An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider two bills Thursday that would effectively nullify the Supreme Court's rulings against patents on broad software processes and human genes. Open source and Internet freedom advocates are mobilizing and pushing back. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (or PERA, S. 2140), sponsored by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), would amend US Code such that "all judicial exceptions to patent eligibility are eliminated." That would include the 2014 ruling in which the Supreme Court held, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing, that simply performing an existing process on a computer does not make it a new, patentable invention. "The relevant question is whether the claims here do more than simply instruct the practitioner to implement the abstract idea of intermediated settlement on a generic computer," Thomas wrote. "They do not." That case also drew on Bilski v. Kappos, a case in which a patent was proposed based solely on the concept of hedging against price fluctuations in commodity markets. [...] Another wrinkle in the PERA bill involves genetic patents. The Supreme Court ruled in June 2013 that pieces of DNA that occur naturally in the genomes of humans or other organisms cannot, themselves, be patented. Myriad Genetics had previously been granted patents on genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2, which were targeted in a lawsuit led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The resulting Supreme Court decision -- this one also written by Thomas -- found that information that naturally occurs in the human genome could not be the subject to a patent, even if the patent covered the process of isolating that information from the rest of the genome. As with broad software patents, PERA would seemingly allow for the patenting of isolated human genes and connections between those genes and diseases like cancer. [...] The Judiciary Committee is set to debate and potentially amend or rewrite PREVAIL and PERA (i.e. mark up) on Thursday.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: You may find yourself smelling crayons in the aisles of stores soon -- if Crayola's chief executive Pete Ruggiero has his way. In July, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a trademark to the arts and crafts giant for the smell of its crayons -- that waxy scent of a childhood spent trying to color within the lines. While it's too soon for this back-to-school season, Ruggiero imagines one day pumping it through the aisles of retailers, triggering nostalgia while shoppers are browsing and hopefully buying more crayons. Crayola, a unit of Hallmark, first applied for the trademark in 2018 and was initially turned down less than a year later, but won its bid on appeal. During the process, the company shared examples of its own crayons as well as competitors to verify the distinctiveness. It's a "slightly earthy soap with pungent, leather-like clay undertones," according to the trademark documents. "We've been talking about doing it for years," Ruggiero said about the trademark. "That Crayola smell, there's a connection between the smell and childhood memories that is very powerful."

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