The National Assembly's portfolio committee on science and technology has finalised its work on the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) from Publicly Financed Research Development Bill.
The Department of Science and Technology (DST) is pushing the draft law. It forms part of minister Mosibudi Mangena's drive towards a "national system of innovation" that seeks a return on investment on research in the form of marketable patents and collectable royalties.
This includes research funded in part or wholly by, for example, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research's Meraka Institute, or the DST's Square Kilometre Array project that is seeing billions of rand funnelled into supercomputing, new-generation signal dishes and signal processing equipment.
An Innovation Fund report prepared last year found that patenting in the public sector was "inordinately low".
One of the Bill's aims is to encourage publicly funded researchers to step up their rate of invention and patenting by ensuring they, as well as their institution and the state, receive a fair share of the proceeds of innovation.
The Bill also creates an Intellectual Property Fund that will foot the bill for protecting IPR.
Meanwhile, the Home Affairs portfolio committee has completed amendments to the Film & Publications Act. These could have a significant impact on social networking Internet sites and criminalises several activities Members of Parliament find abhorrent, such as the peer-to-peer sharing of explicit photographs between teenagers.
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