Period of protection

Utility model rights are protected for 10 years from the filing date.

Scope of protection

Shapes, structures, and combinations of objects are subject to protection. Methods and uses are not covered.

Examination

An examination is carried out, but it is more of a formality and does not assess novelty or inventive step.
As such, utility model rights can be acquired quickly without much cost, making them effective for protecting products with short life cycles.

Period of examination

It takes two to three months from application to registration.

Request for written technical opinions

Anyone, whether they are right holders or not, can request the Patent Office to prepare written technical opinions on the novelty and inventive step of registered utility models.

Exercise of rights

An application affords rights for a utility model without its novelty and inventive step being examined. As such, if the need arises to exercise your rights, you may be asked by the other party to obtain a written technical opinion (effectively the result of a fully-fledged examination) on patentability from the Patent Office and present it to them.
If the written technical opinion shows an unfavorable evaluation (due to a lack of novelty or inventive step), your attempt to exercise your rights will result in your rights becoming invalidated instead, and you as the right holder must compensate any damage caused to the other party through this attempt.

In this way, there is a high level of risk in exercising utility model rights, and so this system is rarely used for inventions where the creators expect to exercise their rights in the future.