Legislative abridgement can completely roll back judicial exceptions
CRS 1-3-2024, Congressional Research Service (CRS). CRS serves as nonpartisan shared staff to congressional committees and Members of Congress. It operates solely at the behest of and under the direction of Congress. Information in a CRS Report should not be relied upon for purposes other than public understanding of information that has been provided by CRS to Members of Congress in connection with CRS’s institutional role https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12563, " Patent-Eligible Subject Matter Reform: An Overview" (ermo/sms, Acc:6-28-2024)
As of the end of 2023, one bill focusing on patent-eligible subject matter has been introduced during the 118th Congress: S. 2140, the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2023 (PERA 2023). Like PERA 2022, the introduced version of PERA 2023 would replace the Alice/Mayo framework with an exclusive statutory list of narrower ineligible categories: mathematical formulas, purely mental processes, purely natural processes, unmodified human genes, and unmodified natural material. PERA 2023 would also exclude from patentability any “substantially economic, financial, business, social, cultural, or artistic” process, even if it involves a machine or manufacture. However, if the process “cannot practically be performed” without the machine or manufacture, then it would be patent-eligible.
PERA 2023 also contains provisions on how to read the exclusions for unmodified human genes or other unmodified natural material. Specifically, PERA 2023 explains that natural material would be considered modified (and thus patentable) if it is “isolated, purified, enriched, or otherwise altered by human activity” or “otherwise employed in a useful invention or discovery.” This provision would appear to abrogate the Supreme Court’s Myriad decision to allow patenting of isolated DNA segments, although unmodified human genes (i.e., genes as they exist in the human body) would remain unpatentable.