The Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) has launched an e-filing facility for people who want to lodge new trademark applications.
The service offers two options for the electronic filing of a new trademark application: Cuba Desktop Client for filing of bulk applications, and a Web client for single application submissions. The CIPC will follow this move with electronic services to lodge patents, designs and copyright within the next few months.
Cuba was developed to allow for bulk lodging of new intellectual property applications, and functions on the basis of uploading electronic files through an XML schema, says the office. There are no additional fees for lodging new applications electronically.
Clients who want to use Cuba would need to incur development costs, and possible hardware costs, to implement the system. It also requires advanced electronic signatures from the Trust Centre at the South African Post Office, at a minimal cost per annum, says the CIPC.
"What is of particular importance to CIPC is that individuals can apply for trademark protection directly with the CIPC, and the new Web-based service makes it much easier than it was before," says commissioner Astrid Ludin.
The CIPC would like to see a rapid migration to e-filing as it has phased out manual stamping of documents as receipt acknowledgement.
As of last Friday, the office had received a total of 1 455 new trademark applications, all of which were processed in one day.
In August, CIPC launched the online annual return filing functionality and also introduced, in partnership with First National Bank (FNB), a facility enabling customers to open a bank account and register their company simultaneously at an FNB branch or on the FNB Web site.
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