Mandate Palestine’s Reconstructed Trademark Registry (1917-1948)

About

Michael Birnhack, Mandate Palestine’s Reconstructed Trademark Registry (1917-1948) (Tel Aviv University, 2023), available at https://en-law.tau.ac.il/MandatePalestineIP

Welcome to The Reconstructed Trademark Registry of Mandate Palestine (1917-1948)!

We invite you to explore the trademarks registered by the British Government during its control of the region. You can search for specific trademarks (if you know their registration number) or search for the applicant’s name (“Shell”). You can also search more broadly by entering the applicant’s country (“Germany”), specific words used in the trademarks (“Oranges”), or the trademarks’ content (“Camel”).

This reconstructed registry is made available as the original one has not survived. The site also offers some metadata and background material. You are invited to explore the data and use it for any academic purpose free of charge.

You can find information about how we reconstructed the registry here and some tips on using the search engine here.

Some legal stuff: Disclaimers and permissions

• Disclaimer 1: Most of the trademarks in the reconstructed registry have expired, but some may still be valid in Israel or elsewhere; hence, you are responsible for examining any potential commercial use of the trademarks. The Israeli Patent Office offers a Trademarks Search of registered trademarks which are still valid.

• Disclaimer 2: Some of the trademarks may be subject to copyright protection. However, non-commercial academic use that does not affect any market of the original trademarks 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 3: As we explain in the methodology section, the reconstructed 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, with new teams assigned to reexamine the data. This reconstructed registry encompasses substantial data. Thus, despite our comprehensive review, within the 9823 applications (and the 7904 that are included in the reconstructed database) and multiple fields for each, 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 the 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.

We suggest:

Michael Birnhack, Mandate Palestine’s Reconstructed Trademark Registry (1917-1948) (Tel Aviv University, 2023), 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’d love to know of papers that have used the registry. Please inform us, as we are happy to share!

The Team

The reconstruction of the registry took more than a decade, and many individuals and institutions were instrumental in advancing it.

The registry was reconstructed and curated by Professor Michael Birnhack (Tel Aviv University (TAU), Faculty of Law), with the assistance of numerous students from Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. Two individuals headed the data collection and organization over the years: Doron Pe’er and Raz Ashkenazi. Research students included Yoav Banai, Adi Ben-Eli, Orly Ben-Moshe, Nita Ben-Oliel, Yonatan Ben-Yosef, Hila Davidi, Yael Iosilevich, Asaf Kramer, Yafit Mamistvalov, Shereen Ounallah, Nimrod Prinz, and Dona Saabni.

Bar Yifrah of TAU’s Faculty of Engineering developed a method to extract the trademarks from PDF files, and organized the trademarks to facilitate the search and extraction. Bar was supervised by Professor Eran Toch, of TAU Engineering.

The final development stage was accomplished by Oren Ben-Zvi and Michal Lahav of the Brender-Moss Library for Social Sciences, Management and Education at TAU. The design of the site is by Puah Eden Holtsman.

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge 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.

The project was presented over the years in numerous fora, and the feedback received enabled us to better understand the needs of potential users. Many thanks to participants at the following conferences and workshops: ISHTIP (Glasgow, 2016); 12th Israeli Law & History Association Annual Conference (Jerusalem, 2016); 5th Israeli Economics History Conference (Be’er Sheva, 2016); 2nd IP Scholars Asia (Singapore, 2017); Race+IP (Boston, 2017); Economic History Society, Royal Holloway University of London (2017); Israeli IP Scholars Workshop (Haifa, 2017); Economic Transformation in Cyprus and the Levant, Bank of Cyprus (2017); Law & History Workshop, TAU Law (2018); Workshop at University of Technology Sydney (2019); 16th Israeli Law and History Conference (Jerusalem, 2020); Conference on Legal History and Empires (Barbados, 2018); Israeli Economics History Conference (2020); Intellectual Property Scholars Conference (IPSC) (Cardozo Law School, 2021); Conference on Legal History and Empires (Maynooth, 2022).