America-Israel Patent Law

Are Toxic Bullet Cartridges Next For Hizbullah?

Here in Israel we’re amazed by the exploding pagers and exploding radios of the last two days, in terms of the technological and logistical abilities, not to mention the chutzpa, of carrying it off. And of course we’re laughing at all those terrorists whose attempts to avoid the possible pitfalls of the digital age have left them…digitless. Lots of memes going around, like the one below. (Watch this clip if you didn’t grow up watching American TV and don’t get the joke.)

But you have to wonder, What’s next? Sure, maybe Nasrallah will come to his senses…or maybe not.

My candidate for the next thing to use, if necessary, is the device disclosed in US 9052175: looks like a bullet, but it’s loaded with a toxic agent, so the shooter pulls the trigger and poof! He’s poisoned!

Added bonus:  it’s suitable for use by both Hizbullah AND Hamas.  And since the patentee only filed in the USA, no fear of patent infringement for using this invention in Lebanon or Gaza! That’s what we patent people call a win-win.

Suggestion to the terrorists: don’t buy your ammunition from Benzi’s Bullet Bazaar.

Where Are All Those “Palestinian” Inventions?

I wrote last year noting that there were apparently no patent applications filed, ever, listing Shifa “Hospital” in Gaza as the applicant. Today on a whim I looked for patent applications for anyone in Gaza. Turns out that, at least according to WIPO’s Patentscope and freepatentsonline.com, no one from Gaza City has ever applied for a patent, although back in the 1970’s there was an entity in the USSR that had the word “Gaza” in its name.

So I decided to look for patents and applications that list the inventor country as “PS”, guessing that since PL is already taken for Poland, “PS” is what someone might use as a fake two-letter code for the fictional country of “Palestine” – fake because there is no WIPO two-letter code for “Palestine”.

Patentscope yielded around 20 results, but one of them is clearly a typo – the inventor lives in Texas. Of the rest, most are for people from Ramallah and Shchem (Nablus) who are students in Saudi Arabia or Qatar. But there’s one patent application family for a German chemical company that has an inventor who lists his city as Khan Yunis, in Gaza. WO 2013/046041, “PYRIDINYLPYRAZOLES FOR USE AS KINASE MODULATORS FOR THE TREATMENT OF CANCER”, was filed by a German company, Synovo GmbH, and includes Bassam abu Thaher of Khan Yunis as an inventor. A continuation bypass in the USA eventually matured into US 9416123 B1, but apparently no corresponding applications were filed elsewhere.

A search in Patentscope for applicants who list “PS” as their state yields two PCTs, one that lists Al Quds University jointly with Rutgers, and a gem – WO/2023/063908 – that lists a Ramadan Ziada of Ramallah as both inventor and applicant, titled “Perpetual Motion Machine”. The EPO, acting as International Search Authority, stated that the “invention” was both novel and inventive, but that it was not susceptible of industrial applicability, as it “violates the law of conservation of energy” and that the disclosure thus fails as “the claimed invention can not be carried out by a person of skill in the art.” Good luck with that application, Mr. Ziada.

31 years since Oslo, hundreds of millions of Euros spent building tunnels and rockets and bombs to use to kill Israelis, but no inventions of any use to mankind. During that same time Israel has developed thousands of technologies. Including the Iron Dome system to intercept those rockets.

Some folks only know how to destroy, not to create anything of value (cf. "Al Qaida" and "Twin Towers"). Maybe if “the Palestinians” tried to make something of themselves instead of falsely blaming the Jews for “the Palestinians” self-induced failings, they’d get somewhere.