Pieter Visagie

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has published that there will be notable increases in some of its patent application fees as from 19 January 2025.  Since South African patent applicants generally have a strong interest in the USA as a patent jurisdiction, the changes should be taken note of. The most relevant change […]

South Africa has a very active, and deeply rooted, chemical, metallurgical and process engineering industry that continues to contribute significantly to the country’s GDP. This provides fertile ground for market focused research and development work and, in this space, new technologies are therefore developed and commercially exploited at a rapid pace. Patent protection holds significant […]

Biotechnologists work tirelessly to improve our quality of life.  Never has this been more evident than in the current global health crisis that we face.  Their inventions address some of the world’s greatest challenges. Advancements in medicine, surgical procedures, food science, and agriculture, amongst many others, stem from innovations and technical achievements in this field […]

Amid the outbreak of the COVID-19, many countries around the world implemented various drastic measures to curb the spread of the virus. South Africa, with the highest number of reported cases in Africa, was forced to effect such measures, inclusive of a national lockdown, in order to save lives, albeit economic repercussion of these measures.

The South African cannabis market is poised to take off and local entrepreneurs should move industriously to secure their place in this prospective industry, says Pieter Visagie, Partner and Patent Attorney at law firm Adams & Adams.

The European Patent Office (EPO) has finally been given, and has taken, an opportunity to pin its colours to the mast on the question of how it would interpret its legal provisions, as they stand, on the naming of inventors in cases where inventions are asserted as having been created by artificial intelligence (AI).