[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 43 (Monday, April 14, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H1444-H1449]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        AMERICA'S PATENT SYSTEM

  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, yesterday was the birthday of Thomas 
Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, 
is a revered Founding Father of our Nation, the man who stood more than 
any of our other Founding Fathers for liberty and independence, the 
author of the Declaration of Independence.
  Thomas Jefferson, I might add, did not stand just for liberty and 
freedom and democracy, he also stood for technology. Many times, people 
have forgotten this aspect of Thomas Jefferson, but Thomas Jefferson's 
commitment, his dedication to the concept of America being a new kind 
of society where people would be free to grow and to expand and to live 
decent lives and to have opportunity that was unknown throughout the 
world at the time of Thomas Jefferson, his dedication has been 
imprinted onto American law in ways that most Americans do not even 
remember or reflect upon as we enjoy this freedom and this great 
standard of living that we have as Americans.
  Thomas Jefferson was a technologist as well as a democrat, small-D 
democrat. Thomas Jefferson, when he retired from his political life, 
went home to invent gadgets and devices and machines around Monticello, 
which can be seen even today as visitors visit Monticello. So today it 
is fitting that we begin this week, the Thomas Jefferson week in the 
House of Representatives, recognizing that on Thursday of this week, 
there will be a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives, this 
body, that will make the difference as to whether America remains the 
technological leader of the world or whether we will gut our patent 
system and open up this country to the greatest theft of its genius and 
creativity that the world has ever seen.
  Yes, on Thursday, there will be a vote that will make the difference 
in the standard of living of future generations of Americans and not 
only our economic well-being but the security of our country as well. 
What is fascinating is that most Americans have no idea that this issue 
is coming to a vote. In fact, half or more of the Members of Congress 
do not know the issue will be coming to a vote. Yet it will come to a 
vote, the skids have been greased, the legislation is coming forward, 
and it will be voted on on Thursday whether or not the Members are 
fully aware of how their constituents believe. But what they will be 
aware of is the lobbyists for multinational corporations who are 
knocking on their door telling them how important it is to pass said 
legislation on America's patent system.
  How fitting for Jefferson's week that we will be at a turning point 
because, if we vote the wrong way, if we permit the gutting of our 
patent system, America's technological lead will evaporate in the next 
20 years; and Americans 20 years hence, the children of today, will 
never know what happened to their standard of living.
  I call it Pearl Harbor in slow motion. What will happen is that 
foreigners who have long looked at America's technological genius with 
envious eyes will at last have the legal opportunity to steal American 
technology and to use it against us because we are changing the patent 
system that has protected Americans for over 200 years in a way that 
guts the protection of the little guy, the little guys like Thomas 
Edison, like Alexander Graham Bell, like the Wright Brothers.
  The word has not gotten out because there is a blackout in the 
mainstream media that this bill will be coming forward. In fact, there 
was one article in the New York Times, and that is all I have seen 
among the networks and among the major newspapers of this country, one 
small article and no articles leading up to this great momentous 
decision that will be made.
  Someone does not want the public to know the decision that will be 
made here on Thursday. The American people would be left totally in the 
dark if it was not for talk show radio hosts like Michael Reagan and 
others who have been spreading the word and warning the people, like 
modern-day Paul Reveres, telling the American people to wake up or they 
will lose their freedom.
  We will be making this decision on Thursday. If the American people 
remain in the dark, a decision will be made that will harm their 
children. As I say, their children will think, did we not used to have 
the technological lead? Were we not always the leaders? Did we not put 
a man on the moon? Were we not the ones, why was it that our fathers 
and grandfathers could outcompete all these countries with cheap labor 
and now we cannot do it anymore?
  They will never know. It will never be traced back to a vote here on 
the floor of the House of Representatives on the week that we celebrate 
Thomas Jefferson's birthday in the year 1997. They will not even think 
about it because patent law and many of the laws that protect our 
rights and have been responsible for this great land of liberty and 
opportunity that we enjoy today, many of those laws are taken for 
granted. Freedom, people have said, is like the air; you take it for 
granted until it is denied. The moment you are denied the right to 
breathe air, you will realize that breathing air is the most important 
thing in your life because everything else disappears without it. But 
yet we take it for granted because it is abundant and all around us.
  So, too, with America's freedom, so, too, with the legal protections 
that have permitted the people of the United States by and large, 
millions of us, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of us to live 
lives of dignity and opportunity, lives that are the dream of people 
throughout the planet and over the ages.
  Yet that will be threatened because the legal basis that protected 
America's rights is being eroded, the legal basis is being eroded. It 
is being eroded bit by bit by people who have good motives. They say 
that we live in a world that is far different than the world of Thomas 
Jefferson, far different than the world of Teddy Roosevelt, far 
different than the world of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

                              {time}  1415

  They say now we live in a world where we have to accommodate the 
changes by creating a global economy. These individuals, who are very 
well-intended, believe that by creating a global economy that we can 
perfect the planet, or at least near perfect the planet.
  I say to my fellow Americans today and my colleagues in the House of 
Representatives, ``Lord, protect us from those who would perfect 
mankind.'' Because, in the end, they always threaten the rights and 
freedoms of the American people.
  I do not care if they were Communists, I do not care if they were 
Fascists, I do not care who they are or what they are, if they will 
superimpose an ideal world upon the American people with no reflection 
on our constitutional rights, we will see a diminishing of our rights 
and we will see a decline in our standard of living.
  Mr. Speaker, the vote that is coming up on Thursday will be a vote on 
H.R. 400, which has already passed committee, both the subcommittee and 
the committee. Yet the American people have no idea that this great 
gutting of our patent system is on the way to the floor and what 
repercussions it will have on the standard of living of the American 
people, of their children and their children's children.
  I have a piece of legislation that will be granted the right to be 
offered as a substitute to H.R. 400. I call H.R. 400 the Steal American 
Technology Act. My bill, H.R. 811, and its companion bill, 812, will be 
offered as a substitute to H.R. 400.
  The issues are clear and simple. However, the American people have 
been denied the right to hear those issues. They have been denied the 
right to a public debate by a media elite that has put a blanket over 
this issue.
  Perhaps the media believes that patriotism and loyalty to one's 
country

[[Page H1445]]

and fellow countrymen is old-fashioned. Perhaps they believe that it 
will hinder the development of a global economy, which will benefit all 
the people in the world. I do not know what the motive is, but I will 
say this much; that this is a crucial vote in our history, and unless 
the American people become part of the process and contact their 
Representative in Washington, DC, this vote will be lost and the 
American people will never know what hit them.
  Here are the central issues. When we ask our colleagues why they 
support H.R. 400, they will say that there are numerous reasons they 
support H.R. 400. H.R. 400 officially is called the 21st Century Patent 
Reform Act. The 21st Century Patent Reform Act. That is what they will 
say; that there are lots of reforms.
  It is like a bouquet of flowers that is being handed to the American 
people: Look at all of these reforms. And I will have to admit when I 
look at the flowers in the bouquet I am very supportive. In fact, my 
alternative substitute for H.R. 400 will contain all the flowers that 
are in H.R. 400. We have taken from the bill all of the good points of 
that bill, and that is all the authors want to talk about.
  That was not the original title of H.R. 400. I call H.R. 400 the 
Steal American Technologies Act, but that is my title. The title they 
are going by now officially is the 21st Century Patent Reform Act. What 
was the original title of H.R. 400 when it was introduced over a year 
ago in the House of Representatives? The title then was the Patent 
Publication Act.
  Well, why have they changed the name? Why has the name changed? The 
name has changed because in those flowers that I talked about in the 
bouquet are poisonous snakes. Poisonous snakes. If we only look at the 
flowers and we take the bouquet home, the snakes will bite our family 
and children and will destroy us. And the worst of all of the snakes is 
a snake called publication, which is the central purpose of the bill. 
That is why H.R. 400 was called formerly the Patent Publication Act, 
because the purpose of the bill is to establish a rule about 
publication.
  For those who have not heard what this rule is, it is dramatic, it is 
revulsive, it is something that will shock one's sensitivities, because 
no one will believe that serious people are proposing that this become 
the law of the land in the United States of America.
  What I am talking about is the main provision of H.R. 400, the 
provision that mandates that every American inventor who applies for a 
patent, that after 18 months that patent application will be published 
for the entire world to see whether or not the patent has been issued.
  To tell my colleagues how different this is, from the founding of our 
country and the Constitution of the United States, from the moment that 
was affirmed and made the law of the land until today, Americans have 
had a right of confidentiality. An American inventor who applied for a 
patent would know that until that patent was issued no one else could 
know about what his application dealt with. No one would be given the 
details. He and his investors, he or she and their investors would be 
protected from their competition and from thieves.
  H.R. 400 dramatically changes the fundamental law of the land to 
permit every thief in the world, every copycat, every individual and 
organization that despises the United States of America to have 
possession of every one of our intellectual and technological secrets 
so that they may use those secrets and that technology against the 
interests of the people of the United States of America.
  There are all kinds of reasons that we will hear from the proponents 
of this bill as to why it is so important for our big businesses, our 
big businesses, to have knowledge of what is being investigated and 
researched by different inventors and that will give them a heads-up on 
what our inventors are up to.
  Yes, that will give our own businessmen a heads-up, and then those 
huge corporations can steal from the little guy as well, just like 
multinational corporations. More importantly, it will 
permit multinational and foreign corporations to have that same 
information to go into production and to use the profits from producing 
their stolen technology to defeat and destroy American technologists in 
the court, using our own resources against us.

  Now, why are people doing this? Again, they will say they have some 
sort of motive that makes sense, and sometimes it is hard to 
understand, but let me show everyone the real reason. What we have 
here, my fellow colleagues, people of the United States, and I will put 
this into the Record for another time, this is a copy of an agreement 
that was signed on January 20, 1994. The signatories are the head of 
the United States Patent Office, Bruce Lehman, and his Japanese 
counterpart. This is an agreement by the head of our Patent Office to 
harmonize American law with that of Japan's. That is the real purpose 
behind this legislation.
  Why do we want to change our patent law so that it discloses all of 
this secret information, all of our technological secrets to our 
adversaries? Because we have an agreement to harmonize our law. Did 
anyone ever pass on that agreement? Did someone acknowledge this 
agreement on the floor of the House or the U.S. Senate? Absolutely not. 
But then we turn around and we have people trying to put this into law 
without telling us what it is really all about. Bruce Lehman had no 
power to make this agreement, but we can be tricked into fulfilling the 
obligations set out by this unelected official from the United States.
  To put things into perspective, harmonization of law with Japan may 
be a good thing, if they are bringing their standards up to ours. But 
Bruce Lehman, as is clear by this document, has set out, along with his 
supporters in the administration and in the corporate community, to 
bring down the protections of American law to the level of Japan. That 
is harmonization. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a formula for 
catastrophe and disaster for the people of the United States of 
America. That is a formula that will permit the economic shoguns and 
the tyrants who rule the Japanese economy and brutally suppress anyone 
who threatens their interests, it will permit those power elites in 
Japan, who have beaten down their own people, to come to the United 
States and beat down our people because now we have changed our legal 
protections to harmonize with Japan's.
  Why should they not come here and steal our technology? Why should 
they not try to beat us down and destroy the standard of living of the 
American people in order to put cash in their own pockets? Why should 
they not when the American Congress is willing to change the law to 
permit them to do it?
  It is not shame on the Japanese. The Japanese Government is simply 
watching out for the interests of Japanese people and the special 
interests who hold power in Japan. It is not shame on Japan. It is 
shame on those people who would decrease the legal protection of the 
people of the United States in order to harmonize our law; those people 
who would risk our standard of living and the technological advances 
that have kept us the envy of the world, who now have a global picture 
in mind and think that having the American people, a people guaranteed 
certain rights and freedoms and opportunities that do not exist in 
other parts of the planet, that that has become some sort of passe goal 
for American leaders.
  If it was not for the United States of America, there would be no 
freedom and no hope anywhere in the world. Yes, I think it is nice that 
we should try to help others and we should try to help establish 
situations where trade and commerce flourish. I believe in free trade. 
But I believe in free trade between free people. I believe first and 
foremost, when our negotiators sit down at the table they should not be 
thinking about some idealistic goal that is a dream goal of a unitary 
planet where commerce is flowing freely and that everyone is 
benefitted, but when they sit down at the table they should be 
representing the interests of the people of the United States.
  There is nothing wrong with that. We should make no apologies for 
that. The American people have borne the burden of war and borne the 
burden of aid to other countries. We have been the most generous people 
in the world, but we should not be generous with our technology and 
permit others to steal it in order to use it against us.

[[Page H1446]]

  Yes, there will be a price to pay. Not only our economic adversaries 
will be stealing this technology, but so will potential foreign policy 
and military adversaries. The Americans won the cold war not because we 
matched the potential Communist enemy man-for-man. It was when Ronald 
Reagan expanded the technological capabilities of our military that 
broke the will of the Communist bosses in Moscow and led to a more 
peaceful world.
  Today we have a great opportunity to lead mankind into a more 
peaceful world, but we will not do it by lowering the protections that 
have afforded Americans the highest standard of living and the rights 
of opportunity and freedom that were unknown in other parts.
  Yes, the Chinese, not just the Japanese, and other American 
competitors are ready and waiting with their Xerox machines and their 
fax machines for this Congress to pass this rule that will mandate 
every one of our technological secrets to become public information 
even before the patent is issued.
  We are told, well, we are giving the right of people to sue some 
corporate entity if the corporate entity steals their patent after it 
has been published after 18 months. To put this in perspective, often 
it takes years for a patent of significance to issue, sometimes 5 and 
10 years. Thus, we are saying to our people we are going to expose all 
of your secret information, all the work that you have done to your 
adversaries, who can then use it, and then once the patent is issued, 
let us say 5 or 10 years later, after they have been in production of 
your idea, of your technology, we are giving you the right to sue them.
  This is asking smaller American companies or even individual 
Americans to sue huge U.S., huge foreign, and multinational 
corporations. Talk about a fantasy. This is an absolute fantasy that 
that means anything. That has absolutely no relevance. It is setting up 
a situation where there will be theft and no recourse because the 
Americans will not have the money to go out and file these suits 
against huge foreign corporations, especially if those huge 
corporations happen to be the People's Liberation Army of China, which 
is currently stealing much of our intellectual property.

                              {time}  1430

  Let us put this in perspective as well. The Wright brothers, people 
who we are so proud of. We are proud of the Wright brothers. Go down to 
Kitty Hawk, NC, and see where two Americans, with little education, who 
worked at a bicycle shop, had a dream, had a dream of inventing a 
machine that would permit mankind to soar through the air. And people 
all over the world who had tried before them failed, yet they 
persevered, and they tried and they failed and they came back to try 
again. And there on the windy slopes on the coastline of Kitty Hawk, 
NC, in 1903, less than 100 years ago, mankind ascended into the sky 
with powered flight for the first time, and the lives of the American 
people and the people of the world were changed forever, because they 
had discovered the secret of the shape of the wing and the aerodynamics 
of an airplane. And under the new system that is being decided on 
Thursday, if it passes, the Wright brothers' secret would be made 
public for everyone in the world to know the secret before the patent 
was issued, and you can bet that Mitsubishi Corp. in Japan, which made 
airplanes during World War II to shoot down Americans and destroy 
Americans, that that corporation would have used the Wright brothers' 
patent information to build aircraft, and today the American people 
would say, well, I wonder why Japan is always ahead of us. How come 
they are always ahead of us? Like for example, how come we have to buy 
all of our jet airplanes from Japan? They would never know that if it 
was not for this type of legislation that America would have a strong 
aerospace industry, that we would have hundreds of thousands of jobs, 
high-paying, good jobs, manufacturing jet aircraft, except for the fact 
that we changed the law and the Japanese were able to steal the 
technology and go into production. Yes, that is how much difference it 
will make in the future for America, but they will never know what hit 
them.
  This law, H.R. 400, is the worst piece of legislation that I have 
seen as a Member of Congress. It is also perhaps the piece of 
legislation that has been attempted to be passed through this body in 
the most insidious manner that I have seen during my time in Congress. 
This agreement with the Japanese in 1994 has two main provisions. One 
we are talking, is the publication, and the other one happens to be the 
changing of another fundamental in our patent system called the 
guaranteed patent term.
  Americans do not even know this. But right now they have already lost 
that right. Up until 3 years ago, until from the time of the founding 
of our country, that any inventor in the United States had a right to a 
guaranteed patent term. That patent term would be the same no matter 
how long it took the patent to be issued from the bureaucracy, from the 
Patent Office. Well, that was what our Founding Fathers had in mind, 
because no matter how long it took that patent to issue after someone 
applied for a patent, he had, or she had, 17 years of guaranteed 
protection. That is called the guaranteed patent term. You would have a 
guaranteed term of 17 years. Again to model the Japanese system, that 
was replaced 3 years ago. The American people do not even know they 
have lost that right and it has been replaced by a system that is the 
Japanese system. The Japanese system, by the way, is when someone 
applies for a patent, the clock starts ticking, but it is ticking 
against the inventor and 20 years later you have no more patent rights. 
And during that 20 years, if the bureaucracy is slow or you have 
powerful interests trying to slow up the issuance of your patent, you 
are losing every second. That is why in Japan they never invent 
anything, because in reality the inventors do not have a guaranteed 
patent term. They have something that is uncertain and people do not 
invest in new technology, they invest in stealing other people's ideas.
  We have already changed that. That change was made not by an up-and-
down vote here on the floor of the House, that change was made when 
some bright person, and I do not know who that person was, decided to 
get around the democratic process in the United States, meaning let us 
not let the elected representatives of the people of the United States 
vote on this fundamental change in our patent law. Instead, this 
provision was stuck into the GATT implementation legislation. GATT was 
an agreement on trade and tariffs between a multitude of countries 
around the world. We gave our President fast-track authority which 
permitted him to make the agreement and then when he brought it back to 
the House floor, that we would have 50 days to look at it but only 
those things that were required by GATT were supposed to be in that 
legislation. This was not required by GATT. This change in our patent 
law was not required by GATT. Yet it was put into the GATT 
implementation legislation. Why was that? Because some bright person, I 
do not know who it was, decided that bypassing the democratic process 
where we would get an up-and-down vote on this did not make any 
difference. So Members of Congress were faced with voting against the 
entire world trading system or accepting this change in the patent law, 
and what was the purpose of that, what I consider to be an underhanded 
maneuver? It was to fulfill our agreement, an agreement made between 
two unelected officials, but especially the official representing us 
was unelected, in Japan. If we let unelected officials go to Japan and 
let them bargain away our rights as Americans and then come back here 
and sneak the provisions of those agreements into other pieces of 
legislation, our standard of living and our freedom are in jeopardy. 
That is why I am making such a big deal about this vote that is coming 
up on Thursday. It is a threat to our national security. It is a threat 
to the well-being of average Americans. There has never been a vote in 
this body that I have seen in my 8 years as a Member of the House that 
is more of a little guy versus big guy vote. In fact, there is 
bipartisan support of H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, 
but there is also bipartisan support for my substitute, the Rohrabacher 
substitute, H.R. 811 and 812. David Bonior, Marcy Kaptur, Cynthia 
McKinney, you name it, we have got some very strong, active, liberal 
Democrats and we have got some

[[Page H1447]]

conservative, active Republicans, but it all comes down to the little 
guy versus the big guy. Our corporate interests in the United States of 
America, the big corporations, have decided that they would be cutting 
deals with their multinational brothers and sisters, and the foreign 
corporations have decided it is time to end America's patent system as 
it has been since the founding of our country, and we are in the 
process of seeing that go down if H.R. 400 passes.
  I have told you the main aspect of H.R. 400 has been publication. But 
there are other aspects of H.R. 400 which I call other poisonous snakes 
in the bouquet. And when you ask someone about H.R. 400 and they say 
they are in favor of H.R. 400 and then want to talk about the little 
flowers, tell them you do not want to talk about the flowers, you want 
to talk about the poisonous snakes. Everybody is in favor of the 
flowers. And the first poisonous snake is the publication, mandatory 
publication. Is someone in favor of publishing for the world all of our 
secrets?
  That is No. 1. But the second item, the second poisonous snake, it is 
called reexamination.
  When our patents are issued to Americans, those patents are your 
property. You then own a piece of property for a given period of time. 
It is like someone giving you a deed. There has only been one way to 
challenge that deed, and that is if someone can prove that that person 
actually invented the invention first and that the Patent Office was 
wrong, that they invented it first. But H.R. 400, on the other hand, 
does what? H.R. 400 opens up for reexamination America's current 
patents, so not only are they putting in jeopardy all of our future 
technology, they are also putting at risk all of our current technology 
that is patented. William Banner, former U.S. Commissioner of Patents 
and Trademarks, calls attention to the fact in this bill in terms of 
publishing patent applications, and it will permit those applications 
to be subject to reexamination prior to any patent issuance as well as 
after the issuance. So what we have got here is the experts now are 
telling us, this bill permits reexamination of current patents and 
examination of those patents that are in the process, reexamination 
within the process.
  What we have got is a lawyers heaven. We have opened up for 
litigation. All of our patent rights are now on the legal block. You 
can bet that when a foreign company decides that they want to use 
American technology, and it has been patented already, that company is 
going to say, well, should we sue this American company and tie them up 
or should we just pay them royalties? They are not going to go for the 
royalties. They are going to say, let us tie them up, let us put them 
through the grinder and if this company does not have the money or if 
this small group of American inventors do not have the money to 
basically protect themselves in court, then the foreign corporation 
will win. That is on current patents. That is currently the patents 
that exist.
  This bill, H.R. 400, is an invitation to every thief in the world, 
every powerful interest in the world to come and take on the American 
people and to steal our technology. People say, well, how can anybody 
support this? Well, this same gentleman who signed this agreement is 
still the head of our Patent Office, Bruce Lehman. Last year he 
proposed, guess what? Mr. Lehman proposed last year that we give the 
entire data base of our Patent Office, that we put it on disks, on 
these computer disks, the entire data base for our Patent Office and 
give it to the Red Chinese. I know there are some people right now just 
falling out of their seats and they cannot believe that anyone would 
ever do that. When he was asked, why would we ever want to do that, his 
answer was, ``Well, we've got to tell them what not to steal, and we 
can give a little message, here's what not to steal.'' Well, that is 
very close to sending the world's worst crime syndicates the 
combinations of every safe in the United States of America and say, By 
the way, we would hope that you don't steal and use these combinations 
to the safes in the United States of America to steal American money.
  We are sending you this so you will know what not to do. Give me a 
break. What is going on here? Something is going on here. It is called 
the harmonization of law that has nothing to do with the best interests 
of the people of the United States.
  Something else, another poisonous snake in H.R. 400, the bill that 
will be voted here on Thursday, celebrating Jefferson's birthday, the 
birthday week of Thomas Jefferson, we will vote, and a poisonous snake 
in the bouquet of H.R. 400, another one, is that the Patent Office that 
is written into our Constitution, in our Constitution is written a 
provision that establishes a Patent Office. We can thank Tom Jefferson, 
we can thank Ben Franklin, we can thank our forefathers and mothers who 
saw well beyond the years of 1789 and knew that this would be important 
to our country, that we would actually establish in our Government a 
means of protecting the new genius of our people and that people would 
come from all over the world to participate in this, the American 
dream. But do you know what H.R. 400 does to the Patent Office? It 
obliterates the Patent Office. It eliminates the Patent Office as part 
of the U.S. Government. It corporatizes the Patent Office. 
Corporatizes. What does that mean? Well, I am not sure exactly what it 
means. It turns the Patent Office, which has been part of our 
Government, into sort of a quasi-private, quasi-government corporation 
that is sort of like the Post Office. To put it in perspective, our 
Patent Office has functioned for over 200 years and there has never 
been a scandal in which the patent examiners, the men and women who 
make the decision as to who owns these technologies, decisions that are 
worth billions of dollars, decisions that will mean whether or not we 
will have a high standard of living, whether or not the flow of wealth 
will come in the direction of the United States, or will pour out of 
the United States into other countries and into the coffers and bank 
accounts of other interests in the world, these patent examiners have 
never, ever had a scandal in which their veracity and their integrity 
was called and that they had failed us as Americans.

                              {time}  1425

  They have always worked hard and diligently, and it is a tough job. 
Now these people who have been protected as civil servants from outside 
influences because they were part of the U.S. Government, these civil 
servants, who we can thank for doing a good job, are now going to be 
put under a new structure that will not be part of the U.S. Government 
officially, but instead will be a corporatized entity, a corporatized 
entity.
  Now what kind of influences will be put on people who work for a new 
corporatized entity? Will they be protected from the outside?
  Well, for one thing, the patent bill suggests that this new corporate 
entity, this H.R. 400, says that it may, if you want to listen to this, 
that H.R. 400 says that this new corporate entity ``may accept monetary 
gifts or donations of services or of real personal and mixed property 
in order to carry out the function of the office.'' In other words, 
this new corporate entity will be able to receive gifts from big 
foreign corporations or special interests from here and abroad.
  Do you think that would have some impact on the way we do business, 
in the way that people make decisions as to who owns what property and 
what patents are issued? Well, it might, it might not, but we are 
opening the door. This is not a door that we want to open to poisonous 
snakes.
  And then, of course, the opposition says, well, Government agencies, 
Government agencies, can already accept gifts. Well, that is true. That 
is true, and you will hear that rebuttal from the proponents from most 
people who are supporting H.R. 400.
  My colleagues, when you hear that rebuttal, keep in mind that that is 
half the story. The other half of the story, when you can accept gifts, 
is that what can you do with those gifts?
  Currently anybody who gives a gift to a Government agency or 
department, well, those gifts now basically have to go through the 
Federal property and administrative services, and they basically, what 
you have got to do, other people, other Government agencies who are set 
up to handle these gifts, determine what happens to the gifts, and they 
basically go, and they

[[Page H1448]]

become Federal property for the overall Federal Government.
  What we are doing with this legislation is exempting this new 
corporatized Patent Office from that requirement. Thus, they will be 
able to accept gifts and use it for the Patent Office as determined by 
the directors of the Patent Office. Do you think that will influence 
anybody?
  So anybody who says do not worry about it, every Government agency 
has this same type of right to accept gifts, remember that person is 
trying to deceive you because they know darn well that currently those 
gifts and the gifts of other agencies are well controlled by the 
Federal Government, and their insurance is to make sure that does not 
influence those decision makers in those departments and agencies and 
that this new corporate entity is exempt, exempt from that type of 
safeguard.
  Also, I might add that the new corporate entity has a right to borrow 
money on the U.S. taxpayers. That is correct. This new corporation, 
this new corporation that will come into existence, the patent 
corporation, who will be deciding on our future rights as Americans, 
have a right to borrow money and to issue bonds. H.R. 400 transforms an 
agency now fully funded by user fees to one that can borrow and incur 
debt.
  Last year Patent Commissioner Bruce Lehman stated that he would 
seek--now get this--Bruce Lehman has already stated for the record that 
he would seek to borrow $2 billion, citing priorities like a new 
headquarters for the corporate structure; $2 billion added to our 
national debt. That debt is our debt. That debt, if this new 
corporation does not pay it back, becomes the responsibility of the 
American taxpayers.
  Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Can you imagine? We have got a corporate 
entity out there, somewhat independent, who now can borrow against, and 
we are responsible to pay it back. We got somebody who believes they 
are going to build, they are going to spend billions of dollars on new 
offices, and you can bet when this Mr. Lehman buys his office that he 
is going to want it to be pretty plush, and I have not seen the plan, 
but I bet you there will be more marble in this new patent building, 
especially on his floor that he has for his offices, than one can ever 
imagine, and I am sure there will be lots of gold trim, too, because 
why not? They are going to borrow from the taxpayers, and we have got a 
limited right to step in and make sure that we have oversight, they 
have limited oversight, as compared to today where we have just the 
same oversight as any other Government agency.
  So, we have this decision coming up on Thursday. We have all of these 
poisonous snakes about to be unleashed on the American people. The seed 
corn of American prosperity is about to be given away because that is 
the seed corn of America's crops in the future, that is our ideas in 
this era of ideas, and we have got the mainstream media with a total 
blackout, almost a total blackout on this issue, we have got talk show 
hosts all over the country talking about it because they have been 
informed, and they are running with it and going directly to the 
American people.
  How will the vote turn out? How will the vote turn out? It could go 
in either direction. Something as important to the future of our 
country, to the well-being of our children, something that goes to the 
heart of our system, is going to be decided, and it can go either way, 
and you have got people here who delightfully will say the biggest 
employer in my district wants me to support this bill and that is what 
I am going to do, and that is what a lot of Congressmen are basing 
their opinion on, the largest employer in their district.
  So let us talk about the dynamics of why we have ads being placed in 
the Roll Call magazine by America's largest corporations trying to 
foist off on the American people this gutting of America's patent 
system. Why is that? What are the dynamics involved?
  Well, first and foremost I believe that our own multinational and 
domestic corporations who sometimes have interlocking directorates with 
other corporations from other countries, I might add, first and 
foremost they do not want to pay royalties to inventors either. So they 
would just as soon wipe out what they consider an antiquated protection 
of American technologies because it is just too much. Of course, these 
same corporations would invest in Adolf Hitler's Germany in order to 
make a 20-percent profit, just like they are investing all of the money 
now in Communist China in order to make a 20-percent profit rather than 
creating jobs in the United States of America for American workers 
because they would rather do that even though it is a dictatorship than 
to invest over here because over here their return of their investment 
is maybe 10 percent a year, and over there it might be 20 or 25 
percent.
  Well, that is one reason. They want to make more money, they do not 
want to pay royalties, and they do not care about the people of the 
United States, and they especially do not care about these little nerd 
inventors, which is what they think of inventors.

  Well, another reason huge corporations get together and put ads in 
Roll Call, and I might add huge corporations, foreign and domestic, 
hire lobbyists, an army of lobbyists, to knock on the doors of each and 
every Member of Congress to try to get them to vote in this way is 
because they like the status quo, they like the status quo, and there 
is nothing that distorts the status quo as much as someone coming up 
with a new technological innovation. And they want to control, they 
want to control growth and progress in the United States, so that their 
investment in all of this new equipment and all of their corporate 
structures that are based on current technology, they do not want to 
put that technology at risk. They would rather us stay exactly the way 
we are because then their capital investment does not have to be 
remade. But these small inventors who come up--you know some guy who 
comes up; by the way, I have got an invention that can do that very 
same thing and will only cost a dollar as compared to $200 that you are 
charging for what you do currently. Do you think a corporate leader 
wants to hear that? They do not want to hear that. They want that guy 
to go away. They do not want the American people to have a cheaper 
widget. They do not have a cheaper refrigeration system. They do not 
want to have something that develops that makes our life better, but we 
do not have to pay as much money to some big corporation for making it 
for us.
  The fact is that the corporate leaders today are not the innovators 
of the world, they are not the people, the Alexander Graham Bells; they 
are not the Thomas Edisons. They are people who got educations in 
corporate management at big elitist schools, and they do not care about 
the people of the United States, and they do not want their elite 
position challenged. They want to control what happens in our country 
for their benefit, and they do not want new innovations coming out that 
could so stir up things that it makes their current investments 
meaningless.
  That is a big motive for what is going on right now with H.R. 400. 
That is one of the reasons that we have H.R. 400 before us today, 
because there are powerful interests who do not--do not respect the 
will, nor do they consider themselves to be Americans and watching out 
for the interest of Americans. They are watching out for their bank 
account. And what effect will this have if we let those people, those 
elitists move forward? How will it impact us? How will it impact the 
average American?
  I have had calls from all over the United States, all over the United 
States from inventors and from small companies, small businesses who 
are trying to develop new things. Just last night I was talking to a 
person who owns a small company in my own congressional district, and 
they told me, and I will not go into great detail about it, but about a 
process that will absolutely prevent, and I should not say 
``absolutely'' so often that will prevent meat from being contaminated, 
and when it is contaminated, it will alert the consumer so that never 
again will we have to worry about getting bad meat and different 
bacteria in the meat, and it would be very low cost, and it will just 
spread across America, and it is a marvelous idea, and do you know that 
he has been waiting for his patent for over 2 years, and if this system 
was in place, the system they are trying to foist on us, his 
information

[[Page H1449]]

that he used to--he used, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in 
time and investment to develop this new technology. It would have been 
published, all of his people all over the world would already have 
known about it, his competitors, and he would never ever get any return 
on it. So why should he even try in the first place? That system would 
never emerge because no one would have the profit motive to come up to 
try to invent it.
  Then of course we have got letters from a person who is trying to act 
like--talk to this person as well who has developed a way of debugging 
not only buildings, but crop land without the use of chemicals. We are 
poisoning our homes and poisoning our environment and poisoning our 
land in order to get rid of bugs that are eating our crops. This person 
has a new technology that will eliminate these bugs, kill them without 
the use of poisons, without the use of chemicals. Yet he says to me, 
``I'm afraid to write up a patent application because if it takes 15 
years or 5 years or 10 years for me to get my patent issued, all of the 
foreigners will steal my idea, and I'll never get any benefit from 
it.''
  Someone wrote me and said ``I need a new system to try to detect 
breast cancer.''
  Now these are things we do not think of, breast cancer, or meat 
spoilage, bugs that are being killed. These are little things that just 
slip by, but they make all the difference in the world to what our 
standard of living is, what kind of land that we will be in, whether or 
not we will--all of our food will be eaten by bugs or rodents or things 
like that, or we have to poison ourselves with chemicals to get rid of 
that problem.

                              {time}  1500

  These problems can be solved if we keep the door of technological 
progress open. This will slam the door in the face of these people. 
They know it. They are writing and calling every day saying, I cannot 
see a future and I will never move forward with my invention if these 
laws are in place.
  The American people will suffer, and they will never know what hit 
them. They will never know that there was equipment to debug their 
homes without chemicals. They will never know about it in the future. 
Their children will be sick and their grandparents will be sick from 
the fumes, and our food will have the chemicals in it. They will never 
know there was an alternative, because the inventors could not apply 
for a patent without the worry of having it stolen from them.
  Mr. Speaker, I had a man in my office when this was going to the 
committee, he ran a small solar energy company. And as I told him what 
was going on, his face became red and he was pounding on the table. He 
said, Mr. Congressman, if that bill passes, I have put millions of 
dollars in trying to invent this method of improving the amount of 
electricity that comes out of solar energy. If they publish my patent, 
the Japanese will be in production of what I have invested my whole 
life in; they will be in production and they will be using the money 
that they are making from my technology to steal my technology from me 
legally in the court system once my patent is issued.
  Mr. Speaker, this is wrong. This is wrong. It is going to hurt 
America. It is coming to a vote, and it is sliding right through the 
process. H.R. 400 will come to a floor vote on Thursday. There is an 
army of lobbyists contacting Members of Congress, paid for by 
multinational corporations and by huge American corporations.
  Members of Congress need to talk to their constituents and the 
constituents need to talk to their Member of Congress. That is the way 
America will be saved. That is the way America has always been saved, 
not by some top dog somewhere making some decision.
  During the American Revolution when Thomas Jefferson was writing the 
Declaration of Independence, a third of the colonists were supporting 
the British. They were basically people who were of the elite classes. 
Throughout our history, when American freedom was in jeopardy, it was 
the American people themselves and not our corporate elite and not our 
business executives, and not the big, important, handsome, and 
beautiful people that stepped forward. But it was those average 
Americans, average you and me type people, who saved the day, who 
charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, who fought with the 69th 
Regiment, the Irish Regiment at Gettysburg, who fought the American 
Revolution, and afterwards saw that they did not get anything from it, 
and those same Tories came back who had supported the British and made 
all kinds of money by speculating on currency, on continental currency.
  But I believe in the American people. I know that they will meet the 
challenges. They will keep our country free. When we celebrate Thomas 
Jefferson's birthday, and his birthday week, we will hold that torch 
high, because that is our job. It is not the job of Government. It is 
not the job of the other guy. It is the job of every human being who 
believes in liberty and believes our country must maintain the 
standards of justice and decency and the legal protection of individual 
rights far beyond those of any other country on this planet. Of that we 
can be proud.
  Mr. Speaker, as long as we have that kind of commitment, America will 
remain that dream, that hope for all mankind. And we will lead the rest 
of the world into a new era when other people do have more 
opportunities, because we will maintain our standards, rather than 
trying to bring our standards down to those of other countries.
  I am confident that we have a chance to win, but I am warning the 
people now. I am ringing the alarm bell. The people of this country 
have to step forward. I know they will.
  Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the document entitled ``Mutual 
Understanding Between the Japanese Patent Office and the United States 
Patent and Trademark Office''.
  The material referred to is as follows:
                                                 January 20, 1994.

Mutual Understanding Between the Japanese Patent Office and the United 
                   States Patent and Trademark Office

       Actions to be taken by Japan:
       1.  By July 1, 1995, the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) will 
     permit foreign nationals to file patent applications in the 
     English language, with a translation into Japanese to follow 
     within two months.
       2.  Prior to the grant of a patent, the JPO will permit the 
     correction of translation errors up the time allowed for the 
     reply to the first substantive communication from the JPO.
       3.  After the grant of a patent, the JPO will permit the 
     correction of translation errors to the extent that the 
     correction does not substantially extend the scope of 
     protection.
       4.  Appropriate fees may be charged by the JPO for the 
     above procedures.
       Actions to be taken by the U.S.:
       1.  By June 1, 1994, the United States Patent and Trademark 
     Office (USPTO) will introduce legislation to amend U.S. 
     patent law to change the term of patents from 17 years from 
     the date of grant of a patent for an invention to 20 years 
     from the date of filing of the first complete application.
       2.  The legislation that the USPTO will introduce shall 
     take effect six months from the date of enactment and shall 
     apply to all applications filed in the United States 
     thereafter.
       3.  Paragraph 2 requires that the term of all continuing 
     applications (continuations, continuations-in-part and 
     divisionals), filed six months after enactment of the above 
     legislation, be counted from the filing date of the earliest-
     filed of any applications invoked under 35 U.S.C. 120.
     Wataru Asou,
       Commissioner, Japanese Patent Office.
     Bruce A. Lehman,
       Assistant Secretary of Commerce, and Commissioner of 
     Patents and Trademarks, United States Patent and Trademark 
     Office.

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