[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 12 (Tuesday, February 4, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H268-H272]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            U.S. PATENT LAW

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from California [Mr. ROHRABACHER) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, today I would like to discuss with the 
Members here assembled and those listening on C-SPAN and those who will 
be reading the Congressional Record an issue that will be determined 
very early on in this session.
  It is an issue that is somewhat obscure. It is an issue that is very 
difficult to understand in that it is complicated and deals with a 
complicated part of the law. It is an issue that will probably be 
ignored by much of the public and will probably not even be understood 
by most of the Members of the House of Representatives. Yet how 
Congress resolves this issue will determine the future well-being of 
our people and the security of our country.
  This Congress will determine early on the fundamental patent law that 
will take precedence in this country probably for the next 50 years and 
perhaps longer. We will be making a determination of what the patent 
law of the United States of America will be for this generation and 
future generations of Americans.
  Now some people say oh, my gosh, he was saying this is so important, 
and now all of a sudden he is talking about patent law. Well, that is 
exactly what I am talking about. Patent law is a part of the American 
legal system that has been taken for granted by the American people.
  However, every time we turn around we can see that it is America's 
technological edge that has permitted the American people to have the 
highest standard of living in the world and permitted our country to 
sail safely through the troubled waters of world wars and international 
threats. It is American technology that has made all the difference, 
and it is American patent law that has determined what technology and 
what level of technological development that America has had.
  This is not an obscure issue. This is an issue of vital importance to 
every American, and it will determine in the future the standard of 
living of our people and the safety of our country.
  We Americans came to this continent as poor immigrants, by and large, 
millions of us. We fared very well for a people and, comparing what we 
did as Americans to other countries, we faced the most undeveloped land 
imaginable. There was no land that was more undeveloped than the United 
States of America when our forefathers and mothers came here.
  And, yes, we had space and we had resources. But more importantly 
than that, the secret of America's success is not found in our wide 
expanses and our deposits of minerals. Instead, the secret of our 
success can be found in the fact that our people had freedom and they 
had guaranteed rights, and also, of course, we had a dream. We had a 
dream of a country where average people, even people who are below 
average, people who came here from every part of the world, of every 
race, of every religion, of every creed, could come and they could live 
in dignity, they could live free from fear, they could live with the 
understanding that their children would have opportunity to improve 
themselves because there was a rising standard of living. We believed 
in rights, and we believe that these rights are God given rights and 
not just government rights.
  Patent rights are one of those rights that are written into the U.S. 
Constitution, and there is another fact for those of you who may be 
listening to a discussion of patents for the first time. Do you know 
that the United States of America is one of the only countries of the 
world to have written into its founding document, the Constitution, a 
section dealing with patent rights? In fact, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas 
Jefferson, Washington, and others of our Founding Fathers were not only 
people who believed in freedom, but they believed in technology.
  Visit Monticello and see what Thomas Jefferson did with his time 
after he penned the words to the Declaration of Independence, after he 
served as President of the United States. He went back to Monticello, 
and he spent his time inventing things that would lift the burden from 
the shoulders of labor.
  Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the bifocal and the stove; these 
were our Founding Fathers because they knew that with freedom and with 
technology we could increase the standard of living of our people. Our 
people were not just the Americans who were here, but the tens of 
millions of Americans who would come from other lands, who we would 
have to produce the wealth that was necessary to support them. We have 
the strongest patent protection in the world, and that is why in the 
history of mankind there has never been a more innovative and creative 
people.
  Everyone has heard about Thomas Fulton and the steamboat. They assume 
that we invented, meaning Thomas Fulton invented, the steam engine. 
Thomas Fulton did not invent the steam engine. Mr. Fulton put the steam 
engine onto a boat and put it to work.
  Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper; Samuel Morris, the telegraph; 
Thomas Edison, the light bulb and so many other inventions. We are 
proud of our history of technologies because we know as Americans, and 
we have always known through our country's history, that these 
inventions produced more wealth with less labor and increased the 
standard of living of all people and the opportunity of all people who 
were part of our American brotherhood and sisterhood.
  And then of course the Wright brothers. We remember the Wright 
brothers: Men with little education who worked in a bicycle shop and 
ended up inventing something less than 100 years ago they were told was 
absolutely impossible by the experts. Yet they went ahead and moved 
ahead, received a patent, and they changed the future of mankind 
forever as they took mankind's feet off of the ground and put us on the 
road to the heavens.
  Innovation and our great creative genius is the miracle that produced 
our wealth, not just our muscle. It was the genius and tenacity of the 
Wright brothers and of Cyrus McCormick and others that produced the 
wealth that has changed all of humankind and especially all the lives 
of all Americans. It was not raw muscle of every American, it was our 
ingenuity, our intelligence and, yes, the legal system that was 
established to protect that ingenuity and creativity. We treated 
intellectual property rights, the creation of new technologies, as we 
treated the property rights that someone had to a piece of land. It was 
his property or her property. And that is what America is all about, in 
that every person had a right to own a piece of property, and today as 
we enter the intellectual and innovative era of the electronic age and 
the age where ideas and creativity will mean even more, it is vital 
that we maintain this traditional support.

[[Page H269]]

  In World War II and then in the cold war, it was our genius and our 
commitment to freedom that carried the day. It was not our willingness 
to throw man for man against the Germans and the Japanese or face the 
Chinese Communists and the Russian Communists person for person in the 
cold war. If that was the case we would have been destroyed. We could 
never have matched them for pure muscle power. Instead, our aerospace 
workers, our scientists, our inventors, our computer specialists, our 
missile technicians, our rocket builders and, yes, those scientists who 
came up and started developing the SDI, the strategic defense system 
that would have created a missile defense system for the United States; 
these technological workers in our society made the difference in the 
cold war.
  Yes, we won the cold war without having to fire a shot because we 
relied, yes, on courage, yes, on faith and freedom, but also in 
superior technology, and we had that superior technology because our 
lands protected American inventors and our creative citizens as no 
other in the world.
  Today it is my sad duty to inform my fellow colleagues and the 
American people who are reading this Record and who are listening 
tonight that we face a great historic challenge, and this challenge 
comes at exactly the time when our country is moving into a global 
economy, which means that there is global competition, global warfare 
on an economic level that we must win or our country and our people 
will lose. If we lose this battle, our people will suffer. Future 
generations will see their economic situation, their standard of living 
decline, as well as the safety and strength of our country, if we do 
not remain technologically superior in this new challenge that we face 
as part of the global economy.
  Our adversaries, by the way, have identified this as our strong 
point. They did this long ago. It did not take the Japanese too long 
before they realized what it is that always gives Americans the edge. 
How come that they always are able even though we are working so hard 
and we are able to maintain unity among our people like the Americans 
can never have, how come we are always falling one step behind as 
compared to the Americans as a new day approaches? They saw it right 
away. Americans are innovative, Americans have the ideas. We have to 
depend on them to get our ideas. Well, they identified that as our 
strong point, but it is also our weak point in that the American people 
have no idea what legal structure has been established to protect that 
technological lead.
  What I am talking about is the fundamental patent law of this 
country. In short, let me explain that our economic adversaries and 
their allies, who are multinational corporations who are based here in 
the United States, whose allegiance, who knows where, in what country 
their allegiance is to are engaged in a systematic attack on the patent 
rights of the American people. Those people and those of our fellow 
citizens not engaged in the development of new technology, those people 
who are not inventors have no idea what fear is spreading throughout 
the community of innovative thinkers and creative technologists in our 
society. In an age of information technology innovation America's 
adversaries are hitting us hard and our people do not know it, and 20 
years from now our citizens will wonder what hit them, whether it is--
they might think it was another Pearl Harbor and happened in one 
moment. They know exactly what it was, but if it is happening slowly 
and their rights are being eroded and they do not know that laws are 
changing, they will have a decreasing standard of living and attack on 
their well-being and not know what hit them.
  This attack is being conducted not by bombers in Pearl Harbor in 
Hawaii, but is being done by lobbyists in the Nation's capital who are 
out to destroy our patent system, lobbyists who have been hired by 
well-heeled multinational corporations and by companies who no longer 
have any desire to pay for the use of technology that has been 
developed by other American citizens. They are out, so-called, but when 
you ask them, they are not saying, well, we are out to destroy the 
patent system. No, instead what is being said is there is a measure out 
now to correct a so-called flaw in the system.

                              {time}  1545

  When you read the defense of the changes that are being proposed, you 
will hear about a minuscule flaw that has been used in less than 1 
percent of all patents, actually probably one-tenth of 1 percent of all 
patents, that they are using as an excuse to fundamentally change the 
entire patent structure, the entire patent rights that have been 
guaranteed to Americans since the founding of our country.
  In reality, if you look very closely, it is not this flaw that they 
will talk about, however. In reality, this flaw, which is called the 
submarine patent issue, is not what will be admitted to by those who 
are pushing the hardest on this particular issue, this reform of the 
patent system, so-called reform.
  In fact, last year, Congresswoman Schroeder was in the well, and when 
I asked her about it, offhandedly she said, oh, well this is nothing 
more than an attempt to harmonize our patent law with the rest of the 
world.
  Well, that is the real motivating force for many of those who are 
pushing so-called patent reform in the U.S. Congress, to harmonize, 
harmonize American patent law with the rest of the world. What does 
that mean?
  Well, we have had the strongest patent protection of any country on 
this planet, just as we have had the strongest protection for our 
rights of speech and freedom of religion and the other rights that we 
hold sacred.
  Now, tell me this: If Americans were out to harmonize patent law, 
that is one thing, certainly. But what would happen if they said, in 
order to harmonize freedom of religion and freedom of speech, we are 
going to reduce the amount of protection of these freedoms that are now 
enjoyed by the American people so that those freedoms will be exactly 
the same as, let us say, the people of Singapore have? What would be 
the reaction? There would be an immediate revolution throughout 
America, people saying, you are not going to diminish our rights in 
order to harmonize law internationally; forget it.
  However, the move to harmonize patent law is going much more 
smoothly, because it is being done very low-key, not many people 
understand it, while the freedom and the well-being of future 
generations is being frittered away.
  The fact is, we have had the strongest protection, patent right 
protection, and that is why we have had more innovation and a higher 
standard of living than any other people in the world. The common man 
here has opportunity that common people in other parts of the world do 
not have, because America has had technological superiority, and if our 
rights to patent protection are diminished in order to harmonize them 
with the rest of the world, is it not great that we will end up with 
the same type of opportunity and the same type of rights that they have 
in Third World countries? Is that what we want?
  That is an abomination that is being carried out in an underhanded 
way here in Washington, DC, and the American people have got to know 
about it, and they have to unite, and they have to fight, or they will 
lose what our forefathers fought for and put into our Constitution.
  But the argument you hear about submarine patents, every time we will 
hear from the other side, they will stress something called submarine 
patents. Submarine patents, by the way, are this: An inventor invents 
something and then intentionally tries to stall the Patent Office from 
its own internal procedures so that the patent, instead of being issued 
quickly, takes 5 years, maybe even longer, to issue, because the patent 
applicant is doing everything he can to manipulate the system.
  Of course, what the people do not really explain is the fact that 
every decision as to whether or not that person will be granted a 
continuance or a continuation of his application is made by the Patent 
Office itself. Any type of manipulation of the patent system can be 
corrected by internal reforms within the Patent Office.
  And I might add that the submarine patent problem is a problem for 
some people, but it is a minuscule problem. For people to suggest that 
a very small problem that can be corrected by administrative mandates 
within the system, that we must eliminate the guaranteed patent term, 
which is what they

[[Page H270]]

are doing, in order to correct this problem, this is a very similar 
type suggestion to that if you have a hangnail.
  Think about it. You have a hangnail, and you are talking about how 
terrible that hangnail is; in fact, your toe has become infected. And 
you go to your doctor, and the doctor goes into great detail about the 
ugliness and how horrible hangnails are. And you will hear hours of 
talk about the horrors of hangnails, being submarine patents. Only what 
the doctor is leading up to is that he is going to amputate your leg.
  If you go along with a doctor who wants to amputate your leg because 
you have a hangnail, you have got problems. And what is going to happen 
to the U.S. patent system unless the American people rise up and 
contact their elected representative and tell their representative not 
to permit this to happen is, in the name of correcting a hangnail 
called submarine patenting, they are going to amputate the leg and 
destroy the whole system.
  Basically, most inventors, the vast majority of inventors, maybe 95 
to 99 percent of all inventors, struggle as hard as they possibly can 
to have their patent granted as soon as possible. They are afraid, No. 
1, if they wait, that innovation will overtake their invention and they 
will not be able to make any money on it because there will be 
something else that is out.
  No. 2, every second that they do not have the patent issued to them, 
they are restricted in the amount of money that they can get, because 
people will not invest and will not give money for something that has 
not already been issued as a patent. So they are struggling, and they 
are struggling.
  We are told by those people who want to totally change the patent 
system that these evil inventors, you know, evil people like Thomas 
Edison and Cyrus McCormick, evil inventors like people who invented the 
drugs that have cured polio, evil inventors, that these people are 
stringing out the process.
  They are not stringing out the process, they are struggling to get 
their patents through, and the one or two exceptions are not reason to 
destroy the rights of these inventors who have changed the landscape of 
the United States of America and improved the lives of our people.
  Patent rights, unfortunately, have already been diminished, and most 
Americans do not even know it. Three years ago, 3 years ago, there was 
a change that was snuck into the GATT implementation legislation that 
changed the fundamental basic law of the land dealing with patents, a 
law that had been in place, a system that had been in place, since the 
founding of our country. Let me explain it.
  Since the founding of our country, if an inventor applied for a 
patent, that inventor would be granted a patent. Once his patent was 
granted, he would have 17 years of a guaranteed patent term to reap the 
benefits of his invention, his or her invention. That applicant would 
be able to know that, no matter how long it took, if the Patent Office 
and the bureaucracy and those other people who were trying to stop him 
from getting the patent issued, no matter what happens, if it took 10 
years or 20 years, the inventor knew that after that patent was 
actually granted, he or she would have 17 years of a guaranteed patent 
term. That was the term. Americans had a right to a guaranteed patent 
term.
  Well, they just changed that a little bit. They just changed the 
wording a little bit. They changed the wording in the GATT 
implementation legislation. It now says that the patent applicant has 
20 years of patent protection from the date of filing.
  Now, let me describe what that really means. That means there is no 
guaranteed patent term, because if a patent applicant now, an inventor, 
files for a patent, if the system--by the way, if we are talking about 
innovative, innovative and breakthrough technology, sometimes it takes 
years, even a decade, for the Patent Office to issue that patent and 
say, you are the inventor, this is what you say it is.
  What happens with this new system that they snuck into the law is 
that the clock is ticking against the inventor. Instead of having a 
guaranteed patent term of 17 years, the inventor now has an uncertain 
term, and if it takes the bureaucracy 10 years or 15 years, the patent 
applicant may end up with 5 years in return.
  Now, what does that mean? That means that venture capitalists who 
usually go into partnership with inventors, they provide the money that 
the inventor needs, they sustain them while they are exploring new 
ideas and trying to develop new models and working innovations, and the 
venture capitalists also have known, hey, I am going to have 17 years 
to earn my investment back.
  That investor and that inventor now know that they may have no time 
to earn their investment back, because there is no longer a patent term 
certain. We eliminated the right of Americans to a guaranteed patent 
term. And it did not just happen. It was done, as I say, it was snuck 
into the GATT implementation legislation.
  And let me mention this as well. We were told when we voted for fast 
track for GATT, and I voted for fast track for GATT, that the only 
thing in the implementing legislation would be those things required by 
GATT. That is this General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs.
  This provision that I am talking about today was not required by 
GATT, yet it was put into the implementation legislation as an 
underhanded attempt to put us into a situation where we had to vote for 
that agreement, vote for that change, or vote against the entire world 
trading system.
  Those of us who voted for fast track were totally betrayed. We were 
betrayed, because we had made an agreement that the only thing in there 
would be those that were required by GATT.
  Well, the change was made, and 2 years ago I moved forward to try to 
reinstate the guaranteed patent term, because the more I studied it, 
the more I found out how this situation smelled to high heaven. It was 
just something that had been put over through the GATT implementation 
legislation.
  Later on, I found that this was not required by GATT, but what it was 
required by was a personal agreement between the head of our Patent 
Office, Bruce Lehman, and his Japanese counterpart to harmonize 
American law with Japanese law.
  You heard me. There was a personal agreement from someone who had 
absolutely no right to make that agreement and expect that it would be 
just put into law without debate, that he could just sneak it into 
another piece of legislation. That was an agreement between that 
Government official, Bruce Lehman, and his Japanese counterpart. This 
is incredible.
  So, we have the agreement that we are going to harmonize our law. 
Now, what happens in Japan? Yes, we are trying to harmonize our law 
with the Japanese law.
  What happens in Japan? We already discussed the fact that the 
Japanese never come up with any new innovations, they take them from 
the United States. One of the reasons is because their patent law has 
this system, and when an inventor applies for a patent in Japan, he 
knows, or she knows, that the clock is ticking against the inventor and 
that all of a sudden, when the word gets out in Japan that this new 
invention has been requested, a patent has been requested for this new 
invention, what happens? The new inventor is confronted by corporate 
special interests who beat down that inventor until the inventor 
concedes ownership rights to the special interests.
  So when you have huge corporations running roughshod over the people 
of Japan, of course the people of Japan do not invent very many things, 
because the creative people feel, why should they? And they put their 
energies into other things, like families and other things that are 
important to all individuals.

                              {time}  1600

  Do we want to have a system, do we want our system to be like the 
Japanese system? Is that what we want? Do we want to eliminate the 
guaranteed patent term because the Japanese did not have a guaranteed 
patent term? That is what happened in the GATT implementation 
legislation.
  Step two of the attack, by the way, happened 2 years ago as well. 
Actually, last year we saw this. It was a comprehensive bill, H.R. 
3460, which was submitted, a comprehensive patent reform bill. It was 
submitted and it almost got to the floor. I was fighting it

[[Page H271]]

all year round. All year round. It almost got to the floor, but we 
managed to prevent it from getting to the floor.
  What about H.R. 3460? That bill has now been reintroduced in 
Congress. Here we are in our first weeks of the session and H.R. 3460 
has already been introduced. It is now called H.R. 400. This is the 
bill. I call it the Steal American Technology Act, H.R. 400.
  What does H.R. 400 do? First of all it reconfirms the end, the demise 
of America's right to a guaranteed patent term. It basically reaffirms 
that. No longer will we ever have a dream, if this bill passes, of the 
right of a guaranteed patent term. Now it is an uncertain patent term, 
and I might add, it will put us in the same position as the Japanese, 
that the Japanese have with their major corporations.
  This bill not only does that, but it drastically changes other patent 
rights. Up until now in the United States of America, throughout our 
200-year history, a patent applicant would apply for a patent with the 
full understanding that everything that he was applying for with the 
Government would be confidential. In fact, people could be put in jail 
for disclosing the contents of a patent applicant. This is something we 
have held sacrosanct, that it is information that belongs to the patent 
applicant, the right of confidentiality, the right to be kept secret.
  H.R. 400, that is the bill people are trying to push through this 
House, and they will be trying as the weeks go on, with ever-increasing 
intensity and every Japanese paid lobbyist that they can get down here.
  This bill, what does it do also? This bill mandates that every patent 
application made in the United States of America will be published 
after 18 months. Published. We have gone from a right of a guaranteed 
patent term, that has been eliminated; then we have a right of 
confidentiality to our inventions, and now they are trying to eliminate 
that.
  What does it mean? It means that every copycat in the world, every 
brigand, technological thief in the world will have every detail of 
every American patent application after 18 months. Many of our patent 
applicants will see their inventions manufactured overseas by copycat 
thieves before the U.S. Patent Office has had time to grant them a 
patent.
  I sat in my office as the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual 
Property of the Committee on the Judiciary passed through that bill 
last year. There was a man who was a president of a small solar company 
and he was listening to it. He was enraged. His face reddened and his 
fists clenched. He said, Congressman, if this bill passes, my Japanese 
competitors will be taking my patent applications, they will be 
manufacturing my new ideas that I have spent millions of dollars 
developing. They will be taking the profit from the sale of my 
innovations to fight me in court to destroy my own patent rights.
  Is this a formula for catastrophe? Is this a formula for disaster? It 
is an invitation to thieves around the world to steal American 
technology. H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, it will not 
protect American inventors.
  You will hear hoopla, hoopla, hoopla. It is a 90-page bill filled 
with platitudes trying to get people away from the central point that 
they are giving away America's technological secrets to the Chinese, 
the Japanese, and everybody else who could get themselves someone in 
Washington, DC to fax those materials to them around the world.
  In fact, there will be a whole new industry outside the Patent 
Office. There will be people going from the Patent Office to the fax 
machines as rapidly as possible to get the information about new 
American ideas out, and who can go into manufacturing them the quickest 
before the Americans are even able to issue the patent.
  This is something that the American people should be able to 
understand. Patent law is confusing. It is difficult to understand. But 
every American should understand that if we give our secrets away, if 
we publish them for the world, people who do not like us, who are our 
economic adversaries, will use our ideas against us.
  What a catastrophe if the Wright Brothers, in building their 
airplane, were faced with a Mitsubishi Corp. who came down upon them 
and had every secret of their devices and said, no, this is our plane, 
this is our plane. You Americans did not invent this, we invented this. 
You would have two Americans in a bicycle shop facing massive Japanese 
corporations. That is exactly what is going to happen if those people 
who are pushing H.R. 400 have their way.
  America's standard of living, we do not need the aerospace workers 
out in California, we do not need the aerospace industry, do we? That 
is what the Wright Brothers gave to America. They gave hundreds of 
thousands of dollars, millions of Americans great jobs and standards of 
living because we protected their invention. We gave them property 
rights to what they invented. We kept it secret until they were issued 
the patent. We do not give away our secrets and expect our enemies not 
to use them.
  H.R. 400 also by the way obliterates the Patent Office; just by the 
way, it also eliminates the Patent Office from the U.S. Government. 
Just thought I would throw that in as well. It is like saying, oh, yes, 
we have decided to make the court system a quasi-independent 
corporation. That is right. They are going to take the Patent Office in 
H.R. 400 and they are going to turn it into a quasi-independent 
corporation.
  Our patent examiners, who have a history of integrity and honesty, 
they have been protected by their civil service protection, they have a 
quasi-judicial function. They are making legal determinations, legal 
judgments that will mean who owns billions of dollars of wealth in our 
society. Those people are now going to work for a quasi-independent 
corporation, and what influences will be on that corporation we do not 
know. We do not know.
  It would be like saying, now we are going to rely on a private 
corporation to set up a judicial system before we know all the details 
on how it is going to function, as if patent rights--of course, they do 
not mean a thing. The American people would know what was going to 
happen if we were going to give corporations the right to run all the 
judges and all the courts in our country. They would know that. They 
would know we had better have every detail mapped out. We do not have 
every detail mapped out.
  H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, would not only 
disclose all of our secrets, but our own people who are there to 
protect us, the patent examiners who are there to protect the rights of 
our citizens, will be put into an entirely different arrangement. They 
are no longer our representatives, no longer people who are working for 
the United States, working for the American people, they are working 
for some quasi-independent corporation.
  I believe, I personally believe, in privatization. Any time we can 
have privatization, boy, Dana Rohrabacher, is there. The National 
Taxpayers Union and all these other people know I am there when it 
comes to privatization. I think it is a good idea.
  But I would not support privatizing all the courts. I would not 
support privatizing the Army. There are certain functions in 
Government. One of those functions happen to be the protection of our 
rights, and property rights, as I say, the intellectual property rights 
of our people, are going to be ever more important. So we are going to 
take that function away from employees at the Patent Office and turn it 
into a quasi-independent corporation?
  Who is going to control it? Who is going to be on the board of 
directors? Are they going to be corporate representatives on the board 
of directors, maybe foreign corporations might be able to be on the 
board of directors? I do not know. We will have to find out those 
answers.
  Basically, H.R. 400 will permit, the Steal American Technologies Act 
will permit foreign and multinational corporations to run roughshod 
over the American people in the same way they have been running 
roughshod over their own people. That is predictable. They are going to 
give them all the information. They are going to strip away the rights 
that have protected American inventors. You do not expect that these 
huge powerful corporate interests that have had such incredible impact 
on their people in their own countries are not going to come over here 
and try to do the same thing to our people.

[[Page H272]]

  In a few days I will be introducing a bill which will counteract H.R. 
400. My bill, like a similar bill that I had last year, will be 
entitled ``the Patent Term Restoration Act.'' This bill offers us a 
chance to restore to the American people the guaranteed patent term 
which has been our right since our country's founding. I am asking my 
colleagues to sign on as cosponsors.
  The other side has already had their multinational corporate 
interests putting pressure on our colleagues here. This is a free 
society. They have a right to speak. They have a right to talk to their 
representatives. But it is important that the American people have 
their influence as well. Every American needs to talk to his or her 
Member of Congress, his or her Member of the House of Representatives, 
and ask that that representative cosponsor the Patent Term Restoration 
Act, and oppose, please, and oppose the Steal American Technologies 
Act, H.R. 400.
  Last year my bill, which is basically similar to the bill that will 
be reintroduced in the next few days, last year we had the support of 
biotech companies, we had the support of those who are under attack 
from all over the world, we had the support of labor unions, we had the 
support of venture capitalists, the pharmaceutical companies, major 
universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But more 
importantly, we had support from every individual inventors' 
organization in the country. In short, we had the support of the little 
guys versus the big guys.
  This is the ultimate fight of the little guys versus the big guys. In 
America's history, in America's history, the average person, the little 
guy, has always come through because our Government is designed not for 
the protection of people who can hire stables of lawyers to do their 
bidding, and that is what H.R. 400 would do, the Steal American 
Technologies Act will do. It will mean that the big corporations who 
can hire the lawyers will have Government protection of their rights, 
but the rest of us will be left out.
  But we are not going to permit that to happen, because we can 
mobilize support in Congress if the American people will speak to their 
Congressmen, if they will call their Representative in the House of 
Representatives and say, ``We want you to support H.R.,'' whatever the 
bill will be, which is basically the Patent Restoration Act, the Patent 
Restoration Act, and to oppose H.R. 400, which is the Steal American 
Technologies Act.
  Japanese corporations, as I say, and Chinese, and all these people, 
when you hear people talking about the global economy, by the way, I 
believe in a global economy. No matter what we do, we are going to have 
a global economy. We are going to have a more global system, because 
communications and transportation are better than ever, thanks to the 
Wright Brothers and thanks to Thomas Edison and a lot of other people. 
But the fact is that we cannot use that concept as an excuse to 
diminish the rights of our people.
  If we are going to harmonize our law with Japan or anyone else, we 
must bring their standard of protection up to that of the American 
people. That is what this debate will be all about, of whether or not 
we can--the big shots, of course, they can just have their lawyers do 
the work for them, but the rest of us depend on these things being 
written into law, these protections to be written into law.
  We need to restore the American guaranteed patent rights. We need to 
restore them, and when we face these issues of global economy in the 
future, we must face them with the understanding that we will not be 
entering the global economy by basically diminishing the rights of our 
people. The American people can understand that. The American people, 
if they speak to their elected Representatives, their will, their will 
will take precedence over the powerful special interests.
  Today we join the battle. Today we will begin a fight that will be 
decided before August, and before August, through this body, will come 
through either a bill that is aimed at restoring the guaranteed patent 
term to the American people, or H.R. 400, the Steal American 
Technologies Act.

                              {time}  1615

  This will determine the future of our country. People will not fight 
for the American people unless the American people fight for 
themselves. We must all participate. I am confident that just as in the 
past, the American people will be the winners and that in the future of 
our country, when we evermore in the years ahead look to technology, we 
will be the technological leaders. We will not, our people will not go 
out to do battle, to do battle with enemies and adversaries around the 
world in equipment and weapons that are inferior technologically.
  Think about having to disclose every new patent idea after 18 months, 
whether or not the patent has been issued. That means our adversaries, 
who might want to destroy us, will have technology that can actually 
target America for destruction. Certainly they will have information 
that can target American jobs and the standard of living of our people 
for destruction.
  But we will win this battle and we will win the battles in the future 
because we will be strong and the American people will speak loudly and 
rise up and prevent this abomination of H.R. 400, the Steal American 
Technologies Act, from passing and will demand their rights be 
restored, patent rights and their rights to decency and their rights to 
opportunity as American citizens.

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