If you are an inventor and you have a new invention that you wish to
patent, the easiest way of going about it is to contact a patent agent
/ patent attorney and to draft and file the patent application.
Patents are granted by the Patents Office (a division of the Department
of Trade and Industry) in Pretoria. The full name for the office is the
Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office, otherwise known
as CIPRO. A patent is a sole right that is granted to you for a specific
period of time - in South Africa this is normally twenty years.
The steps
that have to be taken by a patent agent to apply for a patent are quite
involved, and it is highly advisable to have a patent attorney file the
patent applications on your behalf, thus ensuring the smooth processing
of the application from start to finish.
Letters Patent, once granted, entitle you to prevent others from using the patented invention in any practical way at all without your express permission or license. This right, or patent, is regarded as property, and like any other property it may be sold, licensed, mortgaged, assigned or transferred, given away, or simply abandoned.
The patent does not give you the right to make, use or sell the invention yourself, for other laws or prior patents may govern that.
In the process of applying for a patent on your behalf, one of the first
steps that a patent agent will take is to establish that the invention
has not been invented and patented before elsewhere.
To do this you may
wish to instruct your patent agent / patent attorney to conduct a novelty
search in order to establish the novelty of the invention. In South Africa
this is carried out by a manual search in the Paper Based Disclosure Centre
at the CIPRO offices in Pretoria. You could carry out this search yourself,
but it is recommended to engage the services of a patent agent / attorney
to conduct the search on your behalf.
A patent attorney is also able to
carry out searches in the databases and websites of other countries to
ensure that the invention really is new.
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