Israel isn’t long on natural resources, but it does have considerable brainpower. Given the sympathetic reception the modern state of Israel received from its neighbors upon it birth, and continues to be lavished with by those neighbors even today, it should come as no surprise that much of that brainpower has been directed to the defense industry, to try to ensure that Israel maintains a qualitative edge over states for whom Israel’s well-being is anathema.
One of the leaders in the defense industry in Israel is Rafael; the name originally was an acronym for R’shut Pituach Emtza’ei Lehima, which can be translated as the Authority for the Development of Armaments. Rafael is active in many areas, it’s good at what it does, and it’s interested in selling its products and technologies to others. That activity sometimes brings it into competition with much larger industry players. Like Raytheon.
I spent several years dealing with a portfolio of about two dozen oppositions that Rafael had filed against Raytheon patent applications in Israel; eventually we whittled the number of open oppositions down to 3 or 4. As a patent practitioner, my general feeling was many of those oppositions were filed because at the time Rafael didn’t have in-house patent counsel, but instead had patent committee composed of scientists, engineers and business people, and despite the professional competence of those scientists and engineers in their own fields, they tended to read concern into patent claims where none was warranted. That, and the fact that it cost relatively little to file an opposition, and that even if you lost the opposition, the amount you’d have to pay to the patentee was a pittance compared to the patentee’s actual costs.
It was also apparent that as a U.S.-based company, Raytheon would always have the upper hand: even if Rafael were to prevail in a patent opposition in Israel, the U.S. armed forces were always going to be more likely to award a contract to Raytheon than to Rafael. And the U.S. government could stipulate that aid money it provided to Israel be spent on U.S.- rather than Israel-made defense devices.
So it was interesting to read news story earlier this week that Rafael and Raytheon had agreed to cooperate in the marketing of the Iron Dome rocket defense system in the U.S.A. I saw the story in the Jerusalem Post, but Raytheon had a press release. (Curiously, Rafael did not.) Iron Dome was developed by Rafael to deal with the short-range missiles that Hamas likes to send as presents to Israeli civilians. Its effectiveness was proven earlier this year, although at $100K a pop, I wonder if turning Gaza into a parking lot wouldn’t be whole lot cheaper.
It’s good to know that Rafael will be able to sell this system, which was developed completely in Israel using Israeli funds, to the U.S. Army. And from statistics in the Israel PTO’s recently published first-ever Annual Report (in Hebrew), it appears that patent opposition filings by Rafael against Raytheon patent applications are way down. Isn’t cooperation fun?