사이버공간상의 새로운 상표 쟁점

Abstract

Emerging Trademark Issues in Cyberspace Cyberspace becomes a place where the whole world is unified beyond time or geographical limitation. Accordingly, cyberspace is meaningful for corporations because it provides for them an opportunity to pioneer a global market easily. In cyberspace, corporations use a trademark to build up their identities and various legal issues of trademark which were unpredictable in the past have arisen from cyberspace. Cybersquatting, metatag, link and framing are well-known examples. However, in addition to those examples, new legal issues continuously arise. They are sale of key words by search engines, pop-up, domain forwarding and misuse of metatag. Except domain forwarding, no case has appeared in Korea yet. Even in the U.S.A., very few cases have been debated surrounding them. As to sale of key words, courts tend to find trademark infringement, but courts have not reached the same conclusion for pop-up yet. However, regardless of the discrepancy of decisions, it seems that courts have a more flexible position to interpret trademark use than in the past. Therefore, these new legal issues in cyberspace bring on a change of fundamental legal principles of trademark; there become growing cases that the owner of trademark can assert its property right without likelihood of confusion on the source of goods or services.