Patent Drawing in Pretoria.

A patent drawing Pretoria brief is unusual in one specific way: this is the city where both the office that grants your patent and the court that will one day test it are located. CIPC is headquartered on the dtic Campus in Sunnyside, and the Court of the Commissioner of Patents sits in Pretoria as part of the Gauteng Division of the High Court. That matters more here than it would elsewhere, because South Africa does not examine patents substantively. The formalities check on your sheets is the only review the office will ever give them, and the next reader is a judge.

Why patent drawing Pretoria work answers to CIPC and the Commissioner of Patents

The Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) administers the Patents Act 57 of 1978 from its head office on the dtic Campus at 77 Meintjies Street, Sunnyside, Pretoria. It is the registry that receives your application, raises any formalities objection against your figures, and grants the patent.

Roughly ten minutes away sits the Court of the Commissioner of Patents — a judge of the Gauteng Division of the High Court, hearing South African patent matters as a dedicated patent court. Appeals run to the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein. There is no second venue and no regional alternative: if a South African patent is litigated, it is litigated in Pretoria.

Three institutions therefore shape a Pretoria drawing brief, and two of them are in this city:

• CIPC, Sunnyside, Pretoria — grants patents, registers designs under the Designs Act 195 of 1993, and checks drawing formalities under Regulations 20 and 21 of the Patent Regulations, 1978.
• Court of the Commissioner of Patents, Pretoria — hears infringement and revocation together; the first and only substantive test of a South African patent.
• Supreme Court of Appeal, Bloemfontein — the appellate venue, and then the Constitutional Court.

For the surrounding procedure, see our guide to patent drawings in South Africa, which works through each regulation in turn.

South Africa does not examine — so formalities are the only review

This is the fact that changes the drawing brief. Regulation 41 directs the registrar to examine an application accompanied by a complete specification “in order to ensure that it complies with the prescribed formalities.” Formalities, and nothing else. CIPC runs no novelty search and raises no inventive-step objection. For a provisional specification, Regulation 40 asks only that the documents be legible and capable of reproduction.

In an examining jurisdiction, a muddled figure set usually gets cleaned up over two or three office actions long before anyone litigates. Here, nobody cleans it up. A granted South African patent carries weak presumptive validity precisely because no one has ever tested it, and the figures you lodged are the figures a revocation respondent will put in front of the Commissioner.

The procedural clock is short and unforgiving. Regulation 42 gives you three months to remedy a defect raised under Regulation 40 or 41, extendible at the registrar’s discretion. Under Regulation 43, if you do not comply the application may be treated as abandoned. Our patent invalidation work in Pretoria routinely turns on exactly this kind of unexamined disclosure.

Regulations 20 and 21: the seven rules CIPC applies to your sheets

Two short regulations carry the whole standard. Run this list against any set before it is lodged:

1. A4 sheets, one side only. Regulation 20 requires A4; Regulation 13 permits only one side of a sheet to be used and requires direct reproduction in unlimited copies. Regulation 14 allows landscape orientation where portrait would be inappropriate for a drawing.
2. Margins of at least 20 mm top, 25 mm left, 15 mm right and 10 mm bottom, kept completely blank — the Regulation 15 minimums, applied to drawings by Regulation 20.
3. A clear band below the top margin for the applicant’s name, the application number and the sheet numbering. Note that it sits below the margin, not inside it, so your figures must start lower than the margin alone would suggest.
4. A clear space in the bottom right-hand corner, within the margin and free of drawing matter, for the signature of the applicant or the applicant’s agent. Few offices still require a signature on the drawing sheet.
5. No colouring at all. Regulation 21 requires drawings “executed without colouring in durable, black, sufficiently dense and dark, uniformly thick and well defined lines and strokes.” There is no petition route and no fee that buys an exception.
6. Reference signs simple and clear — the closing words of Regulation 20, and the ground on which crowded numeral clusters and crossing leader lines get objected to.
7. No erasures, alterations, overwritings or interlineations, and legible in any event (Regulation 19), on durable paper, tracing cloth, or electronic form authorised by the registrar (Regulation 21).

Rules three and four are the ones an otherwise perfect United States, European or PCT set will fail, because nothing in 37 CFR 1.84 or PCT Rule 11 reserves either space. Everything else in a PCT-compliant set already clears the South African minimums — Regulation 21 borrows its line-work wording almost verbatim from PCT Rule 11.13(a).

No EP validation and no ARIPO route — this is a national filing

South Africa is not a party to the European Patent Convention, so there is no European patent to validate here. It is also not a Harare Protocol state: South Africa holds observer status at ARIPO rather than membership, which means the ARIPO regional patent does not reach it either. Protection is obtained nationally, or through the PCT national phase.

Regulations 67C and 67D set the national-phase deadline at 31 months from the priority date under both Chapter I (Article 22) and Chapter II (Article 39) of the PCT, with the registrar holding a discretion to extend by a further three months.

There is a drawing-specific trap in those same regulations. The required translation must include the description, the claims as amended, and expressly “any textual matter on the drawings.” Regulation 12 exempts the drawings themselves from the official-language requirement, but the words printed inside them are not exempt. Every label, callout and flow-chart box becomes a translation line item and a place where the figure and the translated description can drift apart. We draft for that by carrying meaning in reference numerals and explaining them in the description instead.

Where a Pretoria patent dispute is actually heard

Infringement and revocation are heard together in a single action before the Commissioner, with the defendant raising invalidity as a counterclaim. There is no opposition procedure at CIPC to filter weak patents first.

Section 61 of the Act sets out a closed list of revocation grounds, and several of them read directly onto the figures: that the specification does not sufficiently describe and ascertain the invention, or that the claims are not clear or not fairly based on the matter disclosed. South African courts construe claims purposively, so a drawing that omits a claimed feature or numbers the same element twice feeds straight into how the claim is read.

Remedies under section 65 include an interdict, delivery up, and damages or — at the patentee’s election — a reasonable royalty. Damages run only from the point the infringer had notice. Term is 20 years from the filing date, with annuities from the third year. Ascendis Animal Health v Merck Sharp & Dohme (Constitutional Court, 2020) is the modern authority on how far a losing validity challenge can be re-run.

Related Pretoria work: infringement analysis and prior-art litigation searching.

What Pretoria actually files, and the figures each sector needs

Pretoria’s filing profile is driven by public-sector research, defence and vehicle manufacturing rather than by consumer products, and each of those produces a distinct kind of drawing problem.

• Government and contract research. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), one of Africa’s largest R&D organisations, is headquartered in Pretoria. Its filings span materials, energy, mining technology and defence electronics, and typically need process schematics and sectional views rather than product perspectives — with hatching doing the work colour would do elsewhere.
• Defence. Armscor, the state defence acquisition agency, is based in Pretoria, and the surrounding development cluster generates mechanism and assembly figures where exploded views and partial sections carry the disclosure.
• Automotive. Ford’s Silverton assembly plant in Pretoria is the global production hub for the Ranger, and the Tshwane Automotive Special Economic Zone is built around it; BMW and Nissan both assemble at Rosslyn, just north of the city. Component and tooling filings from this cluster live on exploded assemblies, fastening details and tolerance-bearing sectional views.
• Veterinary and agricultural science. The University of Pretoria’s Faculty of Veterinary Science at Onderstepoort anchors an animal-health research community whose filings lean on apparatus figures, dosing devices and process flow diagrams — all of which must survive the no-colour rule, since stained and dyed subject matter is common here.

For work across the Gauteng conurbation we also publish patent drawing services in Johannesburg.

Designs: aesthetic and functional, and the representations differ

CIPC also registers designs, under the Designs Act 195 of 1993, and the Act splits them in a way that changes what your representations should emphasise.

• Aesthetic designs — features judged solely by the eye. They must be new and original, and protection runs for 15 years.
• Functional designs — features necessitated by the function the article performs. They must be new and not commonplace in the art in question, and protection runs for 10 years.

Both terms run from the date of registration or the release date, whichever is earlier, subject to renewal fees. The practical consequence for a draughtsman is that the same article needs different representations depending on which register you are aiming at: an aesthetic filing wants the visual impression of the article preserved, while a functional filing wants the functionally necessitated features legible and unambiguous. Filing one set of representations for both applications is a common and avoidable error.

How we deliver patent drawing Pretoria sets

We build to Regulations 20 and 21 from the start, rather than converting a US or European set and hoping the formalities examiner does not notice. In practice that means laying the sheet out with the identification band and the signature corner reserved before any figure is placed, and converting colour-dependent subject matter into hatching, stippling or legends with a description amendment that keeps the disclosure consistent.

We work from CAD exports, engineering schematics, inventor sketches, photographs, a foreign figure set that needs converting, or a CIPC formalities objection you need answered inside the Regulation 42 three-month window. Deliverables come back as filing-ready sheets plus the editable source, so later amendments do not mean redrawing.

Because South Africa never examines, we also read the set the way a revocation respondent would: looking for a claimed feature that no figure shows, a numeral used for two different elements, and in-figure text that will have to be translated at national-phase entry. Those are the three defects that cost patentees most in Pretoria, and all three are cheap to fix before filing.

IP Landscape & Resources in Pretoria

Key intellectual-property authorities, statutes and venues relevant to a Pretoria patent filing:

• Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) — headquartered on the dtic Campus, 77 Meintjies Street, Sunnyside, Pretoria; registers patents under the Patents Act 57 of 1978 and designs under the Designs Act 195 of 1993, and checks drawing formalities only
• Patent Regulations, 1978 (consolidated text) — Regulation 20 sets sheet size, margins, the identification band and the signature space; Regulation 21 requires black line work executed without colouring; Regulations 67C and 67D set the 31-month PCT national-phase deadline
• Patents Act 57 of 1978 — section 61 lists the closed set of revocation grounds and section 65 the remedies; the Act creates the Court of the Commissioner of Patents, which sits in Pretoria
• Designs Act 195 of 1993 — splits registered designs into aesthetic (15 years, judged solely by the eye) and functional (10 years, necessitated by function and not commonplace in the art)
• PCT Regulations, Rule 11 — Rule 11.13(a) requires drawings in black lines without colorings, wording South Africa's Regulation 21 follows almost verbatim; Rule 11.6 sets drawing margins of 2.5/2.5/1.5/1 cm

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