Alex Moss, executive director of the Public Interest Patent Law Institute, said a “weaker PTAB” leads to lower quality patents and ones that are “demonstrably invalid.”

“That means more monopolies, less competition, higher prices, less economic dynamism,” she said.

The proposed Promoting and Respecting Economically Vital American Innovation Leadership Act, or PREVAIL Act, would prohibit patients and consumers from challenging patents’ validity and raise evidentiary standards to make it more difficult to cancel wrongly granted patents, according to the letters advocacy groups sent Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and ranking member Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Tuesday. Signatories included Public Citizen, People’s Action, and R Street Institute.

The bill was introduced in the Senate in July with Durbin among its sponsors. It would require a petitioner at the US Patent and Trademark Office’s administrative patent tribunal to have a “business or financial reason to challenge patent validity” through its inter partes review process in an effort to reduce incentives for “privateering or extortion of nuisance settlements.”