If Nkosana Makate invented the Please Call Me service, the subject of the ongoing 15-year-old court case between him and Vodacom, where is his patent? Or even his application for one?

The Daily Maverick reports that the only patent application was submitted by former MTN engineer Ari Kahn and filed with the Patent Office on 22 January 2001. His patent was awarded the same day.

Kahn briefed MTN’s legal representatives on 16 November 2000, having conceived of the idea the day before.

While Makate was a trainee accountant at Vodacom, Kahn was already developing technical solutions as lead data consultant at MTN from 1994 to 2002. He worked on a range of cutting-edge ideas for the then-nascent mobile industry, including a website that allowed anyone to send free SMSes to mobile numbers.

As reported, the SCA ordered Vodacom to pay Makate between R29bn and R55bn for an idea he said he conceived of. This is significantly higher than what the Constitutional Court previously ordered in the long-running Please Call Me (PCM) saga. The apex court stipulated that Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub had the final say in what Makate should be paid and offered R47m.

However, the SCA judgment reads that Makate is entitled to be paid between 5% and 7.5% of the total revenue of the product from March 2001 to date of judgment 'together with the mora interest thereon’.

DM notes that with a market cap of R200bn, the lower R29bn figure represents nearly two years of Vodacom’s annual dividend payouts of around R13bn to R14bn, according to the network’s figures.

It was a runaway success and is now as essential a part of the SA cellular landscape – which is a staggering amount for a concept that has no patent behind it.

Kahn says he worked on ‘three world firsts’, including his so-called ‘Callme’.

He patented it – through MTN’s lawyers Spoor and Fisher on 22 January 2001 – as a ‘method and system for sending a message to a recipient’. ‘In the first month, Callme reached market saturation,’ Kahn told DM. ‘Growing at an astronomical rate of ‘hundreds of thousands of new users a day’, Callme was the fastest service adoption ever recorded in the history of telecoms and Internet, then and to this day.’

Makate would not directly address Kahn’s patents.

‘Mr Kahn was, according to Vodacom, lined up as a witness during trial in 2013. Vodacom, after CEO at the time, Alan Knott-Craig(’s) testimony, decided not to call him,’ Makate said.

Vodacom said it will appeal the SCA’s 6 February judgment.

‘Vodacom is surprised and disappointed with the judgment and will bring an application for leave to appeal before the Constitutional Court of SA within the prescribed period,’ it said.

Full Daily Maverick report