A golf ball compared with a kickball
Korean patent attorney Yongdeok Kim examines the Patent Court’s decision of 24 July 2025 (2024Heo16021). The applicant filed a golf-ball design on 27 October 2022. Its surface was divided into four areas, with adjacent areas distinguished by different colours. The examiner refused registration by reference to a kickball, a ball intended to be kicked, pictured on an Amazon product page.
The Intellectual Property Trial and Appeal Board dismissed the applicant’s appeal on 23 October 2024 (2024Won551). The refusal relied on ease of creation under Article 33(2) of the Korean Design Protection Act. Before asking whether an ordinary designer could readily create the claimed design from that material, however, the material had to be shown to have been publicly available before the filing date.
Two photographs and two dates
The first reference, prior design 1-1, showed a single ball and stated ‘Date First Available 14 March 2014’. The Board treated that date as the date of disclosure. In the court proceedings, the original URL no longer reproduced the first reference, and the defendant submitted a different URL as prior design 1-2.
The second page showed a boy holding a ball and gave 26 May 2013 as its first-availability date. Although the defendant regarded both references as the same design, their photographs and dates differed. The court needed to establish the relationship between the date and the image, rather than simply select the older date.
The question was whether that image existed on that date
To infer disclosure from the displayed date, the court required assurance that the same product photograph had appeared on that date and remained unchanged, and that the first-availability date itself had not changed. Differences between the records, including results observed at different times for the same address, supported the possibility that an administrator could change the photograph or date.
The applicant’s failure to challenge the disclosure date during examination or the administrative appeal did not fill that evidential gap. Once the applicant specifically disputed the reliability of the image and date before the court, its earlier silence did not establish pre-filing disclosure.
What the court decided—and what it did not
The evidence was insufficient to establish that either reference had been disclosed before 27 October 2022. The court therefore held that those materials could not support the ease-of-creation refusal and set aside decision 2024Won551.
The judgment did not decide whether the two kickball references were substantively the same design. Nor should it be read as an affirmative assessment of the originality of the golf ball’s coloured divisions, or as an automatic grant of registration. Its decisive point was the missing proof of the prior designs’ disclosure dates.
Preserve the appearance and its date together
A practical response is to preserve the photograph, full URL, product identifiers, and publication or revision history together, and consider contemporaneous catalogues or transaction records that corroborate the same appearance. These are evidence-management suggestions drawn from the decision, not a prescribed checklist announced by the court.
For illustration, a product page might be old while its photograph has recently been replaced with a newer model. That hypothetical example shows why the page’s original date would not, alone, date the replacement image. Applicants facing online references should examine when the image was observed, whether that was before filing, and whether the URL or image changed. The judgment does not exclude Amazon evidence generally: the reliability of the particular material and its corroboration remain central.
The original figure labels and forms are preserved; the text explains the facts and the court’s reasoning.