Sponsors (4)
Tightens PTAB procedures, expands who counts as a real party in interest (including funders), limits parallel forum challenges, creates a USPTO fee revolving fund, and expands micro‑entity eligibility.
Official title: Amend title 35, United States Code, to invest in inventors in the United States, maintain the United States as the leading innovation economy in the world, and protect the property rights of the inventors that grow the economy of the United States, and for other purposes.
Introduced May 1, 2025 by Christopher A. Coons · Last progress May 1, 2025
The bill strengthens patent-owner protections, agency funding stability, and procedural transparency for some PTAB processes while trading off reduced and more costly paths for challengers, potential higher fees or slower processing, and less congressional control over USPTO fee spending.
Inventors, researchers, and small companies will have stronger patent protections and incentives to invest in R&D and commercialization through heightened enforcement and legal protections.
Patent applicants and holders will get more transparent, conflict‑resistant PTAB adjudications because panels must be multi-member, panel changes are recorded, and members who voted to institute reviews are disqualified from deciding those reviews.
Patent owners, courts, and the public will gain clearer disclosure of who actually funds or controls IPRs and reexaminations (real parties in interest), increasing transparency and deterring low‑merit, funder-driven challenges.
Small businesses, competitors, and the public may face higher costs and less competition because higher evidentiary standards and limits on post‑grant reviews could entrench weak or overly broad patents.
Patent applicants, holders, and taxpayers could face higher fees, slower case processing, and increased USPTO operating costs due to larger PTAB panels, new administrative procedures, fee ring‑fencing impacts, and expanded micro‑entity eligibility reducing revenue.
Nonprofits, public-interest challengers, and third‑party funders may be deterred from filing IPRs or reexaminations by burdensome certification/disclosure rules, broad 'real party in interest' definitions, and one‑year bars—reducing avenues to correct bad patents.
Based on analysis of 9 sections of legislative text.
Makes broad changes to U.S. patent review procedures and USPTO operations to strengthen patent owners' protections and increase transparency. It tightens rules for inter partes review (IPR), post‑grant review (PGR), and ex parte reexamination by expanding the definition of real parties in interest (including third‑party funders), adding single‑forum restrictions once administrative review is instituted, imposing faster rehearing deadlines, and changing PTAB panel and conduct rules. It also ends statutory fee diversion for the USPTO by creating a dedicated revolving fund, expands who qualifies as micro‑entity (including university‑affiliated and certain nonprofit filers), and requires an SBA report and free public online access to USPTO public search resources.