The Reconstructed Patent Registry

of Mandate Palestine (1924-1948)

About

Michael Birnhack, Mandate Palestine’s Reconstructed Patent Registry (1924-1948) (Tel Aviv University, 2025), available at https://en-law.tau.ac.il/MandatePalestineIP

Welcome to The Reconstructed Patent Registry of Mandate Palestine (1924-1948)!

We invite you to explore the patents registered by the British Government during its control of the region. The original registry was incomplete and not digitized, hence the current project, reconstructing the original.

You can search for a specific patent (if you know its number) or search for the applicant’s name. You can search more broadly by entering the applicant’s country of origin, or specific words used in the patent application. We have OCRed the applications, but given there were various corrections, often in handwriting, the results may not be perfect. The applications’ titles are accurate. In addition, we applied AI tools (Google AI Summarization) to offer a summary of the application.

Mandate Palestine's Reconstructed Patent Registry is made available to all. You are invited to explore the data and use it for any academic, non-commercial purpose free of charge.

You can find some comments about the Background of patents in Mandate Palestine, a Methodology section about the reconstruction, and FAQ for using the search engine.

Some legal stuff: Disclaimers and Permissions

• Disclaimer 1: Some of the material contained in the patent applications may be subject to copyright protection. However, non-commercial academic use that does not affect any market of the original works may be considered fair use under Israeli law. This determination is your responsibility. The team and Tel Aviv University are not liable for any infringing use.

• Disclaimer 2: As we explain in the Methodology section, the Reconstructed Patent Registry is, as noted, reconstructed. We gathered data from the British and Israeli Official Gazettes, doing our best to maintain the highest accuracy. We reviewed and re-reviewed the data. This Reconstructed Registry encompasses substantial data. Thus, despite our comprehensive review, some errors may have slipped in. We would be most appreciative if you could draw our attention to them!

• Permissions! All our original content––the metadata, background material, and statistics we have gathered or that you generate––is free to use under a Creative Commons license, Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. Simply put: You are welcome to use the data for any non-commercial purpose as long as you provide attribution in a conventional format, and apply the same terms to the elements of your output that are based on the reconstructed registry.

For citation, we suggest:

Michael Birnhack, Mandate Palestine’s Reconstructed Patent Registry (1924-1948) (Tel Aviv University, 2025), available at https://en-law.tau.ac.il/MandatePalestineIP.

We would love to hear about your research and add it to the list of publications using this database.

Mistakes?

Please let us know if you found anything you believe is a mistake.

Share!

We would love to hear about your research and add it to the list of publications.

The Team

The reconstruction of the patent registry took more than five years, and many individuals and institutions were instrumental in advancing it.

The registry was reconstructed and curated by Professor Michael Birnhack (Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law), with the assistance of numerous students from TAU Law. Raz Ashkenazi headed the main collection phase, with Liron Assor, Yonatan Ben-Yosef, Hila Davidi, Judith Goldberg, Udi Halizen, Yael Iosilevich, Shereen Ounallah, Naor Peretz, and Nimrod Prinz. A new team, led by Daniel Niazov and Rona Tal curated the data and worked with the librarians in forming the search engines and the website.

The final development stage was accomplished by Oren Ben-Zvi of the Brender-Moss Library for Social Sciences, Management and Education, and Hila Buzaglo and Dr. Hagay Bar of the Sourasky Central Library, both at TAU. Oded Zrachia of the Digital Humanities Lab at TAU handled the patent files, made them machine-readable, and initiated and performed the AI summaries. The design of the site is by Pua Eden-Holtsman.

Acknowledgments

We thank Uri Copphenhagen, Head of the Research Department at the Israeli Patent and Trademark Office, for sharing the original patent applications.

Michael acknowledges the generous support of the David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law and Israel Science Foundation (ISF) Grant 537/21.