The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property is conducting a hearing regarding the RESTORE Patent Rights Act of 2024. This legislation seeks to reverse the 2006 Supreme Court decision in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, LLC, which protects defendants from inappropriate injunctive relief.

Josh Landau, Senior Counsel for Innovation Policy at the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), will testify against the RESTORE Act. He warns that it would enable patent owners to halt sales and shut down manufacturing without proving irreparable harm—a requirement common under American law. Landau has previously testified against similar legislative efforts in 2019.

Landau stated, "Senators who support innovation and manufacturing should oppose this bill. Companies that actually make products already obtain injunctions under current law. But patent trolls, who rarely even invent the technologies their patent covers and mainly use their patents to initiate lawsuits against innovators, would be able to use RESTORE to extort manufacturers. This, in turn, would create significant incentives to keep manufacturing outside of the United States, hurting jobs and the U.S. economy."

He further commented that "The RESTORE Act is a giveaway to patent trolls and foreign sovereign wealth funds whose interest in the patent system is profit, not the progress of the useful arts."