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PERSONAL ESSAY · 2026
★ ESSAY · ERIC RITTER

Why this patent application kicked off everything else.

A patent application doesn't usually move someone to read 400 pages of prosecution history, file ten third-party observations at the European Patent Office, build a public archive of every relevant document on their company's website, and start asking whether the people defending it have themselves been affected by the very thing the patent is supposed to detect. This one did.

A long read about a patent application, the chemistry, and the question I keep coming back to.

Atomic Rhino was a smelling salt. Sodium polyacrylate mixed with twenty-eight percent ammonium hydroxide in a modified fifty-five-gallon drum, which produced a red gel. Pressurized air forced the gel into a pneumatic filling machine. I could do seven thousand bottles a day. The ammonia was the problem. I had to dump it into the drum by hand, which meant holding my breath while mixing, sometimes closing my eyes. I had learned to do it this way because a few months earlier, opening a five-gallon bucket of the mixture to fill the funnel, I had inhaled enough that my throat snapped shut. I could not breathe in or out until the CO2 buildup released the muscle in my neck. That is the kind of thing that teaches you to hold your breath. I had taken acid. I had Red 40 on my hands from the gel. I was not thinking about Amsterdam.

Lex called. I don't remember exactly what he said. I remember walking inside while he was still talking and sitting down at my computer. Lex is connected to the foundations and institutes that constitute the professional lead-safety world — Pure Earth, EPA networks, the international set. Somewhere in that call was a name, or an institution, or something that worked as a search term. I followed it. Forty-five minutes later I had the names: Helmbrecht, Noorduin. The institution: AMOLF, Amsterdam. The company they incorporated to commercialize: Lumetallix. The application number.

Then I pulled up their own published work. The 2018 Nature Chemistry paper has Helmbrecht as co-first author and Noorduin as corresponding. Supplementary information, section 6, page 7: methylammonium bromide in isopropanol, Pasteur pipet, lead-bearing surface, 365 nm UV, green fluorescence in real time. Three years before their 2021 priority date. Then Wang et al., published months before the priority date: five parts per billion of lead on a closed solid substrate, same chemistry. I was sitting there with Red 40 drying on my hands and the thing that struck me was not that the application was ambitious. It was that it did not seem to expect to be checked.

★ See for yourself

Don't take my word for any of this. Open the receipts.

Every paper cited in this essay has been mirrored with the most important sentences highlighted in yellow. The links below open the prior-art papers and the patent file at the exact pages where the key passages live. Read them yourself. The argument I am making here is that the contents of these papers are either incomprehensible to the people defending the patent, or thought to be incomprehensible to the people they are defending it against. Those are the only two options. The question that follows is whether lead exposure has had something to do with which option turned out to be true.

There is a question I have been chasing for a year now: why would anyone, looking at the published scientific record as it stood in 2021, think that you could be granted a broad patent on detecting lead by mixing methylammonium bromide with isopropanol and looking at it under a UV light?

I do not mean that as a rhetorical question. I am genuinely asking it. Because the more time I have spent inside the file, the harder it has become to come up with an answer that does not say something uncomfortable about the people involved.

The patent we are talking about is covered in detail elsewhere on this site. The short version is this. In April 2021, two researchers at the AMOLF institute in Amsterdam filed a Dutch patent application claiming a method for detecting lead by using a methylammonium-halide reagent dissolved in a liquid medium and looking at the lead-halide-perovskite crystals it forms under UV. They later filed parallel applications in the United States and at the European Patent Office. They incorporated a company called Lumetallix to commercialize it.

The chemistry is real. It works. The problem is that they did not invent it. The people who founded Lumetallix had themselves co-authored a 2018 paper in Nature Chemistry in which they described the same reaction, applied as an isopropanol solution from a Pasteur pipet onto a real-world solid lead-containing substrate, illuminated under 365 nm UV, and observed in real time. Three years before they filed for the patent. The same chemistry. The same formulation. The same illumination. The same output.

And by the time of their priority date in 2021, two other independent research groups had published papers using the same chemistry specifically as a lead-detection method. Yan et al. (2019) in Scientific Reports demonstrated the method on paper test strips with detection limits in the nanogram range. Wang et al. (2021) in Sensors and Actuators B used the same chemistry to detect lead bound to a sulfhydryl-functionalized solid film, with images that zoom directly to the perovskite crystals forming on the surface.

So the question. Why would anyone, looking at this record, assemble a patent application claiming the chemistry as their own?

If the answer is that they thought no one would actually look this up, then the patent isn't the most interesting thing in the file. The thinking behind it is.

What the published science already showed.

Before I get to the absurd part, let me lay out what the public record looked like by 2021.

Holtus 2018 · Nature Chemistry · the inventor's own paper

This is the paper that quietly destroys every novelty argument the applicant could ever make. Lukas Helmbrecht, the first-named inventor on the patent, is a co-first author. Willem Noorduin, the corresponding author on the patent and the founder of Lumetallix, is the corresponding author on this paper too. See the author byline yourself, highlighted on page 1. The paper's Supplementary Information section 6, page 7 contains the recipe:

"To convert the surface of a sand dollar a solution of 25 mg methyl ammonium bromide in 2.5 g of isopropanol was prepared. The solution was then applied onto the sand dollar shell using a Pasteur pipet. When the conversion reaction was performed under UV radiation, the formation of the perovskite can be observed in real-time. The initially white sand dollar turns light orange in daylight and fluoresces bright green under UV irradiation."Holtus 2018, Supplementary Information, Section 6, page 7. See it for yourself · highlighted.

And from page 2 of the same supplementary information, describing the actual published movie file:

"Real-time movie of the conversion of a 3.5 cm sized sand dollar into CH₃NH₃PbBr₃ by dripping a CH₃NH₃Br solution on the PbCO₃ converted sand dollar surface under UV illumination at 365 nm."Holtus 2018, Supplementary Information, page 2 · Movie 1 description.

That formulation is methylammonium bromide at 1% in isopropanol, applied as drops on a real-world solid lead-bearing substrate, illuminated with 365 nm UV, producing real-time green fluorescence. That is the formulation of the FluoroSpec product I sell today, give or take a tenth of a percent. That is the formulation of the Lumetallix product they sell today, give or take a tenth of a percent. The patent application's stock solution at paragraph [0076] is 1.6% in isopropanol. The recipe was published in 2018. By the inventors. In Nature Chemistry. With supplementary information. With a movie file.

Yan 2019 · Scientific Reports · MABr as a lead-detection method, naked-eye

While the AMOLF group was sitting on what to do with their 2018 chemistry paper, a different team published the chemistry as an explicit lead-detection method. Yan et al. (2019) in Scientific Reports showed the same MABr-and-UV reaction working on paper test strips. From page 5 of their paper:

"The letters 'BJTU' were written with PbBr₂ solution (0.1 M) on paper strips. The 'BJTU' are invisible on paper strips under ambient light. However, after loading of MABr solutions (0.8 M) on these paper strips, the fluorescent letters under UV illumination can be observed by the naked eye."Yan 2019, pages 5–6. See it for yourself · highlighted.

That is the demonstration. PbBr₂ on paper, MABr on top, UV light, green letters visible to the unaided eye. As a proof of using this chemistry to find lead, that is the whole idea, written down in 2019, two years before the patent's priority date. Yan also reports a detection limit of 1.6 × 10⁻³ M PbBr₂, which on a paper strip works out to nanogram-scale total lead.

This paper alone was enough for the U.S. examiner. Every claim of the U.S. patent application was rejected over Yan + Kayano. The examiner did not even need to reach for the inventor's own paper. The published Yan reference, plus a generic teaching about lead in electronics, was sufficient.

Wang 2021 · Sensors and Actuators B · 5 ppb on a 13 mm disk in 50 mL of water

Then there is Wang et al. (2021) in Sensors and Actuators B. This paper, published months before the patent's priority date, used the same chemistry to detect lead bound onto a sulfhydryl-functionalized mesoporous alumina film. The numbers, straight from the abstract:

"the Pb(II) adsorption capacity of the sulfydryl functionalized film was found to be drastically enhanced after sulfydryl modification. Under the optimal conditions, the Pb(II) adsorption capacity of the sulfydryl functionalized film was estimated to be 94.9 µg/g... a limit of detection (LOD) as low as 5 × 10⁻³ µg/mL was achieved."Wang 2021, abstract. See it for yourself · highlighted.

That LOD is 5 × 10⁻³ micrograms per milliliter. Five parts per billion in water. They achieved this on a 13 mm diameter mesoporous alumina film immersed in 50 mL of water at 55°C for 25 minutes, then dropped 20 µL of MABr solution on the film, dried it, and looked at it under 365 nm UV. From page 4:

"The LOD for Pb(II) determination was found to be 5 × 10⁻³ µg/mL evaluated by the typical 3-times of signal to noise method... The sensitivity of this method meets the requirement for Pb(II) determination in drinking water samples following the National Test Standard of China GB 5749–2006, in which a maximum level of Pb(II) should be lower than 0.01 µg/mL."Wang 2021, page 4. See it for yourself · highlighted.

The 0.01 µg/mL standard they reference is also the WHO drinking water guideline and the U.S. EPA limit. Wang's published method, in 2021, hit twice that sensitivity. On a closed substrate. On bound lead. On a thirteen-millimeter disk in fifty milliliters of water. The LOD is the most rigorous metric in analytical chemistry. They reported it. They measured it. They published it in a peer-reviewed journal months before the patent claimed priority.

And here is the part that actually matters for the patent argument. The European patent application's most recent argument hinges on the idea that real-world lead is somehow "embedded in the structure of the material" and "not present in the form of free Pb ions in a freely accessible form" and therefore unexpectedly hard to detect with this chemistry. Wang's substrate is exactly the kind of substrate the EP attorneys say is too closed for the chemistry to work on. A solid mesoporous alumina film with lead bound to sulfhydryl ligands embedded in its surface. The lead is not free. The substrate is not open. And the chemistry works on it at five parts per billion. That paper has been on the patent's information disclosure statement since prosecution started.

Zang 2017 · Solar Energy Materials · PbO converts the same way

Zang et al. (2017) showed lead oxide reacting directly with methylammonium-halide reagent in isopropanol to form methylammonium-lead-iodide perovskite. This matters because lead in old paint and lead in glaze is mostly not free Pb²⁺. It is mostly basic lead carbonate (white lead, the historical pigment) and lead oxide (in glazes, in oxidized solder). The Zang result tells us all of these substrates feed into the same chemistry. None of this is news to anyone who has read the perovskite-synthesis literature. The Lumetallix application has Zang on its own information disclosure statement.

So by April 2021, the published record showed: the chemistry, the formulation, the application method, the substrate generality, and explicit demonstrations of using it as a lead-detection method on solid surfaces. That was the world the patent application was filed into.

★ THE ARGUMENTS THE APPLICANT IS MAKING

The defense is splitting hairs about substrate types.

Faced with that prior art, the European patent attorneys for Lumetallix have settled on a defense strategy I find genuinely bizarre. The most recent reply, filed April 24, 2026, is built around three propositions. I will take them in turn, because each one is a way of trying to pull something over on the patent examiner that requires the examiner to either not look at the applicant's own data, or to accept consumer painting blog posts as authorities, or to believe that detecting fluorescent crystals on a surface somehow requires light to penetrate the surface.

1

"Real-world lead is on closed inaccessible surfaces, so detecting it would not be obvious."

Their actual quote, page 3 of the April 24 reply:

"As the skilled person will recognise, these materials have closed, inaccessible surfaces. Further, if lead is present in these materials, it is chemically incorporated in the structure of the material; it is not present in the form of Pb ions in a freely accessible form."De Vries & Metman, reply to Examining Division, April 24, 2026.

This is a total affront to anyone who understands what is actually happening in the chemistry. The methylammonium-bromide reagent does not need to penetrate the substrate. The UV light does not need to penetrate the substrate. The lead halide perovskite crystals form right at the surface where the reagent contacts the lead-bearing material, and they fluoresce green from that same surface. Wang's published images show this. Holtus's published images show this. The patent's own example tables show this. If the crystals form, they can be observed. It really is that simple.

You do not need a closed-surface theory of inventive step. You need a surface. The lead is at or near the surface in cured lead-white paint, in a lead glaze, in a soldered joint with an oxide skin, in an old enamel decoration. The crystals form on the surface. The light hits the surface. The fluorescence comes off the surface. None of this requires any penetration of any substrate. Trying to argue otherwise is, again, a thing you would only attempt if you were hoping the examiner would not stop to think about how the chemistry physically works.

The patent's own data refutes the closed-surface argument directly. Example 1 reports cured lead white paint giving "very bright instant" green fluorescence with a cotton swab. If the lead were truly embedded in a "closed inaccessible structure," that would not happen. The chemistry would not fire. It does fire. Instantly. The applicant tested it and reported it. Their own attorneys are now arguing the opposite.

2

"Yan's PbBr₂-on-paper is not paint, so it does not anticipate the claim."

The novelty argument over Yan 2019 turns on the word "paint." Lumetallix's attorneys argue that Yan's lead-bromide-on-paper is not paint because it does not contain a binder or pigment. Then, to support what paint is, they submitted the following two documents to the European Patent Office:

Citation A · "Basic Paint Ingredients and Chemicals" (2017)

Citation A: Basic Paint Ingredients blog post

Author photo at the top. By Haseeb Jamal. A civil-engineering blog post. Submitted as authority for what paint is to the European Patent Office.

Citation B · "Painting 101: What Is Paint Made Of?" (2018)

Citation B title page Citation B paint can infographic

Author: "admin." A residential painting company's consumer blog post. With a paint-can infographic. Submitted as authority for what paint is to the European Patent Office.

These are real screenshots of the actual documents in the actual EPO file. I could not make this up. The patent attorneys submitted them in the same letter where they accuse me of trade secret misappropriation. Imagine the meeting where someone said "for our European patent defense over a Nature Chemistry-grade prior art reference, let's submit a residential painter's blog as the authority for what paint is."

The premise of submitting these documents is that the European patent examiner, presented with two consumer-facing painting articles, will accept them as the working definition of paint. This only makes sense if you imagine the examiner as someone who will not pause for ten seconds to ask whether ultrafinishpainting.com is a peer-reviewed source, or whether there might be a more authoritative reference for what paint is than a 2017 blog post written by a contributor on a civil-engineering tutorial site.

And then there is the deeper problem with the argument. The patent's own example 1, paragraph [0087], makes paint by combining "1 gram lead white with 0.4 gram of linseed oil" and curing it in an oven. That is pigment plus binder. No solvent. No additives. Under the Lumetallix attorneys' own paint definition (which requires all four), the inventors' own working example is not paint. They cannot have it both ways.

3

"Detecting embedded lead in solid substrates is unexpected, so it is inventive."

Inventive step in European patent law asks whether a person skilled in the art, looking at the prior art, would have a reasonable expectation of success in extending what was known to the claimed invention. The Lumetallix attorneys argue that this would not have been obvious because real-world lead is at low concentrations in closed structures and the chemistry was only previously demonstrated on idealized substrates.

This is the part that requires you to imagine the patent examiner as someone who will not look at the patent application's own example tables. Because if you look at the substrates the inventors tested, you find the following.

Substrate class (claimed) Pb concentration actually tested
Painted surfaces 1 g lead white pigment + 0.4 g linseed oil = ~71% lead-carbonate pigment by mass, ~52% Pb metal equivalent.
Glass "Glass 24% PbO" — 24% lead oxide, ~22% Pb metal equivalent.
Metals Metallic lead (100%) and Lead-Tin 60-40 solder (60% Pb).
Plastics Not tested. Not mentioned. Not anywhere in the application. Yet claimed in the substrate menu.

That is the data the patent submits. Lead loadings of 22%, 52%, 60%, and 100%. No real-world consumer-product lead-paint test. No painted toy. No painted china. No vintage decoration. No regulated-concentration paint anywhere near the 90 ppm CPSC limit. No plastic substrate at all. And from this data, the attorneys argue that the method's success on "closed inaccessible surfaces" with "low concentrations" is unexpected.

What makes the argument absurd is that the very things they are claiming inventive step over are the things they did not test. The inventive step is supposed to live in the gap between Yan's paper-strip lab work and consumer-product low-concentration lead detection. That gap is not bridged by their own data. It is asserted across that gap with attorney prose.

An examiner who reads the application carefully will see this immediately. An examiner who is hurried, or who trusts the attorneys to characterize their own data accurately, might miss it. The strategy seems to require the examiner to be the second kind. That is what I mean when I say the argument is built to fool the examiner.

Splitting hairs about whether Yan's substrate is technically paint, while submitting consumer blog posts as authority, while quietly omitting that your own examples don't satisfy your own definition, is not a serious patent argument. It is what you reach for when you do not have a serious patent argument.

There are only two possibilities.

I want to lay out, plainly, the structure of what is happening on the other side of this dispute.

The patent application's defense, as filed at the European Patent Office on April 24, 2026, requires you to believe that:

  • The chemistry the inventors themselves published in Nature Chemistry in 2018, with the recipe in the supplementary information, somehow does not anticipate the patent claims.
  • An independent group's 2019 demonstration of the same chemistry on paper test strips, visible to the naked eye, somehow does not anticipate the claims either.
  • An independent group's 2021 demonstration of the same chemistry detecting 5 parts per billion of lead in 50 milliliters of water on a closed sulfhydryl-functionalized solid film, below the WHO drinking water standard, somehow does not undermine the inventive-step argument that real-world lead is too closed and too embedded to detect.
  • Two consumer-facing painting blog posts are authoritative references for what paint is.
  • The patent's own working examples, which never test plastic, never test low-concentration paint, and use a paint formulation that fails the very paint definition the attorneys are advancing, somehow support the breadth of the claims.

The conclusion someone has to draw from this is one of two things. There is no third option. I have looked.

A

The people defending it cannot see the contradictions.

Smart people, in good faith, looked at the prior art, looked at the patent's own examples, and constructed a defense that contradicts both. They did not see the contradictions. They genuinely cannot tell that their paint definition excludes their own example. They genuinely think Wang's 5 ppb on a closed substrate doesn't matter to a closed-surface inventive-step argument. They genuinely think submitting two consumer blog posts as authoritative references is normal patent practice. The argument is not strategic; it is what they actually believe.

B

They think no one else will see the contradictions.

The defense is strategic. They see the contradictions perfectly clearly. They are betting that the patent examiner will not pause to look at the patent's own example tables, will not check whether ultrafinishpainting.com is an authority, will not read past the abstract of Wang to see that 5 ppb beats the inventive-step framing, will not notice that the prior-art author list includes the patent's own first inventor. They are calculating that the examiner, the public, the third-party observers, and the eventual judges of this dispute can be played for fools. The strategy is built on the assumption that you cannot read.

So which is it? Are they incomprehending? Or do they think we are?

I do not know which of those is true. I have stopped trying to guess. What I know is that one of them has to be true, because there is no third option that does not require the contradictions in the file to be invisible to either the people defending it or to the people they are defending it against. Pick whichever one feels true to you. Either way, the fact that one of them has to be true is itself the most important fact in this whole story.

And the question that follows.

If A is true, then there are smart people in a lab in Amsterdam who genuinely cannot see what is right in front of them in their own published work. If B is true, then there are smart people in a lab in Amsterdam who think the rest of us cannot see what is right in front of us. Both of those are descriptions of impaired cognition. Either it is impaired in them, or it is what they assume about us.

And the substrate of this entire dispute is a chemical that, at chronic exposure, causes measurable deficits in cognition. Lead is a neurotoxin. There is no debate about that anywhere in the medical literature. Childhood lead exposure has been linked, in study after study, to adult outcomes that include impulsivity, antisocial behavior, and impaired judgment. The CDC's blood lead reference value sits at 3.5 micrograms per deciliter, with no known safe threshold below that. Some of the most consequential public-health findings of the last thirty years are about lead's effects on the brain.

So the question that I think is fair to ask out loud, given the structure of what is happening here, is whether we are watching what lead does to people, in real time, in a patent dispute that is also about lead.

I am not making a clinical claim about any specific person. I have no idea what anyone's blood-lead levels are. I am not their doctor. But the meta-question is real. Is it possible that lead exposure, distributed across the people involved in this dispute, in the people who tolerated the dispute, in the people who funded the patent strategy, in the people who think this kind of argument might work, has shaped the way these decisions got made? I think it is at least worth asking. The chemistry the patent is supposed to detect is the very chemistry that may have shaped the choice to file the patent.

Ten years ago I would not have framed a patent dispute in cognitive terms. I am framing it that way now because the alternatives, A or B, are both descriptions of cognitive failure. One of them is true. And the technology in dispute is a tool for measuring the cause of the kind of cognitive failure both descriptions point at.

Has lead enabled this? I cannot prove it. But after a year of reading the file, I cannot stop thinking about it.

What this has actually cost.

I want to be honest about how this has affected the work I am supposed to be doing.

FluoroSpec is a lead poisoning prevention product. The job is to put a tool in people's hands that lets them check if their cookware, their children's plates, the painted toy at the consignment shop, the glaze on the antique mug at the thrift store, the dust under the windowsill, contains lead. That is the entire mission. Every minute spent on something that is not that mission is a minute the mission is not getting done.

Since the European patent application was filed against me, I have spent hundreds of hours reading prosecution history, drafting third-party observations, paying for professional patent searches, retaining counsel, building this archive. I have spent money I did not budget. I have lost sleep. I have had to reorient public-facing content on this site to address claims I did not bring and would not have brought if Lumetallix had simply published their work and competed on its merits.

I do not say this to ask for sympathy. I say it because the toll is real, and because every hour I spent inside the patent file is an hour I did not spend on the actual work of helping people not get poisoned. That is a cost. Someone is paying for it. Most of the people paying for it are children whose parents do not know there are tools available to test the things in their home. They are paying in attention I owed them and didn't deliver.

The Lumetallix decision to file these applications, and to defend them with the arguments described above, is not a neutral commercial choice. It has consequences that fall on the public-health work that the chemistry was supposed to serve. The world has more lead than it has resources to detect lead. Aggressive patent enforcement against the people building the detection tools makes that worse.

This is one of the things I want anyone reading this to take seriously. The chemistry is bigger than any one company. The people who need lead detection in their homes are not bystanders to this dispute. They are the constituency. They are who this is for.

"Is it OK to share these PDFs?"

I get this question a lot. People look at the file archive on this site and ask: who is going to be mad? Is this allowed? Are you going to get sued for it?

So let me lay it out, plainly.

The patent prosecution documents are public records.

When the United States Patent and Trademark Office receives an application and goes about examining it, the entire file wrapper becomes accessible through the USPTO's Patent Center portal. Anyone can pull every document. The Office Action, the application itself, the third-party submissions, the IDS papers, all of it. This is a feature of U.S. patent law, not a bug. Patents are a deal between an inventor and the public. In exchange for a limited monopoly, the inventor discloses what they have done. The public gets to read the file.

The European Patent Office works the same way. After publication, the file is accessible through EPO Online File Inspection. Anyone can pull every substantive document. I downloaded the entire EP 22 720 443.5 file from there and uploaded the relevant parts to this site. That is exactly the use case the European Patent Office's file inspection portal exists to support.

Mirroring public records on a public website is, in the United States, plainly protected speech under the First Amendment. In the Netherlands and the EU broadly, it falls within freedom-of-information principles that have been part of European law since well before the EPC.

The prior art papers are scientific publications.

The Yan, Wang, Holtus, and Zang papers are copyrighted by their publishers. Hosting them on a third-party website without permission is technically a copyright issue. But hosting them in the context of detailed criticism of an actively-pending patent application, for the purpose of education and commentary on a matter of public concern, is squarely within the fair use doctrine codified at 17 U.S.C. § 107. The four-factor test:

  • Purpose and character. Criticism, comment, news reporting, scholarship, research. All of those apply here. The use is also transformative: the papers are being used as evidence in an analysis of patent validity, not as substitutes for reading them in their original context.
  • Nature of the work. Published scientific papers, factual in nature, deposited in indexed journals.
  • Amount and substantiality. Yes, full text. But the alternative is not "show only excerpts" — it's "force readers to track down each paper individually," which defeats the educational purpose. And these papers are also on the USPTO's IDS file as third-party submissions, which makes them public-record-adjacent.
  • Market effect. None. Anyone who needs the paper for research already has institutional access. This site is not selling subscriptions.

I am not saying this with confidence that no copyright complaint will ever issue. I am saying that the legal posture is clearly defensible.

Sharing public records, in service of education on a matter of public health, is not a fringe legal position. It is what the entire system is supposed to enable.

★ ACTIVE LITIGATION · ON THE RECORD

There are lawsuits going in every direction.

For the record, and so it is clear when reading this site: this is not theoretical. Four separate cases are currently pending in two countries, with a fifth being threatened by pre-suit demand letters from a fourth law firm. The cases interweave. The chemistry interweaves. The cast of characters interweaves. So does the question I keep ending up at.

1

Spirochaete Research Labs, LLC, Fluoro-Spec Inc., and Eric C. Ritter v. Lumetallix Holding B.V., Lumetallix B.V., Xander Terpstra, Obtainium LLC, and John Schiff

U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York · filed April 27, 2026 · plaintiffs' counsel: Dmitriy Ishimbayev, Ishimbayev Law Firm, P.C. (1 World Trade Center, New York)

I am the plaintiff. The cause of action is pleaded under 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a)(1)(B) — false advertising and trade libel under the Lanham Act and New York common law concerning false patent-status statements and false comparative-performance claims. Damages sought exceed $150,000 with injunctive relief. Jury demand: yes.

The defendants include Lumetallix Holding B.V. and Lumetallix B.V. (the Dutch parent and operating entities), Xander Terpstra (Lumetallix co-founder), Obtainium LLC (the U.S. distributor that ships Lumetallix product into New York), and John Schiff (referenced in Lumetallix's own LinkedIn co-founder posts). The complaint is grounded in publicly verifiable representations about a "granted international patent" that has not in fact granted, deliberate marketing claims that the FluoroSpec product is "copied and counterfeited" from a patent that stands rejected in both jurisdictions, and the resulting damage to a U.S. small business attempting to do public-health work.

The complaint and the eighteen-plus exhibits filed in support of it form the documentary backbone for the analysis on the /patent page.

2

Lumetallix Holding B.V. v. Spirochaete Research Labs, LLC and Eric Ritter

District Court of Amsterdam, the Netherlands · Bailiff reference L2502186 · counsel for claimant: Ploum Lodder Princen (Rotterdam)

Lumetallix is the claimant. They have filed a parallel proceeding in the Netherlands against me and Spirochaete Research Labs. The substantive theory mirrors the trade-secret-misappropriation accusation now also embedded in their April 24, 2026 European patent office reply, the relevant passage of which is quoted on the /patent page. The Dutch summons and complaint is filed in the EDNY case as Exhibit F to my own filing.

Three things to note about it. First, the Netherlands action was filed before my U.S. action, so the characterization of "they sued me first" is fair. Second, the substantive claim is that I and Spirochaete obtained confidential subject-matter under a 2022 NDA and built FluoroSpec from it. The chemistry that FluoroSpec uses, however, was published by the named Lumetallix inventors themselves in Nature Chemistry in 2018, four years before any NDA was signed. The claim therefore confronts an awkward question: what confidential information could there have been to misappropriate, when the recipe was already in the open scientific literature? Third, the U.S. action and the Dutch action are in different fora and proceed independently. Both will produce records.

3

Spirochaete Research Labs LLC v. Alyvia LLC and Meiyu Yu (the AA Wipes case)

U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York · Case No. 2:25-cv-05021-GRB-ARL · plaintiff's counsel: Dmitriy Ishimbayev, Ishimbayev Law Firm, P.C. · discovery cutoff June 17, 2026

Spirochaete is the plaintiff in this separate Lanham Act and New York General Business Law § 349/350 case against the seller of "AA Wipes Lead Test Swabs," an Amazon-listed product that has been one of the more visible competitor swabs in the consumer lead-detection market. The substantive theory is straightforward: AA Wipes' label and Amazon listing represent that the active reagent is sodium rhodizonate (CAS 523-21-7). The supplier-disclosed truth, documented in an email from their Chinese supplier and pulled in as Exhibit E in the amended complaint, is that the actual active reagent is xylenol orange (CAS 1611-35-4), a sulfonephthalein-class metallochromic indicator — a different chemistry that produces different reactivity, including known false positives on titanium and zinc surfaces.

This case interweaves with the Tamara Rubin case in a specific and ironic way. In 2023 and 2024, Rubin published statements claiming my swab products were producing false positives on titanium and zinc-based paints. The false-positive behavior she was describing was real, but it was AA Wipes' xylenol-orange chemistry, not Spirochaete's sodium-rhodizonate chemistry. The two products were being conflated by an audience that did not, in most cases, distinguish the underlying reagents. The Tamara dispute kicked off because she described AA Wipes' chemistry while pointing at our brand. The AA Wipes case puts that chemistry distinction on the public record.

AA Wipes amended complaint (Doc 12, EDNY)

4

Ritter v. Rubin (Tamara Rubin individually and Lead Safe Mama LLC)

U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York · Case No. 2:26-cv-00414-ARL · refiled January 23, 2026 · related case to the Lumetallix EDNY action

I am the plaintiff. The case stems from a $90,000 advertising contract Rubin signed with Fluoro-Spec on April 14, 2023, which she repudiated in March 2024 after Lumetallix told her, in writing, that they held "a valid international patent" on the chemistry. They did not. They held a pending application that has now been rejected in both the United States and Europe.

This case is procedurally related to the Lumetallix action because the defamation, repudiation, and false-patent-status story is downstream of the same set of facts. Exhibit M of the Lumetallix EDNY filing is the Rubin email asserting the "valid international patent" representation that was used to repudiate the contract. The chemistry-conflation story, where Rubin's published statements about my products described behavior that actually belongs to AA Wipes' product, sits underneath all of it (see case #3 above).

Pre-suit pressure · the Oregon defamation threat

Two pre-suit demand letters from Oregon counsel, separate from the federal Ritter v. Rubin case above, threaten a parallel defamation action against me in Oregon state court. Counsel: Taylor G. Duty, JJH Law (1640 NW Irving Street, Portland, Oregon). The letters are preserved here as posted to me.

MARCH 19, 2026

Notice to Cease and Desist

Eight-page letter plus Oregon Office of State Fire Marshal incident report. Identifies three "buckets" of allegedly defamatory livestream statements from my Instagram account (~475,000 followers) regarding (1) a 2002 house fire, (2) tax/charity charges that were dropped by the Oregon Department of Justice, and (3) child-lead-exposure allegations. Cites Oregon defamation law and U.S. Sullivan/Curtis Publishing actual-malice doctrine. Demands cease and desist, retraction visible 120 days, removal of content, written assurance. Ten-day deadline.

Read the C&D letter

APRIL 20, 2026

Settlement Demand & Follow-Up

Five-page letter acknowledging some compliance (a retraction video and partial content removal) but demanding more. Sets seven non-severable settlement terms with a $682,000 financial demand. Ten-day deadline. The deadline (April 30, 2026) has passed without Rubin filing the threatened Oregon defamation action. Counsel has signaled the suit is being prepared.

Read the settlement demand

Why this matters for what you are reading

Everything on this site, including this essay, is being written while litigation is pending and pre-suit pressure is being applied. That is intentional. The First Amendment in the United States, and freedom-of-information principles in Europe, both protect public commentary on matters of public concern, including matters that are simultaneously the subject of active litigation. I am not going to wait for a court to tell me whether a patent application the patent offices have already rejected is the kind of thing the public is allowed to read about.

The lawsuits will run their course. The records will become public. The arguments on both sides will be tested. In the meantime, the documents on this site are accurate, sourced, and downloadable from the original public-record portals at the USPTO, the European Patent Office, and PACER. If something I have written is wrong, it can be corrected. If something is missing, it can be added. The goal is to make the underlying record visible.

And it begs a question that I do not have a clean answer to. Why would these people behave this way? A failed patent application that they themselves anticipated in published literature. A trade-secret claim against publicly-disclosed chemistry. A repudiated $90,000 ad contract grounded in a representation about a patent that did not exist. A competitor product that mislabels its own active reagent. Pre-suit demand letters totaling $682,000 over Instagram livestreams. Why? The two-options framing earlier in this essay applies again. Either the people behind these decisions cannot see what is plainly on the record, or they think nobody else can.

Get the next chapter.

This story is unfinished. The U.S. application has not been responded to. The European application is awaiting the Examining Division's reply to the April 24 letter. The applicant has booked oral proceedings as a backstop. Third-party observations are still being filed. There are likely months, possibly years, before any of this resolves.

I will keep writing about it as it develops. If you want me to send the next installment to your inbox, leave your email below. No marketing, no upsell. Just the next concrete thing that happens in either jurisdiction, when it happens.

★ ALSO ON THIS SITE

The receipts.

Everything I have referenced on this page is hosted in detail on the patent file page, with the original PDFs downloadable. If something on this essay sounds incredible, it is meant to. Click through to see for yourself.

The Patent File

Every document. The U.S. Office Action. The European prosecution timeline. The April 24 reply. The two paint blog posts. The full file archive.

/patent →

FluoroSpec vs Lumetallix

Honest side-by-side comparison of the products and the chemistry. The work this site exists to support.

/fluorospec-vs-lumetallix →

Trace-Detection Patent Disclosure

Fluoro-Spec Inc.'s own published patent disclosure, available freely under public-disclosure terms.

/trace-detection-patent →

What Public Disclosure Does

Why I published my work openly, and what that means for everyone else who wants to detect lead.

/what-public-disclosure-does →

Last updated 2026-05-09 · Eric Ritter · eric@fluorospect.com · 631-461-1838 · Suffolk County, New York