[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 17 (Tuesday, February 11, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H445-H450]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  AMERICAN PATENT SYSTEM UNDER THREAT

  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.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I am asking my colleagues today to join 
me in cosponsoring the Patent Term Restoration Act. This piece of 
legislation is basically the same bill that I offered last year as H.R. 
359. H.R. 359 had over 200 cosponsors; 81 of them were Democrats. H.R. 
359 had the support of major universities, pharmaceutical companies, 
energy companies, energy innovators, biotech companies, venture 
capitalists, and, most importantly, it had the support of every small 
inventors organization in the country.
  Last year H.R. 359, my piece of legislation, never made it to the 
floor of the House of Representatives for a vote. This year, we have 
every indication that it should get to the floor and have a vote here 
on the floor of the House of Representatives by the August break.
  Last year there was another patent bill, as well as my own, that was 
introduced. This was a far different bill. It was introduced by 
Congressman Carlos Moorhead and Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, who are 
now, of course, retired from this institution. This bill had a dozen or 
so cosponsors, but it had the tremendous support, the enormous support, 
of multinational corporations and those people in the political and 
economic establishment that are struggling to create what they are 
calling a global economy.
  You see, the Patent Term Restoration Act, H.R. 359, which I will be 
submitting and asking Members to join me in cosponsoring, takes a 
totally different approach than what last year's bill by Mr. Moorhead 
and Mrs. Schroeder was taking. In fact, their bill now, H.R. 3460, has 
been reintroduced as H.R. 400, which will also come to the floor by the 
August break.
  So we have two different approaches, and I thought that today I would 
discuss this major decision that Congress will make that seems like it 
is such an obscure issue and a complicated issue that many Americans 
will probably not even understand that there is an important decision 
about to be made that will impact so directly on their lives and the 
lives of their children.
  First of all, let us note that patent protection in the United States 
of America is something that has reaped tremendous rewards for our 
people. We have had, in the United States of America, the strongest 
patent protection of any country in the world.
  In fact, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others of our 
Founding Fathers insisted that the concept of patent protection be 
written into the Constitution of the United States. We in fact had the 
strongest patent protection because our Founding Fathers believed it, 
it was written into our Constitution, and throughout our history the 
idea of the ownership of one's creative genius was always supported by 
the American Government.
  Thus, over the years, as people came here from every part of the 
world, people who wanted to work hard and people who had the creative 
spirit and a revolutionary spirit about them, these people brought with 
them new ideas, and they were confronted with a society that protected 
their ideas and gave them the right to own those ideas, just as we gave 
people the right to own property.
  Many of the countries from which our Founding Fathers and Mothers 
came from, the right of property ownership for the average person did 
not exist. In fact, people were repressed, and the right of ownership, 
just like other rights, the right of religion and speech, were not 
things that were granted to the common man. These were things that were 
meant for the aristocracy. That is why people came to the United States 
of America, because they read Thomas Jefferson and they read Benjamin 
Franklin and they read Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry and John Adams 
and George Washington, and they read our Declaration of Independence 
and they knew something was going on in the United States of America. 
It was a place where the common man could come, he could raise his 
family, and a family could expect that their children would have 
opportunities beyond anything that was accessible anywhere else in the 
world. Part of this opportunity came from the fact that we recognized 
property rights. The property rights to own land, as I say, was also 
protected by the Constitution. The right of contract, and other 
economic liberties that were only thought of as rights for the elite in 
these other countries, were turned over to every person who was an 
American, and every person who came here who wished to become a citizen 
was given freedom. They were not given any subsidies or any type of 
welfare, but they were given freedom, and they were given the promise 
that their rights would be protected. As I say, interestingly enough, 
one of these rights that is so often ignored and often overlooked was 
the right to own one's own creative genius, the product of one's own 
creative genius, the patent right.
  Traditionally, this is how the patent system worked in America. As I 
say, it was the strongest of any place in the world. Someone who had a 
new idea, whether it was Eli Whitney with the cotton gin or whether it 
was Samuel Morse with the telegraph or Alexander Graham Bell with his 
many inventions, the light bulb and others, these people would work on 
their idea and they would then develop their idea into a patent and 
take it in the proper form and would submit this idea, submit it to the 
Patent Office and the Patent Office would consider their idea.
  Traditionally, no matter how long it took our Government to act in 
granting the right of ownership to that piece of property, that 
intellectual property, the applicant always knew that after the patent 
was granted that he would have a guaranteed patent term. Well, that was 
part of the guaranteed rights that we had.
  You have a right to freedom of speech, you have a right of freedom of 
religion, you have a right of freedom of assembly. You have a right to 
own your property. Well, you also had a

[[Page H446]]

right to a guaranteed patent term. In the early part of our country's 
history, the patent term was, no matter how long it took you to get it 
issued by the Government, if it took 10 years, you would still have 14 
years of patent protection. They would give you a guaranteed patent 
term of 14 years once it was issued.
  Later on, as America began to realize how important the development 
of technology was to our well-being, our Government wisely extended the 
patent term to be 17 years. So for the last 150 years, American 
inventors would work on their patent and develop new systems and new 
ideas and concepts and technologies. They would go to the Patent Office 
knowing, and their investors would see them through, knowing that no 
matter how long it took for that patent to be issued, they would have 
17 years to recoup and benefit from that. From that time that they had 
put in personally or the venture capitalist who put in the investment, 
they knew they would have a chance to get a return.
  This has served America so well. Technology and the fact that we have 
been on the cutting edge of technology has made all the difference in 
our country. It did not make just all the difference for the 
aristocracy. The fact is they did not have this freedom in other 
countries. They did not have the freedom of speech, the freedom to own 
property, the economic freedoms we have, and they also did not have the 
patent freedom that we had in America in these other lands, but the 
aristocracy did not care because they had the rights. The aristocracy 
kept the power and the rights to themselves in other societies.
  That is why in the United States of America that we made the 
blessings of liberty to every person here, was available to every 
person here. That is the reason why we became a beacon of hope to the 
world, but also we became a leader in the world in the standard of 
living of our people, of the average person. Our people were able to 
outcompete every potential competitor in the world because Americans 
had, yes, low taxes, which was important, and yes, we had people who 
were willing to work. But there are other countries with low taxes and 
other countries that basically had many people willing to work. But 
what we did was we put our working people in the position of being able 
to outcompete anyone in the world because they were using superior 
technology, cutting-edge technology, and it was the American people 
that were coming up with the ideas to lift the burden of labor from 
their fellow Americans in a way that would increase the production of 
their fellow Americans, making us more productive but making us a 
wealthier society.
  This was the vision that Thomas Jefferson had. This was the vision 
when he retired to Monticello and he was tinkering with his various 
devices, and if you visit that place today, you will see that Thomas 
Jefferson believed in that. If you visit Philadelphia and visit the 
home of Benjamin Franklin and the places where he lived, you will see 
that Benjamin Franklin was the inventor of the potbellied stove. Now 
that does not mean much to us today, but it certainly meant an 
incredible amount to people who lived in cold homes and all they had 
were fireplaces before this. It permitted the average person to be warm 
in the wintertime. It was a piece of technology. Thomas Jefferson, 
Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocal. He 
experimented with electricity, and how many of us read about that in 
our childhood when we went to school about Benjamin Franklin flying the 
kite and experimenting with electricity?

                              {time}  1745

  Thomas Jefferson experimenting with balloons in Paris when he 
represented the United States there, as well as Benjamin Franklin 
experimenting with flight; they had vision. In fact, when Benjamin 
Franklin in his waning years thought about the future--there is a 
famous quote from Benjamin Franklin saying that he is sorry that he is 
going to die, not because he is sorry for leaving the planet, just for 
not being alive, but he is sorry to die because he knows that the 
American people will be inventing so many new things and there will be 
so many changes in the human condition brought on by devices and 
technologies that are undreamed of in that day when he was alive, and 
that he just yearned to be able to see those inventions. Well, he had 
faith in the American people, and he ensured that the American people's 
rights were protected. And during the century after his death, the 
American people did not let him down. We were the center not only of 
freedom but of innovation.
  The Fulton steam engine on the steamboats; we all think of Robert 
Fulton as being the inventor of the steam engine. He was not the 
inventor of the steam engine. The steam engine was built many, many 
years before, but it was the American genius that put that steam engine 
onto a boat in order to use it rather than having people having to 
paddle or use the sail in order to propel a boat.
  We had inventions, whether it was the initial inventions that 
permitted us to have mass manufacturing, or whether it was the initial 
inventions of the telegraph or these other things that help us with 
communication, or whether it was the great surge of inventions that 
happened after we actually increased the length of the patent term.
  Alexander Graham Bell and others came forth with these new types of 
processes that propelled mankind into an era when the common man was 
not just trying to keep warm in the winter, but where average families 
lived decent lives.
  A black American who invented a process of how to bring down the cost 
of building shoes was issued a patent back in the, I think it was 1870, 
and this patent man, here he was in a country that basically 
discriminated against black American citizens, but they so believed in 
the patent right that they protected his right to that patent, and in 
doing so that black American was able to contribute knowledge and 
technology that within a few years reduced the price of shoes for the 
average American by 50 percent. And what that meant: that Americans 
were able to have shoes. Americans had clothing, they had shoes, they 
had full stomachs. They in fact were not slaves to their labor because 
there were labor-saving devices that were being developed every day by 
other Americans.
  This is what made us. This freedom and this technology is what made 
us the most prosperous country in the world. It also protected us 
during those times of conflict when America's safety was in the balance 
during World War II and during the cold war. It was American 
technology, not raw manpower that saved America.
  You know, if we tried to match, if Americans tried to match the world 
man for man, economically, we never would have succeeded; we will not 
succeed in that today. There are many people who think that just, oh, 
basically we cannot compete against cheap labor around the world. Well, 
there was always cheap labor around the world, and our people always 
outcompeted them; and in terms of warfare, we could not have competed 
against adversaries man to man, we could not put raw muscle power or 
the numbers of people in the field that adversaries, tyrannical 
adversaries, could.
  What saved us economically and saved us militarily was the fact that 
our people were superior in the equipment that they had to use to 
produce goods and services, but they were also superior in the 
technology that was in the weapon systems they used to protect our 
country.
  Our adversaries understand this. During the cold war, more than 
anything else it was the concept that the United States of America had 
technology that was well beyond anything that could have been produced 
in Communist countries. That unnerved the Communist bosses and led to a 
disintegration, a disintegration of the Communist empire that 
threatened us for four decades after World War II.
  We can thank our rocket scientists, we can thank our people who went 
forth to develop a missile defense system, but we could also thank the 
aerospace engineers who over those 40 years built airplanes that would 
take our people out to battle and make sure that they were superior to 
any aircraft in the world. We can also thank our scientists and our 
other technologists who produced the radar, produced the

[[Page H447]]

electronics, produced the other equipment that enabled us to with 
confidence tell the Soviet Union, as Ronald Reagan did, that it would 
be left in the dust bin of history unless it joined the free nations of 
the world and put away its aggressive aims on the West and its aims at 
destroying democracy.
  So instead, we have ended the cold war without firing a shot at the 
Soviet Union. Instead of massive destruction, we ended the cold war by 
insuring that we were ahead technologically and by being strong 
advocates of human freedom.
  Unfortunately, what helped us end the cold war, what has preserved 
the American way of life and given us a standard of living, given a 
standard of living to the American people as no one has ever dreamed 
before, is under attack. It is under attack because a global economic 
war has replaced a cold war. That is something we cannot get rid of. We 
cannot escape that. We cannot escape the fact that now we will have 
global competition because technology has improved communication and 
transportation beyond anything that could have been believed only 100 
years ago.
  So we have a global economy, we have a global war economically going 
on, but our adversaries have launched a sneak attack on the United 
States of America.
  This will surprise many of the American people, but there has in the 
last 4 years been a concerted effort to diminish the patent protections 
that we have considered to be a right of Americans over the history of 
our country. There has been an underhanded effort to change patent law 
and to undo this great economic prosperity that we have for the common 
man by coupling, decoupling that is, America from its greatest asset, 
and that is our technological superiority over our competitors and our 
adversaries.
  Let me say this so that it will be very plain for everyone to 
understand. The fundamental patent law of our country, which is the 
reason why Americans from all parts of the world were able to come here 
and produce these great new technologies, it did not just happen on its 
own, it did not happen because of our race or religion or anything 
else, it happened because we were a people that had a Government that 
was set up to protect intellectual property rights, especially patent 
rights, and those laws protecting patent rights have been fundamentally 
changed and there is a move in this country to basically greatly 
diminish the patent protection enjoyed by our people.
  In order to what? Why would someone do that? Why would any American 
do that? It is being done by many people with a straight face, who come 
forward thinking they are trying to create a better world in the name 
of creating a global market. Lord save us from benevolent souls who 
would restructure our lives and remake the entire world in order to 
make it a better place by their understanding of what a better place 
means. Lord help us from people who think that they are going to make a 
perfect world because what we are facing when you face someone who is 
going to make a perfect world, you are facing an individual who has all 
the good intentions in his heart but is willing to destroy your rights 
in order to achieve his or her objectives. That is what we saw with all 
the past reformers who were going to make this a global world which was 
a perfect world.
  Well, that is what we are facing here. We have groups of people, 
powerful individuals who think they are going to build a perfect world, 
and they are going to guide us into this new era of a global economy, 
and they are going to regulate the global economy. Well, they cannot 
even regulate the American economy. Even that does not work. And now 
they are going to try to create the global economy.
  Now I happen to believe in free trade. I am a free trader. I believe 
commerce between people is a good thing. But I would tell you one 
thing: I do not believe in free trade with dictatorships because it is 
only free on one end. What I believe in is free trade between free 
people, and between free people we will prevail. But one of the things 
that will make us prevail is the fact that we will continue to protect 
our own citizens.
  We live in a world where there are many countries that are not free, 
and if in order to create a global marketplace that includes these 
unfree societies, these dictatorial societies like Communist China, and 
like I would say probably a quarter of the other countries across this 
planet where people live in despotism, where they live in deprivation, 
where they have no rights, where the working people are basically 
slaves that have no right to organize unions, they have no right to 
have contracts enforced; they are the pawns of vicious and ugly rulers 
who side with the elites in their society. If we tried to basically 
lower the standards of the American protection, our protections that we 
have had, the protection of our rights as U.S. citizens, in order to 
create a global economy in which we will be dealing on an equal basis 
with those kinds of societies, the American people are bound to lose.
  And what is happening, and the patent fight is just the first step in 
this global economy battle that we will see popping up here in Congress 
over and over again, what we will see, more and more, is that in order 
to be in a global economy we have to eliminate this, we have to 
eliminate that, we have to change this, our law, and we have to 
diminish the rights of Americans.
  What we are talking about is that there is an elite at work in the 
world and in the United States that in order to create a global economy 
are willing to cast away and diminish the rights that have been 
protected by the American people, rights of the American people. They 
are willing to diminish those rights in order to achieve their 
objective because, once they achieve a global marketplace, their theory 
is, oh, the dictatorships like that in China and elsewhere, they will 
disappear because if they just have more contact with the West, well, 
those dictatorships, those ruthless regimes, will liberalize, they will 
become more benevolent, and they can become part, in fact, of the 
benevolent new global order. I guess George Bush called it the New 
World Order.
  Well, this type of nonsense is going to lead to nothing but misery 
for the American people. This type of logic will lead the American 
people with the same status as the multitude of people who live in 
countries throughout the world that were the homelands of our 
forefathers and mothers. We left those societies to come and live in 
America to be free. We came here because we knew our rights as human 
beings would be protected and that America was a special place.

                              {time}  1800

  But now we see that those protections are going to be diminished.
  In the beginning, they hoped to diminish these rights. Just 
basically, they do not want to talk about it, and in this first battle, 
I might say, of the global economy, they tried to do this in a very 
underhanded way. Let me describe how the patent rights of the American 
people have already been diminished.
  What was our basic right to begin with? Our basic right was, the 
American inventor could apply for a patent and no matter how long it 
took the bureaucracy to prove that patent, he or she would still own 
that patent and have a right to benefit from it for 17 years. That was 
called the right of a guaranteed patent term.
  Well, in order to harmonize our law and to have a global economy, it 
was determined that the United States should end the guaranteed patent 
term, that that should no longer be a guaranteed right for the American 
people. As I say, in a very underhanded fashion the change in the 
patent law was snuck in, and I say snuck in because I asked repeatedly 
for any language that would be in the GATT implementation legislation 
about patents, and was denied the right to know what was in there until 
the very last minute. I am a Member of Congress asking what language 
will be in a piece of legislation, and the administration was denying 
me that right to know what was in it. They put this change in patent 
law into the GATT implementation legislation.
  Let me explain what GATT implementation legislation means. The GATT 
implementation legislation is the legislation that we passed in 
Congress in order to fulfill our obligations by agreements that we 
reached with other countries to establish the general policies on trade 
and tariffs for around the world. Basically, GATT means General 
Agreement on Trades and Tariffs.

[[Page H448]]

  When this administration and other administrations were negotiating 
GATT, they were given the right to negotiate GATT by the Members of 
Congress, and I voted for this, by the way. They were given what they 
called fast track authority, because there is nobody to negotiate an 
agreement like this if you are going to have every little thing that is 
agreed upon have to be voted up and down by Congress.
  Fast track simply means that the Congress will be kept informed of 
what is involved in the GATT agreement, and then the Congress would be 
given 50 days to examine the agreement and everything that is in the 
legislation that implements the agreement, and then we would only have 
an up or down vote on the GATT implementation legislation.
  So we gave up our rights here; to look at every little section of the 
GATT implementation legislation, we gave up that right with the promise 
that we would have 50 days to examine it and know everything that was 
in it; and that there would be nothing, and here is the catch, there 
would be nothing in that legislation that was not required by the GATT 
agreement itself, and the agreement that we made with all of these 
other countries.
  Well, there was no agreement made as part of GATT that required us to 
cast aside and to eliminate this traditional guarantee that we had of 
patent protection important to the American people. There was nothing 
in there that mandated we had to do that. Yet, the administration snuck 
this into the GATT implementation legislation, would not even tell me 
as a Member of Congress until the last minute that it was in there, and 
then gave us just a few days to pass GATT. Luckily, we beat them back 
and we were able to postpone that vote on the GATT implementation 
legislation.
  That is really when I became active on this issue of the GATT 
implementation legislation. What it was was an amendment, a small 
amendment, obscure, hard to see the importance of it; and in fact, if 
you read the language it looked like they were actually increasing the 
time of patent protection for the American people.
  The change is, and traditionally, remember, if you applied for a 
patent, no matter how long it took you to get it, once you got it, it 
was yours for 17 years, 17 years of a guaranteed patent protection. 
Now, under the new law which is now in law, they totally betrayed us, 
they put it in there without it being required by GATT, I was not able 
to defeat it, now what does the law say?
  The law says that someone who comes up with a new idea, new 
invention, can submit that, but the clock starts ticking immediately. 
And the clock is ticking not against the government, not against the 
bureaucracy, not against those people on the outside who would try to 
interfere, try to interfere with a man's right to have his patent 
issued as soon as possible; no, the clock is ticking against the 
inventor. If it takes him 15 or 20 years to get his patent, his or her 
patent issued, that inventor will have seen three-quarters of his or 
her patent term eliminated, because the time is ticking, the clock is 
ticking against the inventor, and he or she only has 20 years.
  And if it takes 15 years, and many of the breakthrough technologies 
that we have had, especially in this last two and three decades, many 
of them take 5 and 10 years for a patent owner to get the patent 
issued, because if it is a breakthrough technology--by the way, most of 
the patents, 90 percent of all patents are very simple, just 
readjustments of new technology. The breakthrough technologies take a 
very long time to get through the patent system. Many of them have 
taken 10 and 20 years themselves.
  That means that we are dramatically reducing the amount of time that 
our inventors have to reap the rewards of their own innovation, and in 
fact we have eliminated the guaranteed patent term. There is no 
guaranteed patent term. That was done. That was done basically in a 
very surreptitious way, and I have been fighting that battle. That is 
what the Patent Restoration Act is going to be all about, is restoring 
the guaranteed patent term.
  But those people who eliminated that guaranteed patent term, why did 
they do that? They did it, as I say, as part of this harmonization 
effort. But who really started the ball rolling? The American people 
will be surprised to hear, the real reason we have been trying to 
eliminate the guaranteed patent term by some people here in this body 
who have been trying to eliminate the guaranteed patent term is because 
it will harmonize our law with Japan.
  Bruce Lehman, the head of our patent office, went to Japan, had a 
meeting with his counterpart in which he signed an agreement to 
basically harmonize our law, not to bring up the level of protection in 
Japan to that of the United States, but to bring down the level of 
protection in the United States to that of the level of Japan.
  That system, where there is no guaranteed term and the clock is 
ticking against the inventor, has been the Japanese system. That is why 
they never invented anything. That is why they use our technology, 
because they have a system where the inventor, once he applies, the 
clock is ticking against the inventor. The huge corporations come in 
and they beat down the inventors and they force them to give up their 
rights, and the creative people in that society are steamrollered by 
powerful interests who want to have control of the wealth-producing 
ideas and technology that will determine who has the power in the 
future.
  That is the system they are imposing on us, ladies and gentlemen. 
That is the system that these planners want to put on the United 
States.
  There is, by the way, another bill, as I say, that is being 
introduced by the same people who snuck this into the GATT 
implementation legislation. It is H.R. 400. It is the second shoe that 
is falling. The first shoe was eliminating the guaranteed patent term 
for the American people. That helped harmonize law with Japan, except 
in Japan they also have something else. H.R. 400, and I call this the 
Steal American Technologies Act, H.R. 400, the main purpose of that 
bill is to do what?
  The bill, by the way, when it was first introduced was called the 
Patent Publication Act. That is what it was originally titled when they 
first introduced it in the last session of Congress. But they changed 
that right away, because they figured out, oh, my gosh, everybody 
realizes what it is all about. No; H.R. 400 is almost the same piece of 
legislation, it has the same purpose. It is to harmonize our law with 
Japan on the last element that we are not the same with Japan on.
  In Japan it has been far different than the United States. In the 
United States, someone comes up with a new piece of technology, patents 
it, goes to the patent office and applies for a patent. That man is not 
only guaranteed, no matter how long that man or woman, no matter how 
long it took them to get their patent through the process, they would 
have that 17 guaranteed years of protection, but they were also 
guaranteed that during the time before that patent was issued, that 
information, all of the creative genius, all of the investigatory work, 
all of the materials and details about the new technology would be kept 
secret and confidential. No one would know about it, and in fact, it 
was a felony for Members of the Government to disclose that information 
because we protected the rights of that inventor.
  Well, guess what H.R. 400 does? It says that after 18 months, whether 
or not the patent has been issued to the American patent applicant, it 
will be published for the entire world to see. Do you get what I am 
saying here? Understand the magnitude of this. Every new idea that 
Americans come up with technologically will be published for every 
copycat brigand and everyone who would set up factories in order to 
destroy us economically. They will have every piece of information 
about America's new innovative ideas, even before the patents are 
issued. And do you know why? Because that is the way it is in Japan. 
That is also Japanese law.
  It is Japanese law that you do not have a guaranteed patent term, the 
clock is ticking against the inventor, and as soon as the inventor puts 
this patent in, after 18 months it is published so everybody in Japan 
can see it. That is why no one invents anything in Japan, and that is 
why the special interests, the powerful lords of Japan, the great 
shoguns of their economy beat the life out of their own people in order 
to steal the new technological ideas, and why people just do not invent 
anything.

[[Page H449]]

  But here is the problem: If we change our laws so that we do not have 
a guaranteed patent term, and that after 18 months these very same 
shoguns in Japan, and monsters in China who murder their own people, 
who do not care one bit about human rights, these people in different 
parts of the world who wish to steal everything that is America's, 
copycats, these people will now know all of our secrets. They will be 
able to come here and do to the American people, through people that 
they have hired, lawyers and lobbyists who they have hired here in 
Washington, DC, to do to our people what they have been doing to their 
own people.
  We are making the American people vulnerable to the same sort of 
corrupt power plays that have been going on for centuries in these 
other societies. We are making our own people vulnerable to it here, 
and we are doing it in an area that makes America the most vulnerable 
of all. It is our future ability to compete with the world 
technologically. It is our achilles' heel. It did not take our economic 
adversaries too long to realize, ``How do we bring America down? These 
guys are always one step ahead of us. They are one step ahead of us 
because they have a system that protects these new inventors, these 
individuals who come up with all of the ideas.''
  The major force behind this move for harmonization is coming from 
multinational corporations. It is coming from some people who are very 
wellintended, who have become convinced that there is a problem in our 
current system. They call it a submarine patent problem. Submarine 
patents, by the way, are a minor problem that have affected certain 
industries in a very bad way. The electronics industry, there are some 
problems in which submarine patents have played a part and have hurt 
some people. Some people have been unfairly treated economically and 
businesswise because of submarine patents.
  To let my colleagues know what a submarine patent is, it is when it 
is alleged that inventors try to stall the issuance of their own 
patent. They manipulate the system at the patent office so that their 
patent will not be issued until 5 years later or 10 years later, 
because they want it to be issued later, so then they will be able to 
have more money coming in because their technology will be a little bit 
better used in the long term rather than short term.

                              {time}  1815

  Of course, this happens maybe in one-tenth of 1 percent, perhaps, at 
most, of all patents, and it has minimal impact on the overall economy. 
Minimal impact. What they are telling us is this problem, they believe 
it will be solved. And how will it be solved? It will be solved by 
publishing all the information on every patent in America so everybody 
will know what that inventor is hiding, and to eliminate the guaranteed 
patent term so that the inventor, all the time will be put against the 
inventor.
  Yes, there is a small problem called the submarine patent problem. By 
the way, in the piece of legislation I am proposing, the Patent Term 
Restoration Act, we deal with that. The only thing to solve this 
problem, it only takes some remedial discipline or basically some 
remedial reforms within the Patent Office structure itself. We do not 
even need legislation on that.
  The Patent Office, because if you have someone manipulating the 
process at the Patent Office, the Patent Office can simply change their 
procedures to prevent manipulation. It is the Patent Office that has to 
make the decision to grant someone a continuance in their application 
or whatever. The Patent Office can change this.
  But no, no, we cannot do that. We have been told instead, in order to 
solve this problem we have to destroy the whole patent system. We have 
to take the system that has served America so well and eliminate the 
basics of that system in order to get to the submarine patent problem.
  I used this example before and I will use it tonight, as well. This 
is very similar to someone who has a hangnail problem and his doctor 
says, you have a hangnail; in fact, your hangnail is infected. Every 
time you go to the doctor, the doctor is saying, oh my gosh, this 
hangnail; in fact, you are even beginning to limp a little bit because 
your hangnail is bothering your foot. The doctor says, look at the 
hangnail; and all the doctor ever talks to you about is how bad the 
hangnail is.
  That is what is happening with the submarine patent. Any time you 
talk about patent law, the people who are trying to destroy the patent 
system talk about the submarine patents. It is like that hangnail. They 
have huge pictures of the hangnail, how ugly it looks; please focus on 
the hangnail. Then you find out what the doctor really wants to do is 
amputate your leg. And you say, amputate my leg for a hangnail? You are 
out of your mind. No, look how bad hangnails are.
  I would say that if someone's doctor is suggesting that they amputate 
the leg because you have a hangnail, that you had better question 
either the sanity or the motives of your doctor. Something is wrong 
there. And the doctor says, we have to get the hangnail corrected; 
otherwise you are going to limp for the rest of your life or as long as 
that hangnail is there. But you say, wait a minute; if I cut my leg 
off, I will not even be able to walk. Forget it, hangnails are 
terrible.
  That is what is happening with the submarine patent issue. There is a 
problem. It can be corrected easily. But it is being used as an excuse 
to destroy the patent rights that have been part of the American system 
since the founding of our country.
  We had a right to a guaranteed patent term. They are using the 
submarine patent issue, which I think is a bogus issue, or in fact, a 
minuscule part of our system, they are using that as an excuse to 
publish every secret that we have developed technologically to people 
all over the world who will steal that technology and will use it 
against us. This is how terrible it is.
  Our genius will be used to destroy our standard of living. Our genius 
will be used not to make the lives of the American people better, not 
to enable us to compete with the rest of the world, against people with 
low-priced labor. Our genius will not be used to secure us from foreign 
adversaries. Our genius will be exposed to the rest of the world, 
giving it to them on a platter, and they will use it against us. This 
is a sin against the American people.
  People say, how can this possibly happen? How can it happen? We are 
dealing with powerful interest groups. These multinational 
corporations, many of them who control American corporations now, these 
people are the ones who hire lobbyists. They determine the policy of 
these big companies.
  Is it any wonder that these big companies perhaps do not have the 
best interests of the American people at heart, when they are owned and 
controlled by groups of who knows who; somewhere, people who perhaps 
have absolutely no, they have absolutely no commitment to the ideals 
that we think of as Americans?
  I have been told over and over again in the debate, Most Favored 
Nation debate about China, that if we just deal with China for so long 
that this rotten Communist regime is going to liberalize and it is 
going to become more mellow, and actually we are teaching the Chinese 
how to respect human rights.
  That is not what it is all about. We know that. These businessmen are 
out to make money and they do not care if it is blood money or not, and 
they do not care if they have to put out of work all their American 
workers; they are going to go over there and make a 10-percent or 15-
percent profit, rather than a profit here with 5 or 6 percent, in which 
the American people would be able to have jobs, to have decent 
families.
  These same people get involved in economic relationships. They have 
no ideals. They never go to the Communist bosses in China and say, by 
the way, now that I am here doing business, I would like to tell you 
that, you know, you should respect people's right to have their own 
religion. You should not be enclosing those Christians in jail or those 
Buddhists over here in prison camps, or you should not be wiping out 
villages in Tibet. We should live with respect towards human rights. 
They do not do that in China. These very same people now are trying to 
change our law so that the inventions we come up with as American 
people, within 18 months they will have every detail, and it will be 
faxed to their companies in China, and they will be producing it over 
there.

[[Page H450]]

  I was in the office here in the Rayburn Building when last year's 
bill, which I call the Steal American Technologies Act, H.R. 400, the 
equivalent of that was going through committee last year. There was a 
man from a solar energy company. He said, Mr. Congressman, if this 
passes and they publish all the information about my patent 
applications after 18 months, I will tell you what will happen. The 
Japanese will have all that information, and they will have it in 
production, with my new technology, before I am even issued my patent. 
They will take that profit that they have used from my technology and 
they will use it to destroy me. They will hire lawyers in the United 
States and elsewhere to destroy me and take away my rights to what I 
have developed with millions of dollars. That is what will happen. This 
will be a catastrophe for my company.
  It is not hard to understand. They are going to publish everything 
for every brigand in the world to see. Yet they say it with a straight 
face; we have to do that because you have a hangnail. There is a little 
submarine patent problem here. We can solve the submarine patent 
problem. Do not let anybody talk about amputating your leg for a 
hangnail. Do not let anybody talk about destroying your rights as 
Americans because there are some problems in our country.
  We have had problems with people who abuse their free speech. We have 
had problems with people who abuse the freedom of religion. We have had 
problems with our freedom in this country because some people misuse 
it. But that is no excuse to diminish the protection of these freedoms 
that are enjoyed by the American people. That is what we are being told 
we have to accept now, economically. They will win, unless the American 
people rise up and talk to their Members of Congress.
  This is what will surprise everyone. Most Members of Congress have no 
idea this is going on. I would say 75 percent of the Members of 
Congress have no idea about this battle. If they do, they just heard a 
little bit about it, and it is only one thing they have heard in 
passing, and they have no idea of the magnitude of the decision that is 
going to be made. But they are being visited by lobbyists, and they are 
being visited and pressured by huge corporations that have connections 
to this international, global dream of a global marketplace, by 
multinational corporations who they emulate or are in economic 
relationships with.
  These Members of Congress might go along with the pressure. But one 
thing I can tell you, in America, when the American people talk to 
their Members of Congress, when the American people watch how their 
Congressmen vote and let their Congressmen know that, let their Members 
of Congress know how important it is to you and to the future of our 
country about certain issues, this Congress responds.
  Lobbyists and paid adversaries can be overcome when people who live 
throughout our country contact their Congressman and say, you have to 
defeat H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act; you have to 
defeat that. It is going to hurt our country, it is going to hurt the 
standard of living of normal people. You have to support this 
restoration of America's patent rights. You have to restore the patent 
term to the American people, as we have had in our country's past, 
because this will give us what we need to maintain the standard of 
living of regular people, not just the elite.
  The elite has lost touch. I will tell Members something. If we had to 
depend on the elite of the business community to save American freedom, 
we would all be in chains right now. Most of the business elite of this 
country are looking for that extra 5-percent profit at the expense of 
every value and expense of the freedom of other people in the world. 
They do not care, because they want that extra 10-percent profit. We 
are not talking about the entrepreneurs who built American industry 100 
years ago, people who knew what it was like to come from humble 
beginnings.
  We are talking about people who have been educated at Harvard and 
educated at all these elitist schools who really do not identify with 
the American people. They identify more with the elite of other 
societies. They would rather hobnob with these people in other 
societies in their guarded, gated communities.
  The American people need to express themselves, that they will not 
see their rights diminished in order to establish a global marketplace, 
or anything else. Yes, we will correct any abuses that exist. We are 
not a perfect country. But we will not see our freedoms diminished 
because some people abuse them.
  We will enter this global marketplace with the protections we have 
had. We will win the competition, just the way we have beaten the 
competition before. We have beaten them because we had freedom and we 
had technology on our side. That is what our Founding Fathers saw so 
long ago, that people would come to this country, and that is why our 
country would prosper, that is why our people would be safe. Here we 
are, with a little obscure issue like patent law, a little issue like 
that, that has been discovered as very pivotal to the well-being of our 
country in the future.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope my colleagues will pay attention, and I know they 
will, pay attention to calls from home when people call to say, for 
goodness sakes, do not support this H.R. 400, the Steal American 
Technologies Act, and please, cosponsor Dana Rohrabacher's bill that 
will restore patent protection for the American people, and protect us.
  By the way, one other part of H.R. 400 I need to tell you about. That 
is something that is going to shock you more than anything I have said. 
It eliminates the Patent Office from the U.S. Government. It takes our 
patent examiners and turns it into a quasi-private corporation. It is 
like they are proposing in the Steal American Technologies Act to 
basically make the judges who determine who owns the technology, take 
them away from their civil service status and Government status now, 
which means they have to answer to us, and they are going to make it a 
quasi-independent organization.
  They are going to publish all our secrets to the world. They are 
going to take away the guaranteed patent term. Now they are just going 
to obliterate the Patent Office as part of the U.S. Government. Does 
that not tell us something? We have to act. We would not let our courts 
be privatized by somebody who we did not know, who was going to run the 
show. We would not let that happen.
  These hardworking patent examiners, these people are making decisions 
that affect not only the course of our country's future, but affect 
billions of dollars of wealth. They should be part of the Government. I 
believe in privatization, but you do not privatize something like that.
  I would hope that people gather together and say we will not stand 
for this diminishing of our rights. I know we will come through, and 
America will not only survive, but America will prevail and America 
will be free, because that is the way God intended America to be.

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