KIPRIS Trademark Search for Foreigners: A Step-by-Step English Guide (2026)

www.kipris.or.kr

 

So you're about to launch a brand in South Korea — maybe you're selling on Coupang, opening a Korean storefront, or just licensing your name to a local partner. Before you spend a single won on packaging or marketing, there's one thing you absolutely have to check first: whether someone else already owns your trademark in Korea.

Here's the problem. Almost every guide on this topic is written in Korean, for Korean founders, by Korean law firms. If English isn't your first language, figuring out KIPRIS (Korea's free trademark database) on your own can feel like trying to read a legal document through frosted glass. This guide exists because that gap shouldn't exist.

A quick note on naming: South Korea's patent office, formerly called KIPO (Korea Intellectual Property Office), was upgraded in late 2025 to a cabinet-level agency now called MOIP (Ministry of Intellectual Property). You'll still see "KIPO" everywhere online — most of the older documentation hasn't caught up yet — but MOIP is the current name.

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Why This Matters More in Korea Than You'd Expect

In a lot of countries, you can get away with a "soft" trademark check and fix problems later. Korea is less forgiving. If your brand name sounds even close to something already registered — even if the spelling is totally different — your application can get rejected. We'll come back to that.

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Step 1: Go to KIPRIS and Skip the Basic Search Bar

Head to www.kipris.or.kr. There's a simple search box right on the homepage, and it's tempting to just type your brand name in and hit enter. Don't. That basic search is fine for casually checking if a name is "taken," but it won't give you the filtering power you actually need.

Instead, go to the top menu and look for Advanced Search → Trademark. This is where the real search tools live.

Step 2: Type Your Trademark Name — But Don't Stop at the Exact Match

Find the Trademark Name (TN) field. Typing your exact brand name and calling it a day is the single most common mistake people make here. You need to search for variations, partial matches, and anything that might overlap.

KIPRIS uses a handful of search operators that make this much easier:

• * works like AND — finds results containing both terms (e.g., Smart*Care)
• + works like OR — finds results containing either term (e.g., Apple+Saga)
• ! works like NOT — excludes a term from your results (e.g., Tomato!Juice)

(If you want to get more precise, KIPRIS also supports exact-phrase search with quotation marks and a "NEAR" operator using ^, but the three above will cover 90% of what you need.)

Step 3: Narrow Down by Industry (NICE Classification)

Here's something that surprises a lot of first-timers: two businesses can legally use the exact same trademark name in Korea — as long as they're in completely unrelated industries. So if your search is returning a flood of results, that's not necessarily bad news. It just means you need to filter.

Use the Classification Search field and enter your relevant NICE Classification (there are 45 classes covering everything from food to software). For extra precision, you can also look up and enter Similarity Codes — short alphanumeric tags (like G1201) that group related goods and services together under MOIP's internal examination logic. These codes matter more than most people realize, because two products in technically different NICE classes can still be considered "similar" if they share a similarity code.

Step 4: Check "All" Under Administrative Status

Before you hit search, look for the Administrative Status filter. By default, KIPRIS tends to show only active applications and registrations. Switch it to "All."

It might seem counterintuitive to care about dead trademarks, but abandoned, rejected, or invalidated marks tell you a lot about how strict MOIP examiners have been recently in your category — and, as you'll see below, some "dead" marks can still come back to bite you.

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Three Things That Can Sink Your Application Even If Your Search Comes Back Clean

A clean search result doesn't mean you're in the clear. MOIP examiners weigh three factors when deciding whether your mark conflicts with an existing one, and missing any of these is how most rejections happen.

Pronunciation matters — a lot. Korean trademark examination puts heavy weight on how a name sounds out loud, not just how it's spelled. "Cafe Moa" and "Cafe Moare" look different on paper, but they'd likely get flagged as confusingly similar because they sound alike when spoken. If your brand has any phonetic cousins out there, this is where they'll surface.

Search both languages, not just one. If your brand name is in English, search its Korean phonetic equivalent (the Hangul transliteration) too — and vice versa. It's common for a local business to have already registered the Korean sound-alike of an English name without the original brand ever knowing.

Recently dead marks aren't really dead. Under Korean trademark law, a mark that expired or was cancelled within roughly the past year can still block a new, highly similar application from being approved. It's a quirk a lot of people miss because they assume "expired" means "available."

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Bonus: Searching for Logos, Not Just Names

If your brand includes a logo, icon, or any kind of stylized graphic, text search alone won't cut it. KIPRIS has a separate tool for this called the Vienna Classification (Device Code) search, which catalogs visual elements — shapes, animals, human figures, and so on — into specific numerical codes. It's a bit more niche to navigate, but if your logo matters as much as your name, it's worth the extra ten minutes.

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KIPRIS isn't the most polished interface in the world, but it's free, it's official, and once you know where to look, it takes the guesswork out of one of the riskiest steps in launching a brand here. If your search turns up anything ambiguous — a phonetic near-match, an expired mark in your category, a logo that looks a little too familiar — that's the point where it's worth getting a second opinion from a licensed Korean IP attorney before you file.