this approach has been widely tested in practice for example germany and japan which introduced pharmaceutical product patents in and respectively successfully used their utility model laws to protect smallscale innovation for decades the japanese utility model law which once witnessed close to some applications a year allowed japanese inventors to protect smallscale improvements of foreign inventions indeed these local innovators often surrounded the foreign invention to the point where negotiated crosslicensing became necessary utility models petty patents for which the trips agreement does not provide any binding minimum standards are usually granted for smallscale inventions that do not meet the eligibility standards under patent law especially the inventive step requirement