[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 76 (Wednesday, May 29, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H5639-H5644]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
WHAT MAKES AMERICA GREAT?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the
gentleman from California [Mr. Rohrabacher] is recognized for 60
minutes.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, today I would like to begin my talk
here with a question of why do we think that America is a great
country. I would like people who are listening and the people who are
perhaps reading this in the Congressional Record to ask themselves why
they think that America is such a great country.
Is it because we have a powerful military? No, that could not be the
answer, could it, because there are a lot of great countries? There are
a lot of countries in the world that have strong militaries, powerful
militaries. Yet, they are not great countries. They are not countries
that we would wish to identify with.
Is it because we have a lot of big companies, a lot of industrial
companies in the United States? No. They have a lot of big firms and
big companies in other parts of the world that are pretty despicable
parts of the world. In fact, there are big companies at different
places in the world that no American would want to live?
Perhaps it is because we have a beautiful flag, and we have the red,
white, and blue, that is sitting behind the podium there. A beautiful
flag does not make a great country, nor does a big military or a
powerful military make a great country.
Certainly one of the factors that make a society a great country is
the fact that people have a certain degree of freedom, and that was one
of the guiding principles that led to the formation of the United
States 200 years ago, when our Founding Fathers struggled for liberty
and for independence.
But America is not just a free country. America is a prosperous
country as well, but it is not just a prosperous country for a few
people. It has a prosperity that has impacted on the lives of the
common man and woman. Yes, in this country we have freedom. Everyone,
every individual, has the right to vote, to speak, to pray; basically,
to control his or her own destiny. These things are important to what
is great about America.
Even our poor people, however, which is another factor, live a decent
life. In America, a working person, an average working person, if he or
she is willing to work and to try and to live an honest life, they can
live a decent life economically. This, too, is part of the American
dream, because what we have in America, what essentially makes America
great, is our freedom and the opportunity of our people, the
opportunity to live in a certain degree of prosperity. And our people
have, indeed, lived more abundant lives than anyone else in the history
of the world. Here, wealth is abundant enough so that the average
person lives a good life.
Home ownership in this country is more widespread than in almost any
society in the world. People own their own cars. Some of these things
are considered miraculous in other parts of the world, where only a
chosen elite, a very few people, get to participate in this, the
blessings of America. In this country, our people select their own job,
even. That is not the case in many other countries.
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In our country, what we see is even the most arduous physical labor
is assisted by machines, and this is part of the history of our
country. Many people say, well, the reason America has done so well is
because our people work so hard and they have always been hardworking
people. Well, that is not really true. There are hardworking people all
over the world. Yet very few societies have prospered and have enjoyed
the freedom that we have here in the United States.
No, what we have done in the United States is ensure that our working
people are assisted by machines and that the work that they do is
multiplied, the product of their labor is multiplied by technology.
Basically ours is a history of technology being brought to play to help
save the backbreaking pain of our working people.
I recently came across a story of one of the early patents in the
United States. It is not really all that early of a patent. It was
issued March 20 of 1883. It was a patent that was issued to Jan
Matzeliger and two investors who had invested in his project.
What was his project? What was his patent all about? It was a machine
that revolutionized the manufacturing of shoes. Most people just take
shoes for granted, but before this machine was invented, many people of
the United States never wore shoes. In fact, the price of shoes was out
of reach. Most people owned shoes, maybe one pair of shoes for their
entire life.
But within a few years of Mr. Matzeliger's invention being brought to
play, the price of shoes in our country dropped by 50 percent. Ordinary
people were able to afford shoes for their feet. We just take this for
granted today.
We also take for granted machines like Eli Whitney's reaper or the
electric light bulb, or how about Robert Fulton's steam engine? By the
way, Robert Fulton never invented the steam engine. If you look back at
Robert Fulton, not only did he not invent the steam engine, he also was
not the first one to ever put a steam engine onto a ship.
Robert Fulton put a steam engine on a ship and they called him a
great inventor. Well, the fact is that the Germans had put a steam
engine on a ship long before, but it had never been brought to play in
their economy because special interest groups in the German economy
refused to permit that steam engine on that ship from being used
because it would displace people from work.
In the United States we saw it as a means of ending the terrible
labor, the painful labor of pushing ships with sticks through the
water. Our society welcomed technology and the German society did not.
In fact, even the Germans were not the first ones to invent the steam
engine. The steam engine was invented by the Greeks in ancient times.
Maybe you will remember seeing a picture of a steam engine, an early
steam engine which revolved like this over a fire. That was invented by
the Greeks, but in the Greek marketplace, relieving the pressure of
work and the burden of work on so many people like the steam engine
would have done was not something that was thought to be a worthy goal.
So the steam engines were passed up by the Greeks and by the German
boatmen. But it was Robert Fulton that revolutionized the world and
created steamboats which changed the world.
Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, so many of our Founding Fathers were
technologists because they believed in freedom and technology, they
believed that technology would change the world just as democracy would
change the world. In fact, creating a patent office was written into
our Constitution. Can you imagine that? Over 200 years ago, our
Founding Fathers wrote that there would be an office to patent new
technologies and that was mandated in the basic law of the land, the
Constitution.
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That is because our Founding Fathers saw ours as a society that would
be unlike any other society ever in the history of mankind. They saw
that America would be a land of liberty, where the rights of all would
be protected, and they believed that prosperity would follow because it
would be not just the prosperity of the few but the prosperity of the
many.
Well, how could that be possible? If they thought they were going to
create a free society, how could they think that a free society and a
free people could ever compete with slave labor? In fact, we had slave
labor in a large portion of our country, so how could freedom work?
Well, how freedom could work and compete, and how we could convince
ourselves to get rid of the evil of slavery in the United States, was
that free people can compete with slave labor. Free people can compete
with repressed citizens of other parts of the world, as in China today,
if the free people have the technology they need to do the job. The
technology was the key to freedom and prosperity. They saw that.
Interestingly enough, Mr. Matzeliger, whom I just mentioned, Jan
Matzeliger, was a black American, and he invented a machine, as I said,
that changed the life of all Americans. He invented a machine that made
it possible for Americans to have decent lives because they were able
to afford shoes.
And at a time when the rights of other black Americans and all black
Americans were actually being tread upon, were being attacked, his
right as an American to own his patent was not abridged. His patent
rights were protected, even though he was a black American and many of
the rights of black Americans of those days were not being recognized
and not being protected. That is how strongly the United States felt
about technology and about our rights to own the technology that we
develop, because it is so important for new technologies to be
developed and for that incentive to be into the system.
It was America's ingenuity as our Founding Fathers foresaw and as we
can see ourselves in retrospect, it was America's ingenuity that has
proven our most valuable asset.
Well, in the middle of the last century, Americans were given a
guaranteed patent term of 17 years. That patent by that great black
American who invented this machine that provided shoes for all of us,
once his patent was issued, he received a guarantee, he and his
investors, that that patent would be recognized for 17 years and he
would be able to benefit from it. Mr. Matzeliger had lived a life of
deprivation before he invented that machine, and he lived a decent life
after that in Philadelphia. He lived a life not of luxury, not of
opulence but a decent life and he was a gentleman and recognized so by
his community and he left a sizable estate to the church when he died,
because he had been able to receive the benefits of his invention and
this was thought to be so important for all Americans. This was a
right. It was a right, a guaranteed right of 17 years to benefit from
anything that you invented. It was a right just like any other economic
right or just like any other political right or social right. This 17-
year guaranteed patent term served us well for over a century.
Americans, in fact, have had traditionally the strongest patent
protection of any nation of the world. That is why we prospered. That
is why the American people have lived well when huge numbers of people
in other countries have been living in poverty and living lives of
desperation.
If we did not have a strong patent system, if we were not the ones
developing the shoe machines, our people also would have lived in
poverty, would have lived in repression. I am here tonight to warn the
American people that the technology laws that have been so vital to our
Nation's prosperity and to our standard of living, to the standard of
living of all of our people, is being fundamentally changed, it is
being changed in a way that they are not aware of and will have
repercussions on their standard of living and it is happening as we
speak. Patent rights enjoyed by Americans for over a century are being
eliminated. The idea of a guaranteed patent term which has been the
right of Americans is being eliminated. Americans will find that rights
that they have taken for granted, prosperity that they have taken for
granted, is changing, that something is being diminished and they just
cannot figure out what it is that is happening to their country. Were
we not always the leader in technology? What has happened? In the years
ahead, Americans will never know what the change was because it is
happening today very quietly. And it will have serious and sorrowful
consequences upon the people, future generations of Americans and
perhaps on this generation of young Americans.
It started only a short time ago, right after Mr. Clinton was
elected, he sent the head of our patent office, Bruce Lehman, to Japan.
There Mr. Lehman signed an agreement, to, quote, harmonize our patent
laws with those of Japan. Here you have an unelected official who
agreed to change our laws in a way which dramatically diminished our
rights, rights that had been Americans for over 100 years, a guaranteed
patent term, a right to guaranteed patent term of 17 years.
By the way, the Japanese did not have that, of course. That is why we
had to change this patent term. We had to eliminate this guaranteed
patent term that Americans had, because that is not what the Japanese
system is like. The Japanese system is different. So the Agreement that
Mr. Lehman signed was an agreement to harmonize our patent laws and
instead of bringing their system up to our standard of protection for
the individual, Mr. Lehman agreed to bring down the protection enjoyed
by Americans to the much lower level of the Japanese.
If you might remember, the Japanese are not well known for their many
inventions. I remember reading about Admiral Perry landing in Japan.
Admiral Perry landed in Japan and brought a little train with him. Do
you remember that? He brought a little piece of American technology of
the day and the Japanese proceeded to copy it, because the Japanese are
known to copy but they are not know to invent. Where we have something
like 100 Nobel laureates for scientific achievements, they have 5. That
is because in Japan, the system they have established, their patent
system, their system of dealing with ingenuity and new ideas was a
system that was set up for the, quote, collective good, which, of
course, means the big guys who run the system are running it for
themselves and they run roughshod over the common people of Japan. That
is what we have done. We have harmonized our system to be like that. Is
that not wonderful? Does that not make everybody think that is it not a
great thing now that we going to have a system like Japan's? Forget it.
If we had harmonized our political rights with another country and
brought the level of legal protection of our rights down, there would
have been a revolt. What would have happened, for example, if we signed
an agreement with Singapore saying, well, let us harmonize our laws
here and what we are going to do is we will become more like Singapore
and that means that we will have certain restrictions on freedom of
religion and the press and rights to speak and that will make us like
Singapore.
Americans would never accept that. They would say, ``That's too
important. You can't diminish our rights that way.''
However, what is happening right now very quietly is the diminishing
of basically intellectual property rights, the guaranteed patent term,
which will have a much more dramatic impact on the life of the American
people than what I just described as a harmonization with Singapore.
And what will happen is we will turn around and we will never know what
hit us.
This change is more insidious than anything I have ever seen during
my 8 years in the House and during my 7 years before that in the White
House, and during my 10 years before that in and out of journalism.
The first blow of this underhanded maneuver to quote, harmonize our
laws, that protect the patent rights of our people so they will be like
Japan came 2 years ago when a seemingly innocuous change about patent
term was snuck into the GATT implementation legislation. I say snuck,
because there was nothing in GATT that required us to change the length
of our patent
[[Page H5641]]
term the way it was presented. What they did is put something into the
GATT implementation legislation that was not required by GATT.
Many American people do not understand and say, ``Well, what does
that have to do with anything?'' What it has to do with it is the
Members of this Congress voted for a thing called fast track.
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I voted for fast track. I voted for fast track because I believed
that setting up a world trading system was important and that if part
of what that would do is that would say that when the President came
back to us with an agreement, with his international trading agreement,
we would then just vote on that agreement and it would be all or
nothing. We could not amend it. Thus it is called fast track. We could
not amend and would have to vote up or down on the bill. But part of
the agreement that we thought we had by giving the President fast track
was that nothing would be put in the GATT implementation legislation on
that vote that was not absolutely required by GATT.
So in order to achieve this change in the patent law here, which was
not required by GATT, they snuck it into the implementation legislation
so that in order for us to defeat it, this body would have to vote
against the entire world trading system. Well, does that sound like a
Democratic maneuver? This was the most underhanded maneuver that I had
ever seen, especially for a change that will have long-term
implications for the well-being of our country.
The change, as I say, seemed innocent enough. In fact, the change in
the GATT implementation legislation sounded like it was expanding the
length of our patent term. Traditionally, as I have said, when someone
applies for a patent, no matter how long it takes them to get that
patent, it will be 17 years of protection that they have to recoup
their investment and to profit from their invention after the patent is
issued. So after that patent is issued, they will have 17 years.
That is what we have had for over a century. That is the incentive
people have had to invest in new technologies. That is what incentive
people have had, like this black gentleman who invented the shoemaking
machine, who lived years in deprivation in order to invent the machine,
because he knew he would benefit for 17 years of ownership after that
machine was put on to the market and he was issued his patent.
Well, they changed that. They changed. They eliminated that
guaranteed patent term, and, in exchange, what do we have? We were
given a patent term that is 20 years from filing. Now, does that sound
like they are extending your patent term? Well, no; in fact, what is
happening is that the 20-year-from-filing term means that once you have
filed for your patent, 20 years later, no matter how long it takes you
to be issued your patent, you have no patent rights left.
So that means if it takes 10 to 15 years, as many breakthrough
technologies have taken, a long time to get their patent issued,
because sometimes in these modern technologies they are hard to
understand; 20 years from filing means that if it takes them 15 years
to get their patent issued, they have only got 5 years left of
protection. Five years left of protection.
That means that every inventor, then, like in Japan, is totally
vulnerable to the bureaucracy and totally vulnerable to big interest
groups that might try to interfere with the process; might try to stop
the patent from being issued in one way or another.
No, what we did in the GATT implementation legislation to the patent
term was the most dramatic attack on patent rights, on fundamental
right of Americans that I have seen in my lifetime. But because no one
could understand it, it just slipped right on by. And as I say, I
supported the fast track, and I never felt more betrayed than when I
realized what had been put into that GATT implementation legislation
when it was not even required by those negotiations.
Well, when I began to complain about it, I was promised by the House
leadership, by the Republican leadership of the House, that there would
be a chance to correct this problem and that we would have a chance to
vote on restoring the guaranteed patent term. That was the promise made
to me. So I put together a piece of legislation, H.R. 359, that
restores the guaranteed patent term, the right of a guaranteed patent
term of 17 years to the American people. It has 202 cosponsors. That
piece of legislation was bottled up in a subcommittee for almost a year
and a half; not permitted to move to the floor for a vote. And it took
a lot of hell raising on the part of a certain Member of Congress to
make sure that system started to move, because during that year and a
half an expensive public relations campaign was launched.
Huge multinational corporations and foreign corporations, as well as
giant American corporations, have moved into Washington, DC, and
started an attack on H.R. 359. This bill, they say, is not in their
interest. And many Members of this body have been, actually they have
been contacted by huge companies saying, well, Congressman Rohrabacher
does not know what he is talking about; this will be in our benefit.
Well, what appears to have happened is that corporate America, giant
corporate America, that has ties with multinational corporations and
loyalties all over the world, and as we know those loyalties often do
not extend to their own American people, they would sell out the jobs
of American people in an instant in order to get a 10 percent higher
profit margin by investing in a dictatorship like China, well these
giant corporate American interests signed off on the idea of
diminishing American patent rights. In exchange for what? In exchange
for a promise that there would be an international system now which
will recognize somewhat and somewhat enforce America's ownership of
certain technologies and of patents. Sort of a recognition of patents.
Well, what is happening now would be very equivalent of when Japan
began signing agreements 20 years ago to open their markets to the
United States; that if instead of waiting to see if Japan would
actually open their markets, instead of just signing pieces of paper,
that we went right ahead and gave economic concessions to the Japanese
that changed America's ability to compete with Japan. It is absolute
nonsense.
And corporate America is not, is not, I repeat not, the best group in
this country to decide what the rights, economic rights of our people
should be. Not to say they do not do a good job, and oftentimes they
are, yes, profitmaking companies of world scope, but, quite often they
have absolutely no commitment to the freedom and ideals that our
forefathers talked about. They are looking at the bottom line. In this
particular case their bottom line is very, very shortsighted, and
really, in the end, has diminished the rights of the American people in
a way that will dramatically hurt our prosperity.
Well, the second shoe during this year and a half when my bill was
bottled up, the second shoe has fallen. A bill has been introduced,
H.R. 3460, which finishes the harmonization, completes the
harmonization that we, that our government, that this unelected
official, Mr. Layman, has agreed to do, the harmonization of our patent
laws.
What does H.R. 3460 do? This bill is so transparent I do not
understand how any Member of Congress could vote for it. I call it the
Steal American Technologies Act. And I hope that Members of Congress
are contacted by their constituents about this bill, 3460, the Steal
American Technologies Act, because when they hear what this bill does,
common sense will tell them what is going on; that we are in the
process of seeing one of the greatest acts of thievery from the United
States of America in the history of our country.
This patent bill, this supposed patent bill, H.R. 3460, says this:
that if our inventors apply for a patent, 18 months later, whether or
not the patent has been issued to the applicant, all of the details of
that patent application, every blueprint, every last piece of
information, will be published for the world to see. Now, do you
understand what I am saying? This law is an open invitation to the
thieves of the world to steal American technology from American
inventors even before our inventors have been issued their patent.
This is the same mentality at the patent office, which recently led
our
[[Page H5642]]
patent office to give its entire database to the Red Chinese. And what
was the excuse when we were asked, well, why did you do that? They
said, well, then they will know what technology not to steal.
This is beyond imagination, but it should be understandable to the
common sense of the American people. I would hope that they know that
in this Democratic process they can talk to their Congressmen, who will
be voting on 3460 and voting on my bill as a substitute, H.R. 359,
because common sense tells you that before you issue a patent to
someone you do not disclose all of his secrets.
Ironically, when this bill was going through the subcommittee, I was
sitting in my office with a manufacturer of solar technology. And I
asked him, and this is at the same moment that the subcommittee was
passing H.R. 3460 out, I said what will happen if this bill actually
goes into law and when you file for a patent after 18 months, whether
you have been issued the patent or not, that it gets published for the
whole world? And his face reddened and his fist balled up and he said,
Congressman, if that happens, that means that my technology, that we
have spent so much time to develop and our investors here in the United
States have invested in, that means my competitors overseas, the
Chinese and the Japanese, or anybody else, will be in production of my
technology, making a profit from it, before I am issued my patent and
before I can go into production. Which means, if I try to fight them
later, they will be using the profits from my technology to defeat me
and probably put me out of business.
Talk about an outrage. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure
out what is going on here. American technology is being put in
jeopardy. For what? To harmonize our laws with Japan. And in Japan, of
course, when a young inventor invents something, or a poor inventor or
a small businessman invents something, in Japan over these years, the
big companies have run roughshod over those average people and stolen
their wealth and stolen their technology, and they know not to raise
their head up and to protest.
By the way, there are other parts of this H.R. 3460, the Steal
American Technologies Act. Know what the other parts are? They are not
only going to attacks the rights of American citizens to a guaranteed
patent term, they are not only going to take an inventor's rights away
from him to have his invention secret until he is issued a patent, but
they are going to change the system, the government system itself.
They are going to take the patent office and they are going to, what
they call corporatize it. Now, I am a conservative Republican. I am all
in favor of privatization. Now, you would think, oh, here is an idea
where you take something done by the government and take it over to the
private sector. Well, I was Ronald Reagan's speech writer. I talked
about privatization all the time. You would think I would be in favor
of it.
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Well, it is just like the foolishness of changing the patent term to
20 years. That did not help us either. What it was was 20 years that
ends up with 5 or 6 years of protection for breakthrough technologies.
No, this type of corporatization they have in mind would take our
patent office, which has been part of our Government since the founding
of our Constitution and corporatize it. What does that mean? That means
that the patent examiners, the men and women who make judicial
decisions as to what our rights are to new properties of technology,
they are defining what your property rights are for the new
technologies that are being created. Those patent examiners are going
to lose their civil service protection.
So after all of these years, after 100 years of protection for our
patent examiners, they will now be put in a situation where outside
pressures will be brought on them because they do not have their civil
service protection. This is an invitation to corruption. We have seen
an invitation to steal our technology and now we see an invitation to
corruption by opening our system up to pressures that it has never been
opened up to before.
In one fell swoop, our international competitors will have destroyed
the edge that we had on the world, the edge that ensured that America
would be not only a land of freedom, but a land of prosperity for the
common person. This is not just happening on its own. There are
powerful forces at work that are behind H.R. 3460, the Steal American
Technology Act, and are trying to fundamentally change the patent
system.
Now, why is this? Why would they want to do that? They would want to
do that because overseas they too understand that the development of
new technology has been America's greatest leverage in our competition
with the rest of the world.
What made us competitive? what made our people be able to keep their
jobs and have decent standards of living in the past was because we had
machines that permitted us to do things that could not be done overseas
cheaper with slave labor. And that is ever more true as we enter into a
new age where technology is even more important.
America is being neutered of the patent protection and the patent
system that has kept our people free and prosperous, and future
generations, maybe even our own children, will say, well, did we not
always used to be the ones that came up with all the new ideas? Weren't
we the ones that were ahead of the game because we were on the cutting
edge of technology?
But that will be a distant memory because we will have changed the
fundamental laws that made that so with America, because our edge was
not because we were of any particular race or religion or culture. It
was because our laws developed around the spirit of individualism and
creativity and freedom that were consistent with a prosperous society.
And now we are, or at least our leaders are, trying to harmonize our
laws with those of Japan. That is not the way that we are going to have
a better life for our people.
This is a desperate fight. Those who are opposing the Steal American
Technologies Act, H.R. 3460, do not have the resources of these big
corporations who see themselves as players in the international arena,
rather than people who are concerned basically about the well-being of
American people.
We do not have the resources to fight them. H.R. 359, my bill that
would restore the guaranteed patent term, we have got very few
resources behind us.
And even though we have had 202 cosponsors, we have not been able to
move it through the system. I would hope that the American people know
that democracy still flourishes here because they can get involved. It
is not just the people in this body. It is not just Members of Congress
who will make the decision.
If people actually talk to their Congressman, if people actually go
and ask their Congressman, Hey, how are you going to vote on this Steal
American Technologies Act, H.R. 3460? They will find that their
Congressman is also listening to them.
And I would hope that we can prove that our democracy still functions
and it is not just powerful interests in Washington, DC who want to
harmonize our laws with Japan that can guide the future of our country.
I have every faith in this country. With technology, we will continue
to be the land of liberty that our fathers foresaw. We will continue to
be that hope of the world, that shining city on the hill where even the
average people live decent lives if they work hard and are honest.
But this will not happen if in this new age of technology that we
have changed the fundamental laws and protections that have assured
American progress in the past.
This is a desperate fight and it is a fight not that many Americans
understand. Patent law seems such a boring subject. In fact, I cannot
get on talk radio programs. People, ask you about this and they say
patent law? Are you crazy? Patent law, it is a very difficult issue to
understand because it takes longer than 10 seconds to describe it.
But tonight I am telling you that we are in the midst of a battle
that will make all the difference. If this scheme to harmonize our
technology laws with those of Japan succeeds, our people will pay the
consequences.
Now, what is the excuse the other side uses? Obviously, people
honestly disagree. Not everybody on the other side is for bringing
America down.
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Most of the Congressmen on the other side of this issue have been told,
well, the reason we have to change this law is because there is
something called a submarine patent. That this is a big problem.
What a submarine patent is that if somebody invents something and
instead of trying to get their patent, like almost everybody wants to
get their patent as soon as possible, 99 percent of all inventors are
struggling, please give me my patent as soon as possible. They want
their patent, but some, maybe a few, maybe 1 percent, I do not know,
are trying to elongate this. They are actually playing the system so
that the patent is not issued right away and so that when it is issued
and they have that 17 years, it is actually a much longer period, maybe
20 years or maybe 25 years.
This is a very small problem numerically. Only a very few people want
this, because most inventors know that technological change is
happening so quickly, they have to get the patent issued so quickly
because otherwise they will lose out, because new technology will be
developed.
But we are told that this problem is so important. I would say that I
believe this is a small problem and can be dealt with. I have told
everyone in this debate, I will support any effort to deal with the
submarine patent problem that does not eliminate the guaranteed patent
term. And I have been willing to compromise for 1\1/2\ years on this,
but yet it is funny. Those proponents of H.R. 3460 were never able to
come back to me with what I asked.
I said, anything except eliminating the guaranteed patent term we can
put into a bill and then that will work on these people who are trying
to elongate the process. I, in fact, even put something into my bill
that said if someone is elongating the process and not trying to get
their patent issued, that after 60 months it will be published whether
or not the patent has been issued.
And so, I said, okay, if someone is intentionally trying to get their
patent so it is not issued, let us clamp down on that. But no one would
ever come up with these suggestions. All they would suggest is we have
got to eliminate the guaranteed patent term. That is all. That is all
we can do. There is no other alternative but eliminate that guaranteed
patent term.
It is very similar to saying I have got a toe that really hurts me,
and so what I am going to do is cut my foot off in order to make sure
my toe does not hurt me anymore. And that is the answer I have been
getting back.
But some people, and many people in this body will never look at this
issue with any depth because they are involved with many other issues.
The issue we just heard about, the FDA, some Congressmen have spent
enormous time and effort to try to get reforms in the FDA. They
probably do not know about this patent issue, and they may accept the
arguments of these big companies, these multinational corporations
saying that in order to stop this submarine patent we have actually got
to make this change or we have got to have a harmonization with Japan.
Well, we need to make sure that the American people and the American
workers speak up. It should be evident to everyone that we are not
going to have a better system by eliminating the civil service
protection of our patent examiners by opening that up to outside
pressures and corruption. That is not going to help anything.
We are not going to have a better system if our inventors do not have
that guaranteed system because what will happen, if indeed their
patents are held up as compared to past patents? For example, you know,
we know that no matter how long it takes the bureaucracy to work in the
past, they have had 17 years of protection. If they end up with 5 years
of protection because it has been held up 15 years and there is only 5
years left, who is benefiting by that?
Well, look very closely. That 5 years, instead of 17 years worth of
protection, that 5 years is going to result in very few royalties as
compared to the 17 years of protection. Those hundreds of millions of
dollars of royalties, even billions of dollars of royalties that would
have been coming to the United States now are going to be in the bank
accounts of huge foreign corporations that will not have to pay the
royalty, even if they do not steal American technology and they just
pay for it via a royalty.
So they, themselves, if they operate totally legally within the new
system, will find that the wealth that should be coming here for our
ideas and creativity will be staying right in those foreign bank
accounts.
This is not the way to make it better for the United States, and it
certainly will not make it better if every time our people come up with
a great new idea--I know some people who have developed a new system
that will dramatically bring down the pollution coming out of
automobile engines, dramatically reduce this. They have been frightened
to death because they are afraid that before they can actually go in
the market with their invention, that what will happen is the word will
leak out and all over the world, people will be stealing their
technology and what they have a right to receive the benefit from
developing this, that they will lose the profit from their own
invention and never be able to recoup it.
Well, under the system that they are talking about, the Steal
American Technology Act would say to my friends, You cannot file for a
patent unless you are willing after 18 months to let everybody in the
world know about every single detail of your invention.
Is this going to spur innovation and creativity and wealth creation
in the United States? Our people are going to pull back. Investors not
going to invest in American technologies. That is not going to make
things better.
The shortening or eliminating the guaranteed patent term will hurt
our major universities. One of the biggest supporters of my
legislation, H.R. 359 are American universities, MIT, Harvard, all of
these universities that have patents and know that they need a
guaranteed patent term for them to have an asset.
Also the small business community is dramatically behind H.R. 359,
and opposed to the H.R. 3460, the Steal American Technologies Act.
We have the little guy versus the big guy. That is what is going on
in a very quiet but crucial struggle in Washington, DC, today. The
little guy versus the big guy.
I believe in the United States of America. I believe the little guy
can still win. I believe the small inventor who comes up with a new
idea has been the main spring of the progress and the prosperity that
we have had in the United States of America. And I know that if the
American people can understand what the essence of this issue is all
about, that they will insist that their Congressman not support the
Steal American Technologies Act, H.R. 3460, but instead, will demand
that the guaranteed patent term that we have enjoyed as a right of
Americans for over a century be restored to the American people.
2230
This, as I say, is a fight that probably will not even be noticed in
the history books; especially if we win, it will not be noticed. People
will never know about this fight if we win. The American standard of
living and American competitiveness will be what it is.
Mr. Speaker, this is something that people have learned to take for
granted. We have taken it for granted that young people have great
opportunities in their lives. We have taken for granted that they wear
shoes, that there are shoe for everybody in our society. We take that
for granted. That has not been the history of the rest of the world. If
we harmonize our laws and we downgrade our rights so that they are the
same as every other country in the world, America will not be America.
So tonight, I hope that this battle will not be remembered because,
if we win, people will just go right on and take this for granted. But
if we lose, someday someone may read this Congressional Record and say
this was a crucial turning point and no one ever noticed because the
concept of patent law and intellectual property rights was just too
esoteric for regular people to understand. This is at a time when we
are going into a global marketplace, into a new era of technology, when
as never before the standard of living of the American people will be
tied to innovation and tied to creativity and tied to the new
technologies of the coming age.
[[Page H5644]]
Mr. Speaker, I hope that those future Americans will not have to look
back in the Congressional Record and see this speech and say it is too
bad they did not recognize what was going on and complaining about the
system. Instead, I hope that they never read that because the freedom
and progress that we have is taken for granted and will be the same
freedom and progress 100 years from now and 20 years from now that it
was when our forefathers, Benjamin Franklin, that great technologist,
Thomas Jefferson, these great champions of human liberties, not just
for Americans but for all people, when they founded our country 225
years ago.
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