INTERNATIONAL APPLICATION UNDER THE PATENT COOPERATION TREATY

In designating the Republic of Korea, special attention needs to be paid to avoid an unintended designation of KP (Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or North Korea), or vice versa.  Although confirmation of precautionary designations may be made within 15 months from the priority date (pursuant to Rule 4.9(b) of the PCT Regulations), such erroneous designation occurs and is found too late to be corrected, as such discovery is often made when the national phase is about to be entered in the Republic of Korea.   This is a very serious problem given that there is no recourse to file the patent application again in the Republic of Korea as a national application, since the application would have already been published by WIPO, destroying the novelty of the invention.