The Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (Cipro) this week launched its on-line South African Electronic Patent Database, providing access to all the full original documents of granted patents in South Africa between 1984 and 2005.

This formed part of the first phase of the data-base project, which aimed to digitalise all granted patents in force from 1988 to 2008.

Users have the option to peruse the abstract, the description, claims or drawings of the patents they are searching for, while all the bibliographical data of all patent applications presently on Cipro's system were also available.

"Cipro is convinced that anybody who logs onto the Cipro data base will be impressed by the creative and viable patents that have been registered with [us] over the years," Cipro CEO Keith Sendwe said.

Phase two of the data base would involve the digitalisation of all patents granted between 1961 and 1987, while the third phase of the project would cover all patents granted before 1961.

The office was planning to expand the coverage of the data base, which could be accessed on-line at http://patentsearch.cipro.gov.za, on an ongoing basis.

Further, Cipro was also supplying scanned images of South African patents to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, which would perform an optical character recognition on the documents, index the bibliographical information and make the South African patent collection available on their electronic patent search facility PatentScope.

This was expected to be available later this month.

"The launch of this new system will mean that the rest of the world can now see what talent lies within our country, but will also inspire South African entrepreneurs and fuel their creative fires," said Sendwe.