Patents and trade marks

The twenty-seventh entry is il modello di utilità, and it is the term here an English reader can get wrong twice over. Il modello di utilità is a registered right for a technical improvement: it goes through little or no examination of substance, it is cheap, it is quick, and it runs for a shorter term than a patent, which is exactly what the sentence in this list says. English has a settled name for that right, « utility model », used because most of the countries that grant one speak German or Italian or Japanese. The trap is the neighbouring phrase « utility patent », which sounds like the same thing and is not: in the English of the United States it is the ordinary invention patent, the full right, named that way only to hold it apart from a design patent and a plant patent. So the two phrases sit at opposite ends of the scale. Write « utility patent » for il modello di utilità and you have promoted a small, short, barely examined right into the strongest one in the system.