『산업기술보호법』상 산업기술 범위의 재정립

As technology advances and accelerates its advancement, industrial technologies become more recognized as an important assets of a nation for both economy and national security. Nowadays, obtaining industrial technologies has direct impact on nation power. As a result, nations put a lot of efforts to acquire industrial technologies, at times, aggressively. Countries have been attempting to, or been victims of, technology leakage through illegal means. And Republic of Korea was not an exception. In 2006, in order to protect industrial technologies from the leakage and exploitation, the ‘Act on Prevention of Divulgence and Protection of Industrial Technology’ was enacted. The law seeks to protect industrial technology from the illegal activities by punishing offenders of such crimes, putting regulations on exports, company acquisition and merges, and providing financial support for technology protection. The Industrial Technologies, that are eligible to be protected by the Act on Prevention of Divulgence and Protection of Industrial Technology, are listed in the law. However several problems could be found regarding the scope of industrial technology. For example, technologies that has no legal effects since 5 years ago is still on the list of industrial technology, even though there was a major change to national core technology, the law has not been amended and etc. This means that detailed management has not been carried out. To achieve the goal of the ‘Act on Prevention of Divulgence and Protection of Industrial Technology’, the first step would be establishing the scope of legal term ‘industrial technology’ properly. Therefore, in order to protect the interests of the nation, problems arising from the establishment of the scope of industrial technology shall be prioritized. The paper analyzes each industrial technology listed in the law and propose reformations that should be done in order to eliminate issues present in the current system. Such as broadening scope of industrial technology for certain articles and giving the Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy the obligation to regularly check the scope of industrial technology.