This may seem to be on its face another dull instance of people haggling over fine points in the esoteric field of defining patentable subject matter.

But it is not.

It is a potentially huge development and not a good one for tech startups and innovators.

Setting aside fine points, what we have had until just the last few years in the tech world is an insane pattern dating back to the 1990s - thanks to the Federal Circuit Court's seriously flawed interpretation of then-existing caselaw - by which the legal test for patentable subject matter essentially became "anything new under the sun."

An orgy of frivolous software patents followed and this bedeviled tech innovation for well over a decade and allowed patent trolls to run wild with patent claims that swarmed authentic technical innovation and clogged it with endless junk consisting of patents on what were essentially abstract ideas or on what were long-established innovations done "on a computer" with nothing else added and similar claims on which the lawyers feasted and the public suffered.

Fortunately, in recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and reined in the Federal Circuit decisions, narrowly restricting what constituted patentable subject matter under Section 101 of the patent laws. The Bilski case started this reining-in process and many other important cases followed, culminating most recently in the Alice case. (See my elaboration of this trend here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4633163#4633950)

This reining, coupled with liberal use of inter partes review to allow for a relatively swift and efficient procedure by which frivolous patents could be challenged and swatted away, has brought some sanity back to the field in recent years. (See my comments on this procedure here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16913013#16915378)

So, junk patents have become much more vulnerable to attack in recent years. This reform has been judge-driven - primarily by the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been an imperfect sort of reform but hugely important. The orgy of junk software patents that so burdened the tech industry was radically curtailed.

True reform was to await an act of Congress. Congress sets the bounds of how patent law is implemented and a clean resolution of the issues depends on its acting to fix things definitively.

However, far from fixing things, the Senate is in the process of enacting a bill that would radically do away with the recent Supreme Court reforms and open the way for a new patent system that once more makes junk patents freely grantable and sustainable.

The article I posted here is from a conservative source.

But this is an issue that is critical to all who oppose junk patents. For example, here is EFF's take on the proposed Senate effort (known at Tillis-Coons, after the two Senators sponsoring it): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/tillis-coons-patent-bi.... For other critical commentary, see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/tillis-coons-patent-bi...

The proponents of this bill attempt to dress it up as a valuable protection of property rights. Speaking as one who strongly supports IP rights, but also as a lawyer who knows how rights become meaningless if lawyers are permitted to litigate everything to death, I would suggest that this attempt to codify within the patent law a regimen that allows virtually anything to be patented, with few meaningful checks on what is eligible for patentability, will serve only to arm the trolls and litigators at the expense of true innovation.

It is a disaster in the making for tech innovators and startups and ought to be stopped. Let us hope it can be.