While it won`t turn you into a patent law expert, a new patent toolkit by a Pretoria law firm and e-learning software provider will give you the practical skills to register your own provisional patent, saving you thousands of rands in legal fees in the process IN A LIGHTBULB MOMENT of inspiration you come up with a bright idea, and now that you`ve done your market research and mapped out the finer details, you`re ready to patent your product and launch it to the world.

One call to the most reputable intellectual property law firm in town, however, and you encounter your first real stumbling block: it`s going to cost you anything from R8 000 to R12 000 in lawyers` fees to draft a halfway decent product description and file the necessary paperwork for an initial patent with the Patent Office in Pretoria.

One of Pretoria`s smaller intellectual property (IP) law firms, Smit & Van Wyk Patent Attorneys, has teamed up with e-learning software developer Trydian Interactive to tackle this very problem.

Together they`ve produced a multimedia product, known as Patent Toolkit, aimed at those innovators who can ill afford the expense of professional help when filing a provisional patent, as it is known. In terms of patent law, you can`t begin marketing your idea for a product until you`ve filed that provisional patent, if you want to qualify for the relevant protection rights, that is.

"We were analysing the traffic on our website, and it occurred to us that although we were getting a lot of hits on our patent registration services, we lost more than 90% of these potential clients once they contacted us and saw the costs involved," explains partner Carel Smit.

At the time, in mid-2005, Smit and partner Wessel van Wyk had also just drafted an 80-page patent law manual, when they got talking to their new neighbours at the Innovation Hub about taking this information into the public domain.

"We persuaded them that we`re good at taking dry material and making it accessible," quips Donrich Jordaan, joint MD of Trydian Interactive.

While the company generally specialises in traditional e-learning packages for the corporate market, it has also been working with specialist knowledge partners to produce toolkits.

Not much persuasion was needed. "It turns out that there are patent toolkits in the US, but they cater to the US market, and because the South African patent law allows any person to file a provisional patent, and the demand was there, it seemed like a great idea," says Smit.

Within months the manual had been transformed by Trydian into a 300-screen multimedia toolkit. During the product`s beta testing phase, interested parties were invited to complete a survey so that the partners could gain insight into their target market (the survey is still up on www.patenttoolkit.co.za).

Janhendrik Oosthuizen, joint MD of Trydian Interactive, points out that fewer than 1% of the respondents had been in touch with the law firm before. "In other words, this product is not in any way undermining the traditional market for patent registration," observes Jordaan.

While it costs a mere R60 to lodge a provisional patent application, Van Wyk points out that drafting an adequate product description often requires a combination of technical and legal skills. "The two- to three-line description we see in 95% of all cases of aspiring innovators who did their own provisional registration is hopelessly inadequate," he says.

The toolkit, which, as of this month, is available for download at the abovementioned website for just under 0, provides information on all related topics, ranging from what ideas are patentable, how to search the Internet for similar products, the forms to complete and lodge at the Patent Office, advice on product descriptions with a myriad of best-case and worst-case scenarios, to obtaining financing and commercialising a product.

Smit reiterates that once the provisional patent is filed, the holder has a year in which to refine the product, and then register the final patent. This, unfortunately for the aspiring inventor, has to be done by patent attorneys.

Worth noting is that the partners are currently in negotiation with the Patent Office for the use of the product. They have also donated two Patent Toolkit software licences to the Iscor Innovation Centre at the Vaal University of Technology.

"The mainstay of any economy is the IP it generates. In SA, in particular, which is geared towards transforming itself into a knowledge economy, educating innovators on patent law is crucial," says Smit.

Van Wyk notes that 10 000 to 12 000 patents are registered in SA every year, but that about half of these are registered by foreign companies.

He quotes recent research by the National Advisory Council on Innovation that indicates the number of local patent applications had fallen in recent times.

"South Africans produce a number of high-quality inventions, particularly in the farming, security and software fields, but there is a very lax IP culture, so they seldom profit from their inventions," he concludes.