Restoring America’s Leadership in Innovation Act of 2025

Key Points

• The bill switches the U.S. patent system back to a "first-to-invent" model, where the person who actually came up with an idea first gets the patent — not just whoever files the paperwork fastest. This reverses a major change made by the 2011 America Invents Act.
• It eliminates the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and the inter partes review and post-grant review processes that companies currently use to challenge existing patents. Instead, patents could only be invalidated through regular court proceedings.
• Patents would be legally defined as private property rights, similar to owning physical property. Once granted, a patent could only be revoked by a court ruling, unless the patent owner agrees to another process.
• The bill expands what can be patented to include more software inventions and life science discoveries, overriding several Supreme Court rulings that had narrowed patent eligibility in those fields.
• Patent applications would no longer be automatically published after 18 months. Instead, applications would stay secret until a patent is officially granted, which the bill says will help prevent foreign competitors from stealing American innovations.
• All fees collected by the Patent and Trademark Office would stay with the agency in a new dedicated fund, ending the practice of Congress redirecting that money to other uses. This is meant to speed up patent processing.

Votes

No votes have been recorded for this legislation yet.

News

No related news coverage found for this legislation yet.

Related Bills

No related bills have been identified yet.