Fog catcher and academics in patent dispute

A dispute about patent rights for the harvesting of low-lying clouds and fog to alleviate water shortages has led to a bitter fall out between two researchers and their erstwhile business partner.

Fish Hoek businessman Duncan Evans insists that his former partners, professors Johan van Heerden and Jana Olivier, both of whom are acclaimed academics, supported his patent application for a fog collector in January 2010.

The fog collector consists of green yarn knitted onto steel mesh, which is held up by poles. Water droplets from clouds or fog are collected by a gutter at the bottom of the structure, which is attached to a collection tank.

The patent had been registered in the name of Mesh Concepts, a closed corporation of which Evans is the sole member.

He now accuses Van Heerden and Olivier of reneging on their initial support after they received a multi-million-rand grant to research cloud and fog harvesting. He said that their benefactor, the Water Research Commission, wanted to retain patent rights over the inventions.

Evans said he and his business partners had earlier agreed that all future contracts would be handled by Cloud Water Concepts cc, the closed corporation of which he and the two academics were the members.

Van Heerden, a former chief meteorologist at the University of Pretoria, and Olivier, a Unisa professor, dismissed Evans' accusations. They said Cloud Water Concepts no longer exists.

"We refused, on legal advice, to support a patent application," he said. This infuriated Evans so much that he resigned as a member of Cloud Water Concepts.

Van Heerden admitted that he had initially supported the application on which the provisional patent had been approved. He said he changed his view in 2010, the year during which the patent had been provisionally registered.

"A few factors caused this [change of heart]. Jana convinced me that we had acted illegally and she also ascertained that the patent had been registered in the name of Mesh Concepts.

Besides various technical problems they raised, the two academics said they understood that the patent "is to be registered in the name of Mesh Concepts . we are not members of Mesh Concepts and have spent many years conducting research on fog water harvesting.

"We cannot give our intellectual property to another company."