‘Lobby Risk’: Despite strong punishment such as the dual punishment system and two-out system for illegal rebates, the business activity of domestic pharmaceutical companies includes acting as chauffeur or supplying various articles of consumption for physicians who take part in golf games and academic conferences.

‘Patent Risk’: A ‘granted patent linkage system for medicine and medical supplies’ which comes into effect in March this year along with the Korea-America FTA. Under this system, multinational pharmaceutical companies can find out in advance the generics development information of domestic pharmaceutical companies so as to be able to raise patent infiltration lawsuits. With a contraction of generics development by domestic drug makers, the patent period of original drugs could be lengthened.

‘Generic Risk’: At most, more than 170 types of generics are made for one type of original drug. One of such cases is a hyperlipidemia medicine called ‘Atorvastatin’. There are more than 100 types for the hypertension medicine ‘Amlodipine’, and more than 61 types for a medicine with a Sildenafil component, which has the same component as the component of Pfizer’s Viagra, an erectile-dysfunction pill. Personnel related to a pharmaceutical company said, “In such a situation where there are so many generics with the same component, our only option is to give rebates to doctors for selling our drug.”

4. “An item manufacturing method is not an object to be patented”, as the Supreme Court overturns the precedent, patent registration could become fussier

The Supreme Court en banc (Chief Judge Justice Kim So-young) announced on the 23^rdthatitoverturnedtheoriginaldecision,wherebytheplaintiffwonfavorablejudgmentinapatentregistrationinvalidationcancellationsuitwhichMr.A,aJapanesepatentrightholderof‘apolyvinylalcoholpolymerfilmandapolarizingfilm’filedagainstMr.YunXwhodemandedregistrationinvalidationtrialforhispatentinvention,andremandedthecasetothePatentCourt.

Thus, it is ruled that, when simultaneously filing a manufacturing method while registering a patent of an invented item, it is difficult to allow the patent related to the manufacturing method, because it is no more than a means of inventing the item.

When an item similar to an item registered for patenting is manufactured, patent registration is not possible just by the difference in the manufacturing method, but the difference between the products themselves should be demonstrated for patent registration.

5. “Business secrets cannot be compensated for without appropriate secrecy management”; 30% of companies who had secrets leaked lost their suit because the “secret manageability’ requirement was not met

Mr. A, who used to work as an executive in charge of technology in Company W that manufactures outage prevention devices, left the company in 2005, taking business data files of an outage compensation device, documents specifying construction standards, a customer information database, etc. to a competitor company, and came to sell products taking advantage of the business secrets of Company W.

Mr. A was sentenced to six months in prison with two years of probation for violation of the business secret protection law in the first and second trials. However, the Supreme Court overturned the original decision and declared Mr. A not guilty. The reason was that Company W had not made sufficient effort to ensure that business secrets would not be leaked. The leaked business secrets were stored in an employee’s computer of Company W, and no password was set for the computer, so anybody could copy the data and CDs with business secrets stored thereon were also left in desk drawers without a locking device.

From now on companies will need to take some necessary actions such as making a written security agreement, secret classification and restrictions to access authority.