Many people believe the best way to protect their intellectual property rights is to publicise the details of their invention. They’re wrong – and the results of their naivety can be both painful and expensive.

But you’re no mug: you are perfectly aware that the planet is wall-to-wall with shysters, scam artists and assorted no-gooders who would like nothing better than to run off with your intellectual property. Before you start counting your billions, you’ll have to cough up a few grand to secure a patent, right? But before you do that, you’ll call in the local newspapers and alert the TV channels to make damn sure the world knows it’s your invention.

And then, without any warning, things start coming apart...

Although many South African companies and inventors have wakened to the benefits of protecting their inventions by way of patents, the concept of obtaining monopoly rights for worthy inventions is certainly not a new idea. Venice was the first country in Europe to enact a Patent Statute, as early as 1474. By 1550, more than 100 patents had been registered in Venice, with a notable invention – titled Device to Raise Water and Irrigate Land – being granted to a man named Galileo in 1594.

The British were slow on the uptake, and the British Statute of Monopolies was enacted only 150 years later, in 1624. In a particularly leisurely move, the Americans granted their first patent only in 1790, for a new method of making potash. Judging from the more than 7 000 000 patents granted since then, however, they appear to have caught up.

Interestingly, many South African companies and inventors still appear to regard the concept of intellectual property with suspicion, and will contact patent attorneys only when it is too late. This is evidenced by the large numbers of good ideas that are lost every year due to inadvertent disclosure by the inventor himself.

Every patent attorney in the country has at least one story of an inventor breaking into tears on discovering that he should first have filed a patent application before making his invention public. This cannot easily be remedied.

The most common mistakes and pitfalls we see with new clients are:

1. Disclosing the invention prior to filing a patent application.
Many inventions are lost due to the inventor disclosing the invention before filing a patent application. We call this the braai phenomenon; inventors frequently cannot contain their enthusiasm and end up telling people about their brilliant idea around the Saturday evening braai.

Because South Africa (like most other countries) has a so-called absolute or international novelty requirement, the public disclosure of an invention anywhere in the world could be a bar to obtaining patent protection.

2. Disclosing your invention on television to prove inventorship.
This is another frequent mistake: inventors disclose the invention on a public broadcasting service to prove that they are the inventors, assuming that the taped evidence obviates the need to file a patent application. The reality is different: all it proves is that they publicly disclosed their invention. Many so-called invention or design competitions are run in this way, leading to highly disillusioned winners who cannot stop others from copying their concepts.