House, Senate Lawmakers Focus on Patent Eligibility Changes

House and Senate lawmakers are ramping up efforts to rewrite the definition of patent eligibility, in a bid to create greater legal certainty around patents held by pharmaceutical, life sciences and technology companies.

Lawmakers are quietly meeting with company and trade group representatives to ask for suggestions on how to rewrite Section 101 of federal patent law, which defines what inventions may be patented. The U.S. Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions on patent eligibility that practitioners say have left the law poorly defined. Companies are uncertain about what inventions are patentable, and which granted patents can survive ...