Medicines and trials

The fifth entry is a queda da patente, and the noun in the middle names an act that English will not let a patent perform. In Portuguese the patent falls: a patente caiu, a queda da patente, and the sentence beside this entry has the price falling straight after it. English keeps the two falls apart. A patent does not fall. It « expires » when its term runs out, it « lapses » when a renewal fee goes unpaid, and the medicine itself « comes off patent » — a phrasal verb that treats the protection as a coat taken off rather than as something collapsing. What does fall is the money, and there the trade press has built the picture that Portuguese puts in the patent: the « patent cliff », the edge a company walks off in the quarter its exclusivity ends. Beside it sits the flatter phrase the regulators prefer, « loss of exclusivity ». One Portuguese noun therefore answers to three English ones, and choosing between them is choosing what is falling: the right, the protection, or the revenue.