I have invented a gadget. Can I patent it?

May 16, 2008
Intellectual Property News and Interesting Facts

One of the main criteria as to whether an invention is patentable or not is to establish whether it is useful. First and foremost is that the invention must be both useful novel – that is to say that it must not already exist already somewhere in the world. It must not appear in any of the information that has been made available to the general public in any way prior to the application for a patent. In order to establish this a search must be carried out in all existing publications to assess whether the useful invention really is novel. This search is called a novelty search, and in South Africa this search is carried out in the search facility at the CIPRO Offices in Pretoria in their paper based Disclosure Centre. In many other countries it is possible to search databases on the Internet to establish novelty, but a manual search is still necessary in this country.

Provided that the invention passes this search and that:

• The invention is useful to commerce, industry or agriculture
• It must solve a problem
• It should not be “obvious” to someone with a technical background in the field of the invention.

then an application for a provisional patent may be made to the CIPRO (Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office) offices in Pretoria.