A key Senate Committee is about to vote on two bills that would bring back some of the worst patents and empower patent trolls.

The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would throw out crucial rules that ban patents on many abstract ideas. Courts will be ordered to approve patents on things like ordering food on a mobile phone or doing basic financial functions online. If PERA Passes, the floodgates will open for these vague software patents that will be used to sue small companies and individuals. This bill even allows for a type of patent on human genes that the Supreme Court rightly disallowed in 2013.

A second bill, the PREVAIL Act, S. 2220, would sharply limit the public’s right to challenge patents that never should have been granted in the first place.

AI-generated imitations raise legitimate concerns, and Congress should consider narrowly-targeted and proportionate proposals to deal with them. Instead, some Senators have proposed the broad NO FAKES Act, which would create an expansive and confusing new intellectual property right with few real safeguard against abuse.Tell the Senate to throw out the NO FAKES Act and start over.

San Mateo County’s policy of digitizing and destroying physical mail sent to people in its jails violates the privacy and free expression rights of both incarcerated people and those who communicate with them. The County’s contract with Smart Communications—the company that digitizes mail sent to people in San Mateo’s jails—expires on August 31, 2024. We need your help to ensure the County doesn’t renew it: tell the County and the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office that they should let their contract with Smart Communications expire.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) would censor the internet and would make government officials the arbiters of what young people can see online. It will likely lead to age verification, handing more power, and private data, to third-party identity verification companies like Clear or ID.me.

The government should not have the power to decide what topics are "safe" online for young people, and to force services to remove and block access to anything that might be considered unsafe for children. This isn’t safety—it’s censorship.

Court after court has recognized that no one can own the text of the law. But the Pro Codes Act is a deceptive power grab that will help giant industry associations ration access to huge swaths of U.S. laws. Tell Congress not to fall for it.