The KIPO API for trademark search

The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO, 특허청) — elevated to the Ministry of Intellectual Property (MOIP) on October 1, 2025 and now operating directly under the Prime Minister's Office — is the South Korean government body responsible for examining and registering trademarks, patents, designs, and utility models. Headquartered in Daejeon, it receives roughly 250,000 trademark applications per year, placing South Korea consistently among the top five trademark-filing jurisdictions in the world and the most active national office in East Asia after CNIPA and JPO. We continue to refer to the office as "KIPO" throughout this page because that's the term the API ecosystem still uses; the underlying register is the same.

KIPO publishes the Korean trademark register through KIPRIS (the Korean Intellectual Property Rights Information Service) at kipris.or.kr — a free, multilingual search platform that has been the de-facto front door to Korean IP data for two decades. KIPRIS exposes trademark search, status lookups, and document retrieval, but its programmatic interfaces are organized around per-record SOAP and OpenAPI endpoints rather than a true bulk feed, and the documentation is primarily in Korean. KIPO has been steadily expanding its open-data footprint under the K-PION (Korean Patent Office Information Open Network) initiative, and has piloted AI-assisted examination as part of its broader digital-government push.

Signa is building a normalized KIPO connector for launch in Q3 2026. The connector will canonicalize the office's bilingual register — marks frequently carry both Hangul (한글) and Latin-script representations on the same record — into the same unified schema used for USPTO, EUIPO, and the 20 other offices already live on the API. Until then, this page exists so that "KIPO API" searches land on something honest: a waitlist, an explanation of what's coming, and a single endpoint that will pick up KIPO data the day it ships without any client changes.