New Patent Bill Scraps Judge-Made Rules, Opening the Door for Broader Invention Claims

If you’ve ever tried to get a patent for a new app, a diagnostic test, or some kind of clever business process, you know the game has been frustratingly unclear for years. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2025 is Congress’s attempt to scrap the complicated, often contradictory rules judges have created and set a much clearer, much broader standard for what counts as a patentable invention.

The Big Fix: Ending the Eligibility Confusion

This bill fundamentally changes how the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the courts decide if an invention is even eligible for protection under Section 101 of the patent law. The short version? It wipes out the judge-made exceptions—like the infamous "abstract idea" and "natural law" tests—that have been used since the 2010s to invalidate patents, especially in software and biotech. The new rule is simple: if your invention is a useful process, machine, manufactured item, or composition of matter, it’s eligible. Period. The only things that matter now are the specific exclusions listed in the bill, not some judge’s interpretation of what an “abstract idea” is (SEC. 2).

For the biotech and life sciences folks, this is a huge deal. The bill clarifies that if you take a natural material or human gene and purify, enrich, or alter it in any way, it is not considered an “unmodified natural material” and becomes patent-eligible. This means years of investment in isolating useful compounds or developing diagnostic tools based on natural substances could finally get the predictable protection they need. If you’re a startup trying to find the next big drug, this provides crucial legal certainty.

The New Guardrails: What Still Can’t Be Patented

While the bill broadens the field significantly, it doesn’t create a free-for-all. Congress drew some specific lines in the sand (SEC. 3). You still can’t patent:

• A pure mathematical formula (unless it’s tied to a larger, useful invention).
• A process that is purely a thought process happening only in someone’s head.
• Unmodified human genes or natural materials exactly as they exist in nature.
• A process that is mostly just about business, finance, social activities, or art—even if you try to make it sound technical by adding a generic computer step.

This last point is key for the software industry. If your patent claim is essentially a new way to do accounting or manage a social club, adding “...and perform it on a computer” won’t save it if the computer isn’t absolutely essential to the core inventive step. The bill explicitly says that using a computer to simply collect data or display results won't turn an otherwise ineligible business method into a patentable invention (SEC. 4).

Real-World Impact: Certainty vs. Litigation

For inventors and small businesses, the primary benefit is certainty. The current system forces inventors to guess whether their idea will be invalidated years later by a court using vague standards. This bill replaces that with clear statutory text, which should encourage innovation in areas like artificial intelligence and medical diagnostics that were previously held back by eligibility fears.

However, this clarity comes with a trade-off. By lowering the eligibility bar, the system could see an influx of new patents, potentially leading to more litigation. If you’re a competitor, you might now face lawsuits over inventions that previously would have been tossed out early in the process as abstract ideas. Also, the new exclusion for processes that are “mostly just about economics, finance, business, social matters, culture, or art” is still subjective. Expect lawyers to spend years arguing over where that “mostly” line is drawn, creating a new source of legal uncertainty.

Finally, the bill includes a procedural change allowing courts to decide on patent eligibility early in a case, limiting the evidence-gathering process (discovery) to just the eligibility question (SEC. 3). While this sounds efficient, it could mean some cases are thrown out before the patent holder gets a full chance to prove the technical details of their invention, potentially favoring defendants in infringement suits.