Decision preparation for a patent owner
The economic value of an injunction begins with time, not a damages award
A Korean main action is the central proceeding for fully contesting infringement, validity defenses, injunctive relief, and damages.
Yet a later judgment may not restore sales opportunities lost while an accused product remains on the market.
This calculator puts that timing problem into a transparent monthly model and compares a main-action-only path with two conditional injunction paths.
The granted path assumes that an interim order reduces accused sales by the percentage you enter after an assumed decision month.
The denied path assumes denial before security or enforcement and adds the application and technical-review costs to the same loss path as the main action.
Neither path is a forecast, and the calculator never invents a grant probability or converts the arithmetic into a legal recommendation.
Main action only
Monthly margin loss and one at-risk inventory loss continue until the earlier of the assumed merits judgment and the remaining market life.
Injunction granted assumption
Pre-decision loss remains, while post-decision monthly and inventory loss fall only by the user-entered sales-reduction percentage.
Injunction denied assumption
The main-only loss continues and the application plus technical-review cost becomes the conditional downside.
Korean legal boundaries checked for the 2026 model
Patent Act Article 126 provides the statutory starting point for a patent owner or exclusive licensee to seek prevention or cessation of infringement and measures such as disposal of infringing articles or removal of facilities used for infringement.
It does not make this calculator capable of deciding patent term, claim construction, infringement, ownership, licence scope, exhaustion, or the proper breadth of an order.
Civil Execution Act Article 300 addresses provisional dispositions fixing a temporary position where necessary to avoid substantial harm or prevent imminent danger in a disputed legal relationship.
Article 301 applies provisional-seizure procedure mutatis mutandis, Article 280 supplies the security framework, and Article 304 supplies the hearing framework.
Articles 287 and 288 matter because an injunction application cannot responsibly be budgeted as a shortcut isolated from a main action and possible cancellation issues.
Official Korean legal sources and boundaries used for the patent injunction comparison| Authority | Planning boundary reflected here | What the tool does not decide |
|---|
| Patent Act Article 126 | Statutory basis for seeking prevention or cessation and necessary measures | Validity, infringement, ownership, scope, or remedy wording |
| Civil Execution Act Articles 300 and 301 | Temporary-position and preservation-need framework | Substantial harm, imminent danger, urgency, timing, or grant |
| Civil Execution Act Articles 280, 287, 288, and 304 | Security, main-action order, cancellation, and hearing context for budget inputs | Security amount, cash share, hearing schedule, or procedural outcome |
| Supreme Court 2006Ma907 | Careful review of both parties' gains and losses, merits outlook, and related circumstances | Whether the cited case controls a current dispute or whether invalidity is likely |
This is not a Patent Act Article 128 damages calculator
Patent Act Article 128 contains rules relevant to measuring damages for infringement, but this page does not calculate an adjudicated damages amount for past conduct.
Unit margin and substitution rate are user assumptions for comparing the economic value of earlier sales interruption.
They are not court findings on lost profit, contribution, reasonable royalty, infringer profit, or enhanced damages.
Why the decision delay and market horizon must be separate
An injunction does not create economic relief on the filing date in this model.
All monthly loss through the assumed decision month remains in the granted scenario.
Avoided monthly loss begins only after that point and ends at the earlier of the assumed main judgment month and the remaining commercial life of the product or market.
A main judgment assumed at month 18 therefore does not create an 18-month comparison if the market is expected to disappear at month 8.
The horizon becomes 8 months.
If the assumed injunction decision is month 8 or later, the accelerated-relief window becomes zero and the tool reports no sales-timing benefit within that horizon.
This is an arithmetic consequence, not a legal conclusion that provisional relief lacks value.
Hearing dates, service, technical presentations, evidence preservation, settlement discussions, amendments, invalidity proceedings, enforcement, and court workload can all change the actual sequence.
Replace every timing default with a dated case plan reviewed by Korean patent counsel.
Timeline formulas
Comparison horizon = the smaller of remaining market months and assumed main-judgment months.
Pre-decision exposure = the smaller of assumed injunction-decision months and the comparison horizon.
Accelerated-relief window = comparison horizon minus pre-decision exposure, floored at zero.
Prepare inputs from ledgers, sales evidence, and actual quotes
Monthly accused units and unit margin
Enter only the monthly accused volume that can be supported by records, samples, channel data, lawful discovery, or a clearly documented inference.
Unit margin should represent the right holder's incremental contribution margin from one additional unit, not the accused seller's revenue and not the right holder's full selling price.
Check production capacity, inventory, channel access, customer preference, and price positioning before treating a unit as substitutable.
Lost-sales rate and post-order reduction
The lost-sales rate is the share of accused units assumed to return as right-holder sales if the accused competition disappears.
The post-order sales-reduction rate allows for order scope, enforcement delay, channel inventory, design-arounds, exports, substitutes, or residual conduct.
Both percentages matter because the model first estimates displaced right-holder margin and then estimates how much of that displacement an order would actually stop.
At-risk inventory without double counting
At-risk inventory is a one-time quantity expected to be sold within the horizon and potentially affected at the assumed decision point.
Do not enter the same stock if it is already embedded in the monthly accused-unit forecast.
Keep a model, lot, holder, location, expected sell-through date, and source schedule so an adviser can test whether the one-time line is independent.
Procedure cost and security liquidity
Separate main-action cost from injunction application, patent-attorney or technical review, enforcement, guarantee premium, and funding cost.
A potentially returnable security principal is not treated as an immediate economic expense.
Its cash portion is shown as locked liquidity, while the funding cost of that cash becomes an economic cost over the entered security period.
Calculation sequence and present-value treatment
The model rounds to whole Korean won and converts the annual decision discount rate into an effective monthly rate.
That discount rate is not a Korean statutory interest rate, a litigation-delay rate, or a finding about recoverable interest.
It is a user-entered capital-cost assumption used only to compare future monthly losses at a common valuation date.
- Monthly margin loss equals monthly accused units multiplied by right-holder unit margin and the lost-sales rate.
- Monthly avoided loss equals monthly margin loss multiplied by the post-order sales-reduction rate.
- Inventory margin loss and avoided inventory loss use the same two rates and are discounted once at the assumed decision month.
- Denied incremental cost equals application cost plus technical-review cost under the simplified denial path.
- Granted incremental cost adds enforcement cost, guarantee premium, and cash-security funding cost.
- Conditional granted net benefit equals main-only present-value economic burden minus granted-path present-value economic burden.
- The break-even calendar month is the first month when discounted avoided inventory and monthly loss cumulatively reach granted incremental cost.
Economic cost and locked cash answer different questions
Security funding cost = security principal multiplied by cash-security share, annual funding rate, and security months divided by twelve.
Cumulative cash exposure adds the locked cash-security principal to nominal loss and procedure spending.
A path can therefore show positive economic benefit but still exceed available cash.
Build a separate payment-month treasury schedule before filing because this tool reports cumulative exposure, not the true peak by payment date.
Worked example with reproducible default inputs
The defaults are synthetic arithmetic examples, not Korean market averages, typical court values, or recommended assumptions.
Assume 5,000 accused units per month, KRW 20,000 of right-holder contribution margin per unit, and a 35 percent lost-sales rate.
Monthly right-holder margin loss is KRW 35,000,000.
A separate 2,000-unit at-risk inventory produces KRW 14,000,000 of inventory margin loss.
Assume an order would reduce relevant sales by 70 percent.
Monthly avoided loss is KRW 24,500,000 and avoided inventory loss is KRW 9,800,000.
A 24-month remaining market and an 18-month assumed main judgment create an 18-month comparison horizon.
A decision at month 3 leaves 15 accelerated-relief months.
Use a 5 percent annual discount rate, KRW 60,000,000 of main-action cost, KRW 30,000,000 of application cost, KRW 10,000,000 of technical-review cost, and KRW 5,000,000 of enforcement cost.
Enter KRW 200,000,000 of assumed security, a 50 percent cash share, an 8 percent annual cash funding rate, a 12-month security period, and KRW 3,000,000 of guarantee and setup fees.
Locked cash is KRW 100,000,000, funding cost is KRW 8,000,000, and granted incremental procedure cost is KRW 56,000,000.
Worked example comparing the three conditional paths| Conditional path | Economic burden PV | Nominal burden | Cumulative cash exposure | Interpretation |
|---|
| Main action only | KRW 680,095,004 | KRW 704,000,000 | KRW 704,000,000 | Horizon loss plus main-action cost |
| Injunction granted assumption | KRW 374,933,646 | KRW 382,700,000 | KRW 482,700,000 | Post-decision reduction plus security funding |
| Injunction denied assumption | KRW 720,095,004 | KRW 744,000,000 | KRW 744,000,000 | Main-only loss plus application and technical cost |
Conditional net benefit
KRW 305,161,358
This assumes grant and is not probability weighted.
Break-even timing
Month 5 after filing
This is two months after the assumed decision.
Maximum cash gap
KRW 244,000,000
Largest of three paths against KRW 500,000,000 available cash.
Security sensitivity is a liquidity stress test, not a court forecast
Korean law does not supply one fixed security amount or universal cash-security percentage for every patent injunction.
The calculator therefore changes only the entered security principal to 50, 100, and 150 percent while keeping the entered cash share, funding rate, and security months unchanged.
The purpose is to identify whether funding cost, break-even timing, or liquidity changes materially around the working estimate.
Security-principal sensitivity for the worked example| Entered security factor | Granted incremental cost | Conditional net benefit | Break-even month | Cash gap |
|---|
| 50 percent | KRW 52,000,000 | KRW 309,161,358 | Month 5 | KRW 0 |
| 100 percent | KRW 56,000,000 | KRW 305,161,358 | Month 5 | KRW 0 |
| 150 percent | KRW 60,000,000 | KRW 301,161,358 | Month 6 | KRW 36,700,000 |
Ask counsel and a guarantee provider whether any estimate assumes cash, a guarantee bond, a combination, staged security, or later substitution.
Record the quote date, premium basis, collateral requirement, credit line usage, cancellation terms, and expected release date.
None of those commercial terms is supplied by statute or inferred by the calculator.
A seven-step review workflow
- Freeze the right and accused-product scope
Match register status, term, claims, specification, amendments, licences, models, methods, territories, and relevant dates.
- Build a support sheet for monthly loss
Separate accused volume, right-holder margin, capacity to supply, channel access, customer substitution, and the source for each assumption.
- Replace timing defaults with a case calendar
Mark service, hearing, technical briefing, expected decision, main-action milestones, product replacement, patent expiry, and market end.
- Split common and incremental professional cost
Keep main-action spending out of the injunction-only subtotal and identify technical, translation, experiment, inspection, and enforcement work.
- Model security as both funding cost and locked liquidity
Use actual cash-share and guarantee quotes, then create a separate payment-date treasury schedule.
- Save conservative, base, and upside cases
Change lost-sales rate, sales reduction, decision month, market horizon, security, and funding rate without hiding which variable changes the answer.
- Take the result and source bundle to Korean counsel
The evidence checklist, input date, record owner, and scenario notes are more useful than an isolated net-benefit number.
Practical scenarios for using the comparison
Seasonal goods and short product cycles
A later merits judgment may arrive after the selling season or model generation has ended.
Shorten the market horizon and move the decision month one or two months at a time to see when the conditional benefit disappears.
This can clarify which commercial timing records and procedural milestones deserve immediate attention without proving legal urgency.
Components and manufacturing processes
Accused component volume may not equal finished-product displacement.
Document conversion ratios, claim-relevant steps, customer alternatives, design-around timing, and right-holder supply capacity outside the calculator.
Enter only the final monthly unit assumption that can be explained consistently with that support sheet.
A cash-constrained patent owner
A positive conditional economic benefit does not fund security or professional fees.
Compare the 150 percent security row with available cash and then discuss cash deposit, bond availability, credit limits, collateral, shareholder funding, and working-capital protection.
The cumulative gap is a screening signal, not a bankable draw schedule.
Evaluating a proposed standstill or licence
A proposal may limit volume, permit inventory sell-through, set a design-around date, or offer a licence before a decision.
Translate only its expected timing and sales-reduction effect into a separate scenario.
Confidentiality, release, no-challenge, no-suit, foreign proceedings, royalty tax, audit rights, and non-monetary terms remain outside this model.
Six evidence bundles to review before advice
- Patent-right scope: register, term, annuities, claims, specification, prosecution and amendment history, licences, and ownership chain.
- Infringement comparison: lawfully obtained samples, catalogues, purchase records, process information, model mapping, and a claim chart.
- Validity review: prior art, invalidity or amendment proceedings, family prosecution, expert analysis, and unresolved search limitations.
- Sales and margin: monthly units, prices, variable cost, capacity, stock, channel records, customer switching, and a dated substitution rationale.
- Inventory and timeline: stock holder, location, lot, sell-through, market end, patent expiry, decision plan, main-action plan, and duplication check.
- Cost and security: main-action and application engagement scopes, technical and enforcement quotes, security assumptions, guarantee terms, funding rate, and available cash.
A checked box is not an evidence ruling
Marking a bundle confirmed does not establish lawful collection, authenticity, admissibility, weight, infringement, validity, or preservation need.
Preserve originals, collection dates, authors, custody, versions, and access limits.
Trade secrets, personal information, communications, competitor sampling, employee material, and cross-border data may require separate Korean legal review.
Interpretation mistakes to avoid
- Do not call conditional granted net benefit an expected value or attach an unsupported grant percentage.
- Do not use accused revenue as right-holder contribution margin or assume sales beyond right-holder capacity.
- Do not count the same units in both monthly volume and at-risk inventory.
- Do not assume a decision instantly eliminates all sales, recalls all channel inventory, or prevents every design-around.
- Do not expense the full potentially returnable security principal, and do not ignore its liquidity lock.
- Do not duplicate main-action cost inside injunction-only application or technical-review cost.
- Do not confuse present-value economic burden with the actual peak cash need by payment month.
- Do not assume the model includes tax, accounting provisions, adverse-security claims, cancellation, suspension, appeal, insolvency, foreign relief, or collection.
- Do not use Patent Act Article 128 as a reason to label these planning losses adjudicated damages.
- Do not let a large arithmetic result replace claim construction, validity review, proportionality, or counterparty-harm analysis.
Frequently asked questions
Does a positive net benefit mean the patent owner should file
No.
It means only that the conditional granted path has a lower economic burden than the main-only path under the entered timing, sales, cost, and security assumptions.
Patent validity, infringement, preservation need, counterparty harm, undertaking or security, enforcement, business relationships, and remedies require case-specific Korean advice.
Why is there no grant-probability input
Claim construction, accused features, prior art, amendment posture, both parties' harm, evidence quality, procedural developments, and judicial assessment make a universal objective percentage inappropriate.
The calculator keeps the main-only, granted, and denied paths separate so a legal opinion is not silently converted into a made-up probability.
What security amount should I enter
There is no universal statutory amount or cash percentage for every case.
Use a case-specific working estimate from counsel, relevant orders if appropriately comparable, and an actual guarantee or financing quote.
Treat the 50, 100, and 150 percent rows only as sensitivity checks, not predictions of what a Korean court will order.
Where do I enter later damages recovery
You do not enter it in this tool.
A future damages recovery may affect both litigation strategies and depends on proof, legal measurement, offsets, tax, enforceability, solvency, timing, and collection.
Keep that analysis separate from the narrower value of accelerating sales interruption.
Does no break-even month mean provisional relief has no value
No.
It means discounted monetary avoided loss does not reach granted incremental cost within the entered comparison horizon.
Brand positioning, price discipline, evidence preservation, channel relationships, negotiation leverage, deterrence, and other non-monetary considerations are outside the arithmetic.
Can I submit the result directly to a court
No.
It is an internal planning calculation, not an expert report, pleading, affidavit, evidence schedule, accounting opinion, damages analysis, or legal submission.
Korean counsel must review the underlying records, lawful collection, evidentiary purpose, methodology, wording, and relevance before deciding whether any derived schedule belongs in a filing.
Official sources and update date
The legal-source review date is August 30, 2026, represented in the data model as 2026-08-30.
The Patent Act source is Law ID 001455, MST 279827, effective November 11, 2025, with Articles 126 and 128 reviewed for the boundaries described above.
The Civil Execution Act source is Law ID 009290, MST 268837, effective February 1, 2026, with Articles 280, 287, 288, 300, 301, and 304 reviewed.
The precedent source is Supreme Court case 2006Ma907, decided June 4, 2007, official precedent ID 68821.
- Open the official Patent Act source and verify current effect, amendment history, and complete statutory text.
- Open the official Civil Execution Act source and verify the current procedural framework.
- Open Supreme Court 2006Ma907 as a legal interpretation reference, not a substitute for analysis of a new record.
A later amendment, new en banc or Supreme Court decision, court practice, special forum rule, or case-specific order can change the relevant analysis.
Recheck all official sources as of the filing date and record which statutory version counsel used.
The model intentionally contains no fixed statutory decision period, professional fee, security amount, sales-reduction rate, market life, or margin benchmark.
Preserve the assumptions before relying on the result
Patent scope, product life, customer substitution, decision timing, enforcement effect, security structure, and funding terms can change the answer materially.
Save a conservative, base, and upside input set with an as-of date, source record, preparer, reviewer, and explanation for every percentage.
Deliver the result together with the claim chart, validity material, sales ledger, margin bridge, inventory schedule, case calendar, professional quote, and security quote.
The most useful output is not one attractive number.
It is a visible map of which factual, legal, operational, and funding assumptions could change the filing decision and which evidence remains unconfirmed.
Use that map to ask better questions of Korean patent counsel, a patent attorney, finance staff, and treasury advisers.
This Korea-focused calculator provides general planning information only.
It is not legal, patent, accounting, tax, financing, valuation, or investment advice and does not predict validity, infringement, preservation need, security, grant, enforcement, damages, settlement, or case outcome.