The decision and the actual question
On 8 January 2026, Korea’s Supreme Court dismissed the appeal in 2025Hu10234, leaving the Patent Court’s judgment of 14 August 2025 in 2025Heo10299 in place. The invalidity challenge had failed before the tribunal. The disputed question was whether an ordinary designer could readily create the registered design by combining reference design 17 with design 1 or 3.
The Korean statutory test
Article 33(2) of Korea’s Design Protection Act excludes designs that an ordinary designer could readily create from publicly known designs or widely known shapes, patterns, colours or their combinations. The Court described low-level creations such as near-copying, simple transposition, routine combinations, or commercial or functional modifications that do not produce a different aesthetic value overall.
An inventory of elements is not a combination analysis
Finding an individual feature in an earlier design is only a starting point. The analysis must explain how the cited designs would be modified and combined and what appearance the resulting whole would have. The numbers 1, 3 and 17 identify references in this litigation; they are not registration numbers.
Why the particular combination failed
Although the registered design shared features with reference 17, its differences produced a different aesthetic value overall. The lower court did not consider it a near-copy or merely a commercial or functional modification. References 1, 3 and 17 each had distinctive visual characteristics, and readily arriving at the registered design’s overall aesthetic effect by combining them could not be assumed. The Supreme Court found no material legal or reasoning error.
A hypothetical example, not the product in the case
Imagine combining a cup’s round handle with another cup’s wavy body. The proportions, position of the handle and treatment of the junction may alter the overall appearance. This is an illustration only: the published judgment does not identify the product by name. The decision also does not mean that every minor difference makes a design registrable.
Preparing the invalidity case or the defence
A challenger should identify the starting design, the borrowed features, their arrangement and proportions, and evidence that the proposed method was routine. The proprietor should explain how the differences affect the overall aesthetic result. Development drawings may help, but time or expense spent designing is not the legal test. Here the appeal was dismissed and the registration survived the asserted easy-creation challenge.
Original figure labels and forms are preserved; the surrounding text explains their meaning.
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