메타버스 상 디지털 디자인의 디자인권 보호 방안

This article examines recent developments, legal challenges, and interpretive controversies surrounding the protection of digital designs under the Korean Design Protection Act, with particular attention to their application within metaverse environments. This study observes that Korea, the United States, and Japan maintain a traditional interpretation of design protection, limiting its scope to physical “articles” and thereby affording only narrow protection to digital designs, such as graphic images. In contrast, the European Union adopts a more expansive approach. EU design regulation expressly includes animation—understood as the progressive transformation of design features—within the definition of “design,” and recognizes a broad range of non-physical items as protectable “products,” including graphic works or symbols, surface patterns, and graphical user interfaces. To strengthen legal safeguards for design creators and to support the sustainable development of the design industry—while also addressing tensions and overlaps between the Design Protection Act and the Copyright Act—this paper proposes two key reforms. First, art. 2 of the Design Protection Act should be amended to expressly include non-physical items existing in virtual spaces within the definition of “design.” Second, art. 121 should be revised to clarify that if a design is registered based on a work protected under copyright law without proper authorization, such registration may be subject to invalidation proceedings.