One of the main criteria as to whether an invention is patentable or not is to establish whether it is useful. The actual legislation demands that the invention be useful to commerce, industry or agriculture.
There are, of course, several other criteria that must be met before any useful invention can be patentable. First and foremost is that the invention must be 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.
and that the invention is not
- A discovery
- A scientific theory
- A mathematical method
- A literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or any other aesthetic creation
- A scheme, rule or method for performing mental acts, playing a game or doing business
- A program for a computer
- The presentation of information
- Medical methods, frivolous inventions and immoral inventions
and that it meets the usefulness criteria, then an application for a provisional patent may be made to the CIPRO (Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office) offices in Pretoria.
One of the forms that an applicant for a patent has to complete is a provisional specification – this is an extremely important form since the protection that is offered should the application be successful will depend directly on the wording and content of this specification.
The wording of the description of the useful invention in this specification as well as detailed annotated drawings is vital, and it is advisable for an inventor to make use of the services of a patent attorney where possible.
While his application is going through, it is absolutely vital that the inventor is completely secretive about his invention.
Once letters patent have been granted by the Patents Office, certain rights are passed on to the applicant.
These include the right to exclude anyone else from making use of the patented useful invention without permission. The patent essentially recognises ownership of the invention and it is treated as any other form of property.
I may be disposed of in the same way as other property is – it may be sold, rented out, leased out, given away or licensed.
If you have any queries regarding a potentially useful invention and whether it can be patented, you should contact a patent attorney at our offices.
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