South African companies - ICT businesses included - are not realising the true value of their intellectual property (IP), says the Innovation Fund.
Innovation Fund senior patent attorney McLean Sibanda says the country has a low patenting rate - below 500 a year - which has remained relatively stagnant since 1998. At the time, South Korea was filing about a similar number of patents a year. That Asian powerhouse now files in excess of 3 000 patents a year, Sibanda says.
He adds that the South African figure looks even worse when it is considered that an estimated 50% of patent applications filed here emanate from abroad.
"Should this be a cause for concern? Yes. This amounts to money flowing out of the country. The key message here is that we need to pay more attention to protecting our assets for the greater good of all people."
The patent lawyer says there are some legal difficulties to ICT patenting in SA. Firstly, software can generally not be patented and must be protected under the Copyright Act, which companies such as Microsoft have decried as too weak to protect their IP. SA is also not a major original manufacturer of ICT hardware.
Technology explosion
However, Sibanda says a company or inventor can patent an idea if it is novel (new), inventive (not obvious) and has utility (is useful to industry). He says patents are like seedlings: if they are not planted, no crop can grow from them.
He adds that patents quantify a company or person`s intellectual property and allow them to trade or sell that property - something that is impossible without a patent. He says the technology explosion in the mobile phone market is in part the result of patenting - the manufacturing industry uses patents to cross-license technology and leap ahead.
If SA`s ICT industry wants to make an impact on economic growth, it needs to do the same, he notes.
Sibanda cautions that, while it is worth protecting ideas with commercial value through copyright and patents, this is only the case if those rights can be policed. If the knowledge is of the kind where infringements are difficult to prove, then it is best to keep it in-house as a trade secret, he advises.
SA would leap ahead in the global competitiveness stakes, Sibanda says. However, this would not benefit the individual researcher financially in the way patents do, nor the nation or the South African economy.
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