When Daniel Montague Kisch opened a small patent agency in Pretoria in 1874, the telephone had not yet rung its first call and Edison’s incandescent bulb was still on the drawing board. A century-and-a-half later, the firm that now trades as KISCH IP stands at the heart of Africa’s innovation economy, guiding clients through a landscape dominated by generative artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing. The arc of KISCH IP’s story mirrors the wider history of technology itself - each leap forward in science has carved a new chapter in both the firm’s practice and the global intellectual-property (IP) system.(kisch-ip.com)
An African IP Pioneer
KISCH IP’s origins lie in the trading house Kisch & Harsant, which Daniel Kisch soon refocused on patent and trade-mark work for the booming gold-rush industries of the Transvaal. By the late nineteenth century the firm was already filing patent specifications for mining tools, railway components, and early telegraph devices. Over the decades it survived wars, depressions and political change, eventually re-branding as DM Kisch Inc. before adopting its current identity in 2015 - a move designed to signal a forward-looking, innovation-first mindset while honouring its Victorian roots.(kisch-ip.com)
That longevity matters. A practice that helped clients protect steam pumps in the 1890s was ideally placed to secure radio valves in the 1920s, pesticide formulations in the 1960s, and fintech algorithms in the 2010s. The institutional memory built over 150 years allows KISCH IP to recognise technological patterns, anticipate regulatory shifts and advise inventors with the calm born of precedent.
Touchpoints in a Century-and-a-Half of Discovery
The firm’s own archive reads like a who’s-who of disruptive breakthroughs – to highlight a few touchpoints: when Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, Kisch’s attorneys were busy translating telegraphic claims into the legal language of colonies still tied to London by undersea cables. As the Wright brothers climbed above Kitty Hawk in 1903, patent dockets filled with inventions for riveted alloys and air-cooled engines. Television’s flickering debut in the 1930s required fresh advice on broadcasting licences; Watson, Crick and Franklin’s 1953 discovery of DNA structure ushered in an age of biotech patents; and the integrated-circuit boom of the 1970s set the stage for client portfolios centred on microchips, computer-implemented inventions and, ultimately, internet protocols.¹
Every milestone forced the profession to stretch definitions—what counts as patentable subject matter? How do you prove inventive step in software? Where do moral exclusions begin for genetic material? KISCH IP learned that the legal system evolves fastest when technology outpaces statute, a lesson now resurfacing with AI and quantum computing.
The AI Revolution: From Turing’s Test to GPT-4o
Artificial intelligence moved from thought experiment to economic engine in less than 75 years. Alan Turing’s celebrated “Imitation Game” in 1950 posed the question; the 1956 Dartmouth Conference coined the term; IBM’s Deep Blue sensationally defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997; and a cascade of neural-network breakthroughs—ImageNet, AlphaGo, BERT - paved the way for today’s generative models.
The inflection point arrived in May 2024 when OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o, the first production-scale model to reason natively across text, images and audio with human-level latency.(openai.com) Others popped up faster than mushrooms after the rain. Suddenly drafting contracts, analysing chemical spectra or producing marketing copy became a conversation rather than a coding exercise. For IP practitioners the implications are two-fold. First, AI accelerates R-and-D cycles, compressing the window in which patents must be filed; second, it muddies the notion of inventorship - if an algorithm proposes a novel molecule, who is the inventor?
Courts have begun to grapple with the question. In December 2023 the UK Supreme Court ruled that an AI system - Stephen Thaler’s DABUS - cannot be named as a patent inventor under existing law, affirming that inventorship remains the domain of “natural persons.”(reuters.com) The message is clear: legislators must modernise statutes or risk stifling AI-enabled innovation, and firms like KISCH IP are already drafting AI-governance policies to help clients allocate ownership, document creative input and mitigate bias.
Quantum Computing: Crossing the 1 000-Qubit Threshold
While AI transforms what we can invent, quantum computing promises to transform how we invent it. Richard Feynman’s 1981 lecture imagined machines powered by quantum physics; Peter Shor’s 1994 algorithm proved such machines could shatter RSA encryption by factoring large integers exponentially faster than classical supercomputers - an existential threat to today’s digital economy.(ibm.com)
Three decades of laboratory work became commercial reality in December 2023 when IBM introduced Condor, a 1 121-qubit superconducting processor, breaking the once-mythical “1 000-qubit barrier.”(ibm.com) Although error correction remains formidable, Condor marked the shift from proof-of-concept to utility-scale hardware. IBM’s road-map now targets fault-tolerant systems and quantum-centric supercomputers before 2033, while venture funding pours into ion-trap, photonic and neutral-atom platforms.
Quantum computers excel at simulating molecular interactions, optimising logistics and sampling complex distributions - the very tasks that underpin drug discovery, climate modelling and financial risk management. Pair those capabilities with the pattern-recognition prowess of AI and you obtain “Quantum-AI,” a stack capable of designing catalysts, batteries or even vaccines in silico before a single laboratory test.
IP at the Nexus of AI and Quantum
The convergence of AI and quantum forces the IP profession to confront three overlapping challenges:
1. Inventorship & Authorship
Autonomously generated inventions test the human-inventor requirement. The DABUS line of cases shows that doctrine can lag technology by decades; policymakers may eventually introduce sui generis AI rights or expand joint-inventorship frameworks. Until then, practitioners must carefully document human contribution to withstand scrutiny.(reuters.com)
2. Disclosure & Enablement
Quantum algorithms can be inscrutable even to their creators. Patent law demands that the best mode be disclosed such that a skilled person can reproduce the invention. Drafting claims around quantum error-correction codes or variational circuits therefore requires new standards of explanatory clarity.
3. Security & Trade Secrets
Shor’s algorithm foreshadows a “crypto-quake” in which legacy public-key systems collapse. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has already selected lattice-based and hash-based replacements, and businesses must plan migrations today to avoid “decrypt-later” attacks.(ibm.com) Where patents would expose cryptographic detail, trade-secret strategies coupled with quantum-safe encryption may offer better protection.
Looking Forward: The Next 150 Years
If history is a guide, the inventions that define 2175 are already germinating in university labs or on start-up workbenches—and someone is wondering how to protect them. KISCH IP’s journey from the age of telegraph wires to the era of qubits proves that an agile, principled IP practice can survive—and thrive—through every technological revolution.
AI will draft tomorrow’s patent specifications, while quantum accelerators validate the physics behind them. The legal questions will grow more intricate, not less. Yet the profession’s core mission remains unchanged: to encourage disclosure, reward creativity and balance private incentive with public benefit. The firms that master the interplay between IP, AI and quantum computing will not only safeguard innovation -they will shape the very tools with which humanity solves its greatest challenges.
For KISCH IP, the next frontier is already on the docket. In the mean time, KISCH IP ensures that it remains intelligent, not artificial.