If you are one of those inventive people who are always coming up with new inventions, you may wonder how best to either protect your inventions or indeed how to exploit them to the full. Inventive or not, inventions can be protected as long as they fall under certain conditions. The direction to take when you need protection is that of the patent.
A patent is a set of exclusive rights that are granted by the State, in the case of South Africa this is by the Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office, or CIPRO, whose offices can be found at 77 Meintjies Street, Sunnyside in Pretoria. But before even collecting the application papers there are the conditions that have to be met.
The first condition that must be met is that the invention has to be both novel and inventive. Novel in this context means that the invention must be completely new. What your inventive mind has produced as an invention must not exist anywhere else in the world.
A search has to be carried out through all previous inventions to ensure that your artifact has not been filed for a patent ever before. It is unfortunate that in South Africa this search has to be carried out manually (no-one has yet invented a database of South African patents and so this search involves going through reams and reams of filed papers).
The invention must be inventive – 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.
If the invention is inventive enough to have fulfilled all these requirements then you can go ahead and apply for a patent. Initially this has to be an application for a provisional patent. If you do this yourself it will cost you a small fee and you will need the following documentation:
- P1: Application for a Patent and Acknowledgement of Receipt and should be submitted in duplicate.
- P2: Register of Patents also to be submitted in duplicate
- P3: Declaration of Power of Attorney, 1 only to be submitted
- P6: Provisional Specification, 1 only to be submitted
These forms need to be submitted along with a detailed drawing of the invention and a description of it. The wording of the description is extremely important, and it is strongly advisable to engage the services of a qualified Patent Attorney to make the application on your behalf.
If granted this provisional patent is valid for a period of twelve months, during which time you will be able to build and test your invention and be able to test the market. The application for a full patent can be made at any time after the granting of the provisional patent, but in this case, the application has to be made through a qualified patent attorney.
So, if you feel inventive and have inventions to show for it, this is the way to go.
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