Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2025

Summary

Rewrites federal patent-eligibility law to broaden what counts as patentable subject matter while listing explicit categories that remain ineligible. It eliminates judicially created exceptions, updates statutory definitions (including a new definition of “useful”), clarifies that patentability questions must be decided by looking at the claimed invention as a whole, and limits courts from relying on novelty, nonobviousness, or disclosure rules to deny eligibility. The change also lists specific exclusions (pure mathematical formulas, purely mental processes, unmodified human genes and natural materials, and largely economic/financial/business/social/cultural/artistic processes) and says inventions that cannot practically be performed without a machine remain eligible even if they involve those areas.

• Eliminates judicially created exceptions and replaces them with a statutory framework for patent eligibility.
• Defines eligible subject matter broadly as useful processes, machines, manufactures, compositions, and useful improvements, subject to express exclusions.
• Specifically excludes pure math, purely mental processes, unmodified human genes and natural materials, and substantially economic/financial/business/social/cultural/artistic processes.
• Creates a machine-necessity rule: processes that cannot practically be performed without a machine remain eligible even if they touch excluded categories.
• Bars using novelty, nonobviousness, or disclosure rules (sections 102, 103, 112) to determine whether subject matter is eligible.
• Requires eligibility be decided by looking at the claimed invention as a whole and not by discounting claim elements.
• Permits courts to decide eligibility at any stage of litigation and allows limited eligibility-focused discovery before ruling on motions.
• Preserves obviousness-type double patenting doctrine and prevents mere computer recitation from rescuing otherwise ineligible, purely human processes.