Jae Yong Jeong
The Wave IP Law Firm, Republic of Korea
Correspondence to Jae Yong Jeong, E-mail: toori10235@gmail.com
Volume 20, Number 4, Pages 1-30, December 2025.
Journal of Intellectual Property 2025;20(4):1-30. https://doi.org/10.34122/jip.2025.20.4.1
Received on September 22, 2025, Revised on October 12, 2025, Accepted on December 03, 2025, Published on December 30, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 Korea Institute of Intellectual Property.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
This study proposes an integrated standard for harmonizing the judgment criteria of the Supreme Court Decisions 2019Da222782 and 2019Da222799 (the subject decisions) and appellate court decisions, which remain valid because of the partial dismissal of appeals in the subject decisions regarding patent infringement judgments for multi-component inventions. Both the subject decisions and appellate courts require that the invention be finalized (or disposed of) by a single entity and that the invention’s functional effects be realized solely through component production. However, the differences in the subject decisions’ requirements for “extremely minor assembly/processing” and the appellate court’s requirements for “no assembly/processing” leave room for interpretation. This study categorizes component combinations into three categories: (i) no additional processing/assembly required, (ii) cases where additional processing/assembly is required but is extremely minor, and (iii) cases where additional processing/assembly is required and is not trivial. For each category, the existence of direct infringement is determined by applying the legal principles of the subject decisions or appellate courts. These criteria harmoniously integrate the requirements of the two judgments, and their applicability has been confirmed through various case analyses.
Territorialism, All Element Rule, 2019Da222782, suture, medical thread insertion device
No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.
The author received manuscript fees for this article from Korea Institute of Intellectual Property.