Local Patents

Local Patents in South Africa are granted by The Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office, or CIPRO, whose offices can be found at 77 Meintjies Street, Sunnyside in Pretoria. CIPRO is a division of the Department of Trade and Industry and the office is responsible for the Registration of Companies and Close Corporations, and the Registration of Copyright, Designs, Patents and Trade Marks. If you have an invention and you wish to obtain a local patent, it is here that you must apply. In terms of the Patents Act, individuals may apply to CIPRO for a provisional local patent at a small fee. It should be noted though that a patent application is better made through a Patent Attorney as the application involves a complicated legal procedure.

In order for your invention to be patentable it must fall within certain requirements, but generally speaking any invention in the form of an apparatus, a device or a method or process is patentable if it fulfills three basic requirements. Firstly the invention must be new – that means to say that it must not have been described in any way to enable the invention to be understood in any way whatsoever anywhere in the world before this first application is made for a local patent. This is known as novelty. Neither must it have been in secret commercial use in South Africa before the application. The invention must be useful – that means that it must be of practical use in commerce, industry or agriculture. It must not be so similar to other articles of similar use that it required little or no ingenuity to make the invention.

Only the inventor or a person assigned by him may make the application, though it is possible to file an application in the name of joint owners. If the inventor is an employee it is possible in terms of the law that the invention belongs to his or her employer, unless the invention has nothing at all to do with the scope of their employment. A local patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by CIPRO to an inventor or his/her assignee for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (known as an invention), which is new, inventive, and useful or industrially applicable. This exclusive right is the right to prevent or exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell or importing the claimed invention. It does not necessarily mean that the patentee has the right to do all of these things, for example if the invention were to be a new drug it might have to be licensed under a different law before it could be manufactured.

The provisional patent, if granted, is normally valid for a period of twelve months, giving the patentee time to research the manufacture of the invention. The application for full local patents has to be made through a patent attorney. Local patents are only recognized in South Africa, and if the inventor wishes a wider range of protection it is necessary to file for patents in individual countries