PTO is legally bound by court decisions – it can’t change on its own
Adam Mossoff, 24 - Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School George Mason University. Statement before the Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, United States Senate “The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act – Restoring Clarity, Certainty, and Predictability to the U.S. Patent System” 1/24, https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2024-01-23_-_testimony_-_mossoff.pdf //DH
The task for reform falls on Congress in ensuring the laws it enacts are properly interpreted and applied by the courts and by the USPTO. The Supreme Court created the Alice-Mayo inquiry and the resulting legal quagmire and negative impact on the innovation economy, and it has denied numerous writ of certiorari petitions over the past decade asking it to revisit or reverse its new legal inquiry for patent eligibility assessments under § 101. The UPSTO is unable to fix this problem given that it is only an administrative agency in the Executive Branch that is legally bound to obey the decisions of the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Thus, it falls on Congress to achieve the necessary reform of § 101 to return the U.S. patent system back to its original constitutional function in “promoting the Progress . . . of the useful Arts.”15