[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 120 (Thursday, September 11, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H7254-H7259]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
PROTECTING AMERICA'S PATENT RIGHTS
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, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan
[Mr. Smith].
Our Social Security System is Going Broke
Mr. SMITH of Michigan. I thank the gentleman for yielding to me, Mr.
Speaker.
I want to talk straightforwardly about what I think is one of the
greatest problems facing this country, and that is the fact that Social
Security is going broke. Mr. Speaker, we are now looking at a situation
where there is going to be less money coming in from the taxes charged
to workers than the amount of the dollars going out in benefit
payments.
When we started this program in 1935, it was started as a pay-as-you-
go program that cannot be sustained. It was started as a program
charging workers a 1-percent tax, and then paying a very meager, a very
small benefit to retirees once they reached the age of 65. However,
most retirees at that time did not reach the age of 65. The average age
of death in 1935 was 61 years old. That meant that most people never
got any Social Security benefits, but simply paid into it.
We have now developed, with this pay-as-you-go problem, where we have
constantly solved the shortage of funds to pay benefits by increasing
taxes. So what we have done, since 1971, we have increased the taxes,
Social Security taxes, on workers 36 times, more often than once a
year. We are going to end up with generational warfare. We cannot
continue to make workers today pay more and more money in to pay for
the benefits of existing retirees.
When I go to my town hall meetings in Jackson and Battle Creek and in
Hillsdale and Adrian, people say, look, if you would keep the
Government's cotton-picking hands out of the money in the trust fund,
we would be all right. But let me tell the Members how much money is in
that trust fund, and how long it would last. The trust fund only uses
the surpluses coming in in Social Security taxes. In other words, when
there is money left over after benefits are paid out, then it goes into
the trust fund.
Now the trust fund has roughly $600 billion of IOU's. Even if the
Government came up with the money to pay back that $600 billion, it
would not last 2 years. It would last less than 2 years. So that is not
the solution, but it is part of the solution.
I think what we have to face up to is that this is a tremendous
political challenge. There are only two ways, or a combination of the
two, to save Social Security and keep it solvent. That is to increase
the revenues coming in, or reduce the benefits going out. The longer we
delay, the longer we put off coming up with a solution, the more
drastic that solution is going to be.
Dorcas Hardy, a former Commissioner for Social Security, estimates
that we are going to have less money than is needed to pay benefits, as
early as 2005. The official date according to the actuary at the Social
Security Administration is probably going to be closer to 2011 or 2012,
but it is still a huge problem.
When we started back in the 1940's, what we had is 42 people working,
paying in their Social Security taxes, to come up with the money for
each retiree. By 1950, we got down to 17 workers working and paying in
their taxes to support each retiree. Today, Mr. Speaker, guess how many
people are working today, paying in their taxes, to support each
retiree? Three. The estimate now is that by 2027 there will only be two
workers working and paying in their taxes to support each retiree.
There need to be some changes. We need to face up to it.
It should not be a commission. We have had many commissions. Ned
Gramlich, who I have known for years, from the University of Michigan,
of course led the President's effort 2 years ago with his commission,
looking at what we should do with Social Security. They could not
agree. A majority of that commission could not agree on any one
solution, so what they brought back was three different solutions.
I asked Ned when we were in a Social Security forum together if he
thought it was reasonable to appoint yet another commission, and he
rolled his eyes back and said, absolutely not. We
[[Page H7255]]
have had that. We have had Ned's commission, we have had the Kerrey
commission, we have had White House studies, we have had congressional
studies. What we need to do is have a Congress that is willing to face
up to a very serious problem, and come up with some solutions that are
going to keep Social Security solvent.
When I first came to Congress 4\1/2\ years ago I introduced
legislation, a Social Security bill, to help keep Social Security
solvent. Last year after working for a couple of years trying to refine
a long-lasting solution, I introduced another bill. That bill and the
bill that we will be introducing in the next several weeks did not
affect existing retirees. In fact, it did not affect anybody over 58
years old. But it made a lot of modest changes, plus what we are doing
in that legislation is allowing workers of this country to start their
own personal retirement savings accounts, and gain from that personal
ownership.
Unlike today's fixed pay-outs for Social Security, if you happen to
die before you reach the retirement age, you do not get anything. Under
the personal retirement savings concept, that is your money. It is your
account. It becomes part of your estate. It is what we need to move
ahead on.
One reason that all three proposals produced by Ned Gramlich's and
the Social Security commission said that privatization and private
investment has to be part of the solution is because Social Security is
not even hardly breaking even today. The money that is actually paid on
these IOU's in the Social Security trust fund only brings in a real
return of 2.3 percent.
{time} 1745
And when you look at index bonds or index stocks for a long time, for
the last 50 years, they have averaged 8.5 percent or the potential of
bringing in much more money. Opening the doors to private investment as
part of the solution is reasonable and we have to proceed with it.
Countries around the world are leading the United States.
Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, I think there are many legislators that
are very nervous about the fact that senior groups are very strong
politically, and many senior groups are very nervous that some of their
benefits are going to be taken away. But more and more senior groups
today realize that something needs to be done with Social Security if
we are going to keep it solvent. My bill is the only bill that has been
introduced in the House that keeps Social Security solvent for the next
75 years.
Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in studying this and
trying to perfect it. But it is an idea. We need to move ahead. We need
to figure out improvements for this kind of legislation so that we can
solve one of the huge problems facing this country.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California [Mr. Rohrabacher]
very much for yielding.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from California [Mr. Rohra-
bacher] is recognized for the remaining 50 minutes.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I am excited today to call the
attention of my colleagues to an event of awesome importance that
happened today at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It
concerns an issue that is in the process of being decided by Congress
that will determine our country's prosperity, our country's security,
and will determine whether or not the American people can maintain
their high standard of living, their high level of standard of living
as compared to the rest of the world and our competitors in the world
who would drag us down.
The event at MIT was a forceful communication on the part of 26
American Nobel Prize winners. These renowned economists and scientists
signed an open letter to the U.S. Congress. These are the ultimate
source of expertise that could possibly be called upon to advise we
neophytes in Congress in making the decisions that will determine the
future of our country and the well-being of our people.
Mr. Speaker, what did these 26 preeminent American scholars, these
Nobel laureates want to tell us? What is such a threat that the likes
of Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economists,
one a liberal and one a conservative, would join forces to alert our
country in?
These 26 Nobel Prize winners are pleading with Congress to defeat the
effort to dramatically change the patent law that has served our
country well since the founding of our Republic. Most Americans are
unaware that we have had the strongest patent protection system in the
world since the founding of our country. It was written right into our
Constitution. It was the commitment of Jefferson and Franklin and other
heroes of freedom and the champions of the rights of the common man
that made sure that this patent protection was written into our
Constitution.
Mr. Speaker, it has been this protection that ensured our country and
ensured our country the prosperity and progress that we have enjoyed
and ensured our people that we would be a country that would be the
bastion of human progress and they would enjoy the fruits of that
progress, and that our country would be the laboratory of free thought
and entrepreneurialism and innovation that would foster the aspirations
of people like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, the Wright
brothers and so many others.
It is a powerful force, this protection of law for technology
innovation in our country, that elevated the standard of living of our
people and secured our Nation from war and aggression.
Mr. Speaker, we were a different kind of country. That is what Thomas
Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others foresaw. We would not be
dragged into war and the common man would live with rights guaranteed
by law that the common people all over the world were denied, that
these freedoms and these protections would afford us a higher standard
of living and afford us the ability to live in peace. Peace and
progress.
Mr. Speaker, we have had the strongest patent protection, as well as
the other protection for all other rights, of any country in the world.
Now we discover a quiet but determined effort to dramatically change
it. This is what has caught the attention of our Nobel laureates.
Mr. Speaker, not a minor change. It is a change in the fundamental
laws that have protected us for over 200 years. We literally as
Americans have taken this legal protection for granted. Perhaps one out
of a thousand Americans fully understand that this has had something to
do with the standard of living our people have enjoyed, and that their
own happiness and their own success in their own life might be traced
back to this legal protection of technological development in our
country.
What 26 of America's greatest thinkers are warning us about is a bill
that is going through the Senate, S. 507, the so-called patent reform
bill. According to the Nobel laureates this bill, quote, ``Could result
in lasting harm to the United States and the world.'' They point out
that it, ``will prove very damaging to American small inventors'' and
that was by, I quote again, ``curtaining the protection they obtain by
patents relative to large multinational corporations.''
Mr. Speaker, at the end of my special order I will submit for the
Record a copy of that letter that these 26 Nobel laureates have sent to
the Congress today and affixed their signatures at MIT today.
Mr. Speaker, in their press conference today, the Nobel laureates
spoke bluntly so their warning could not be misunderstood and could not
be downplayed. I quote, ``It would create total chaos and it is
conducive to fraud and deceit,'' says Harvard economist Dudley
Herschbach, who won a 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry, a Harvard
professor. ``It would facilitate the theft of an inventor's
intellectual property rights,'' end of quote by Mr. Herschbach as well.
America's greatest economic and scientific minds are pleading with us
not to make the changes in our law that will diminish the patent
protection of the average American. I have heard this pleading before,
Mr. Speaker. As this legislation slid through the Subcommittee on
Courts and Intellectual Property, the owner of a small solar energy
corporation was in my office. And when we looked at the provisions of
this bill, his face turned white and then he clenched his fist and he
pounded on my desk and he told me, ``Mr. Congressman, if they change
the patent law in this way,'' and this is a
[[Page H7256]]
man who owns a small company that is innovative and bringing about new
changes in technology dealing with solar energy, something that will
determine who will be able to be in a dominant position for providing
energy on this planet 100 years from now or maybe even 50 years from
now. This man was pounding on my desk:
Congressman, if they change the laws in this way, it will
mean that my Japanese adversaries will be able to steal all
of my research and use it against me, and they will put me
out of business. They will use the profit from my own
technological developments to put me out of business.
That is what he told me.
Mr. Speaker, he was pleading with me to please inform my colleagues
of the threat that this held to our economy. Then a few months ago, an
entrepreneur in California who was aware of the debate then going on in
Congress about this bill called me. This is a man who also runs a small
company. This company specializes in the killing of bugs in an
environmentally safe way. His company is now developing a whole new
system of killing termites and bugs that eat up the food of mankind and
eat up our houses and destroy property. He has developed a whole new
method of doing this without the use of chemicals that would be totally
environmentally safe.
Mr. Speaker, this man told me that he was frightened because his
patent had not been issued and if this bill passed, he was afraid that
again his adversaries would have the information available from
research that he had financed and that they would put him out of
business using his own technology against him, that they would be able
to capitalize with stolen information; that he would not be able to
capitalize until the patent was issued, and he had that in his hand to
go to give people to invest in his company.
Then, more recently, I spoke with a constituent who wanted to know
what I was doing in Congress. Mr. Speaker, I told him about the patent
fight. He told me that he had been waiting for over 2 years for a
patent and he described to me a unique way, and I cannot go into
detail, of course, but a unique way of protecting the public against
tainted meat.
He told me that if the patent reform, the changes that they were
trying to put through in the Senate and they put forward in a bill here
on the House floor, would go into law, that it would bankrupt him and
that obviously people overseas and elsewhere would be copying his idea
and he would never be able to compete with the big guys, because they
would have all of his information before he was in production.
It was a heart rending thing for me to hear this, because what we
have is we have just these three examples. Someone who is developing
new solar technologies to try to make the world better. This man who
has solar technology, it is a company in Ohio, claims that his changes
will revolutionize energy production in the United States and
throughout the world. But this could make it totally environmentally
safe to produce electricity. Yet, he knows that that will be taken from
him if the changes that are being suggested in our patent law would go
into effect.
Mr. Speaker, we have someone who basically is trying to change the
way that we kill bugs so that we do not have to poison our soil, which
eventually becomes part of our body as we eat the food from the food
chain, or to put poisons and chemicals into our homes so that our
elderly and our little babies have such adverse effects from the
chemicals we need just to kill the bugs in our own houses. He has a new
way of doing that, but he knows if we change the patent law he is going
to be left out.
Then we have, here on the heels of the E. coli catastrophe in which
people lost their lives, a man who has a new way so that every
housewife, every person who runs a restaurant will know whether or not,
in a very cheap way, whether or not meat they are eating is tainted.
Mr. Speaker, these people will not continue to make these innovations
that have changed our lives in the past. These individuals I am
discussing right now, they will not continue to come forward with their
new ideas if we make them vulnerable to their foreign and domestic
predators who would take away from them everything that they have
earned with their creativity, in their investment of their time, and
their skill and their energy.
The spring of human progress will run dry if we take it for granted
and if we change our laws so that people like this, the innovators of
our society, can be robbed.
Mr. Speaker, now, what are these changes that I am talking about? The
American people who have not heard about these proposals will be
shocked to find out, because it must be pretty bad since we have 26
Nobel laureates who are pleading with us. We have had entrepreneurs
pleading with us not to do this, and yet there is huge support in the
Congress for this because there is an army of lobbyists representing
special interests trying to get these changes put into law and the
changes made in the fundamental law that have protected our citizens.
What are these changes? Who will win and who will lose by this
legislative maneuver that is going on as we speak?
{time} 1800
Well, it was 3 years ago when I discovered that Bruce Lehman, the
head of our U.S. Patent Office, had quietly gone to Japan and signed an
agreement to harmonize America's patent law with that of Japan.
Let me make that clear. Bruce Lehman, the head of our Patent Office,
signed an agreement, we have a copy of that agreement, it has been in
the Congressional Record several times, that would harmonize, commit us
to harmonize America's patent law with that of Japan's.
The very existence of this agreement that had basically been kept
from the public was frightening enough. The details of this giveaway of
American legal protections was beyond anything that I could ever have
predicted could ever even exist until I saw it for myself. I saw this
agreement.
I said, no, this is a Pearl Harbor in slow motion. This is a person
signing away the rights of the American people and getting almost
nothing in return. And I discounted it until I actually found evidence
that there were already legislative maneuvers taking place to implement
this hushed agreement with Japan. Of course, during the debate on the
patent issue, over and over and over again, I have stated about the
agreement with Japan as being the primary motivating force for the
changes that are being proposed in our patent law. Never did the
opponents, my opponents on this issue, ever address that issue until we
forced it on the floor.
Then finally they admitted, well, if you are trying to fulfill
international agreements, that is a good enough motive, and then let it
slide very quickly. I do not consider that a good answer. I do not
consider making an agreement with Japan to change our laws and make our
laws like theirs to be something that should be taken lightly.
First and foremost, the agreement made with Japan, yes, would change
our patent system, which was the strongest in the world. It is not
going to change their system; it is going to change ours. They want
change that would make our system, the strongest in the world, so it
will mirror the Japanese system which is the weakest in the world.
Thus we have a situation where a fundamental protection for the
American people, written into our Constitution, is changed. And people
are acting as if that will not change reality, that it will not change
the way we live, that it will not change our standard of living, that
it will not weaken the middle class or make us less prosperous or make
us less secure.
I hate to tell people who are that optimistic, but that is irrational
optimism. The fact is, the prosperity we enjoy, the opportunity of the
average person in this country, the peace that we have had comes from
the fact that we have been technologically superior to our adversaries,
both our economic adversaries and our political adversaries and, yes,
our military adversaries.
We have been superior to them because we have had the strongest
patent protection in the world. And now there is an agreement with the
Japanese to make our system exactly like theirs, which is the weakest
system in the world.
What happens? What happens in Japan? In Japan they do not invent
anything. Twenty-six Nobel laureates
[[Page H7257]]
have signed this letter pleading with us not to make these changes in
our patent law. Japan does not even have 26 Nobel laureates. They do
not have that many Nobel laureates to sign a letter because they have a
system that pushes the individual down, that makes sure that you have
powerful economic shoguns that beat the little guy down and steal from
him, and they have learned in Japan to be submissive.
Well, that is not what America is all about. I am not going to sit by
and neither are many of my colleagues, when they have found out about
this, and watch these changes be put into place blithely, as if they
will not affect the well-being of the American people. They will affect
it in a terrible way.
Again, I call this nothing more than a Pearl Harbor in slow motion
because if these changes are made and these people are successful, 20
years from now we will have lost our edge and the American people will
never know what hit them.
What is the essence that made ours such a strong patent system and
provided these benefits? Well, from the very founding of our country,
if you applied for a patent and it took you a long time to get that
patent, you did not worry about it. Thomas Edison and the rest of them
did not worry about it because they knew that no matter how long it
took them to be issued that patent, they would have a guaranteed patent
term, once it was issued, of 17 years.
They knew they would have that guaranteed patent term. The Wright
Brothers knew that. Thomas Edison knew that. Cyrus McCormick knew that.
The inventor of the sewing machine, Mr. Singer, knew that. This was
something that was guaranteed. It was a guaranteed right of Americans
to a patent term of 17 years.
Then we had a right of confidentiality. Everybody knows about that.
You have heard of industrial espionage. What we are really talking
about is the right of someone who has produced some new technology to
own that and that when a patent has been applied for, that American has
always had the right from the very beginning of our country to
confidentiality. That confidentiality, by the way, has meant up until
now that if someone in the Patent Office or someone else got ahold of
the information of that patent application and released it to the
public or stole it away or gave it to an adversary, that person could
be charged criminally. That was a criminal charge to disclose
information at the Patent Office.
So until the patent was issued, the person, the inventor, the
innovator would know that, be comfortable that that information was not
going to get to his enemies.
Third, there was an integrity to the patent once it was issued. In
our system, once that patent is issued, it is a property right that is
respected and has all the protections of almost every other property
right. It was a solid piece of legal protection.
The Japanese system was different in each and every one of these
ways. There was no guaranteed patent term. The minute someone applies
for a patent under the Japanese system, the clock is ticking, not
against the bureaucracy or the adversaries, but it is ticking against
the inventor. And 20 years later, even if the patent has never been
issued, that patent applicant loses all rights, all rights to any
rewards from his invention and his new patent application.
Second, under the Japanese system, unlike our system, there is no
right of confidentiality. After 18 months in Japan, an inventor applies
for a patent and, after 18 months, it is published so that all the big
guys can see what that guy is doing. They can come down and surround
that little guy, and they can force him, through legal actions, both
above the board and under the board, to give up that new innovation so
that they can take the benefits for themselves.
Again, people in Japan never invent anything; of course, they do not.
Just like if we let people steal the crops from our farmers and that
would have been the way we lived, that the farmers always had all their
crops stolen, pretty soon there would not be many farmers trying to
grow crops anymore. Why should they?
Of course, in Japan, once a patent is issued, that patent is only
worth about a half or a fourth as much as patents over here because
there is what is called reexamination, which is basically saying that
their patents lack integrity.
Needless to say, I was shocked when I learned that there was already
an effort to implement the secret agreement to make our system like
Japan's, because I could not believe it. No one is going to permit this
to happen.
Sure, not only is it going to happen, they are trying to make it
happen as we speak. This sellout of American patent rights to the
Japanese and other American economic adversaries is going on right now.
I first discovered the maneuver when I found a small provision snuck
into the GATT implementation legislation. You may remember that.
GATT, a few years ago, GATT was brought to this body under fast
track. I voted for fast track. I would not do it again. I would not do
it again. But I voted for fast track because here is the understanding:
The administration can negotiate an important trade deal with the
knowledge that when they come here to the House that we will not be
able to add or detract little provisions of it, but we have to vote it
up or down. We cannot amend it. And in agreement for that, the
administration agrees not to put in the implementation legislation
anything that is not required by the treaty itself and give us ample
time to look at the provisions.
The administration, this administration betrayed the Congress,
betrayed me personally, because I voted for fast track. But I found
that they had put into the GATT implementation legislation a provision
that was not required by GATT. But what it was required by was this
secret, little hushed-up agreement that they made with the Japanese to
make our law exactly like the Japanese patent law. It had nothing to do
with GATT. It had everything to do with that agreement with the
Japanese.
In fact, I asked several times whether that provision would be in the
GATT implementation legislation. Several times I was told it was none
of my business. Is that not really nice for Members who are elected by
the people of the United States to hear from an unelected official,
that it is none of our business whether or not something will be
included in a major piece of legislation? That provision in the GATT
implementation legislation ended the 17-year guaranteed patent term
that had been a right of Americans for over 160 years.
Was it a coincidence? Was this a coincidence? No. It was not a
coincidence. In fact, you might think this just sort of got in there by
mistake. It might be, well, that is not a plan, it is not some sort of
maneuver.
Well, darn, if you just take a look at the other things that we have
found since GATT passed, you will find that it is not a coincidence at
all. In fact, lo and behold, another bill, another bill was passed
through this body, and it was another bill that contained the other
provisions that were part of the agreement that Bruce Lehman made with
the Japanese years ago. What a coincidence.
In the GATT bill, there is the first provision of ending the
guaranteed patent term. By the way, every American who hears my voice
tonight or reads this in the Congressional Record or my colleagues
should understand that 5 years ago, Americans had a right, a right to a
guaranteed patent term. And they had that right since the founding of
our country, and that now has been taken away and people do not even
know what that is all about.
They have already had one of their rights taken away, and it is like
they do not understand it. But they knew that Members of Congress, of
course, would watch out for them and, if that right was important, that
we would not have let it go.
No, it was put into the GATT implementation legislation, and we had
no choice but either vote for that bill, including that provision, or
vote against the entire world trading system. It was a betrayal of
those of us who voted for fast track.
Then we find that the skids are greased for another piece of
legislation that finishes the job of fulfilling the commitments made by
Mr. Lehman to the Japanese. It was part of the Patent Publication Act
which last session was put into the hopper, the Patent Publication Act.
[[Page H7258]]
But we stopped it in the last session. One of the reasons we were
able to stop the Patent Publication Act last session was because it was
too blatant. No one thought that anybody would pay attention to Dana
Rohrabacher or anybody else talking about the patent issue. And the
very title of the bill demonstrated what that bill did. What did it do?
It demanded, like in Japanese law, after 18 months, if someone
applies for a patent after 18 months, whether or not the patent has
been issued, that it is going to be published for the entire world to
see. This is what the entrepreneurs that I was talking about were
pleading with us to save them from. They knew that if all of their
innovation and their technological development was made public before
their patent was issued, it was an invitation for every thief in the
world to come here and steal our technology and use it against us, not
only economically but on the battlefield as well.
So this session, this last session of Congress, we were able to stop
that. It did not go through. So this session of Congress, it was
reintroduced. It was reintroduced in a different name. The new name of
the Patent Publication Act, which lets you know exactly what it is all
about, they are going to publish all of our secret information, the new
name of this bill is now the 21st Century Patent Reform Act.
Oh, my goodness, the Patent Reform Act has replaced the Patent
Publication Act. I do not think this fools anybody. I think it is
pretty crass for them to change the name of the legislation like this
in order to cover up the basic purpose of the legislation.
{time} 1815
What was in that bill? Well, what was in the bill this session was
the same thing as last session. No. 1, after 18 months, whether the
patent has been issued or not, it was going to be published for every
thief in the world to come and take our technology and use it against
us.
No. 2, in the bill was a provision, again mirroring some of the
things in the Japanese system. A system of reexamination, that is what
they call it. What reexamination is, is it means that once an
individual is issued a patent, these powerful interest groups, whether
they are in Japan or in the United States or in China, or wherever they
are, they can come in and challenge the patents that have already been
issued to Americans.
So we are not only talking about new innovations that are being
threatened by this patent bill, we are talking about challenges to our
patent holders so that instead of paying the royalties to our
inventors, foreign corporations and, yes, our own big corporations will
just find legal ways to attack the legitimacy of the patent that has
already been issued.
This will be a catastrophe. It will be a disaster for the guys who do
not have the money to buy a stable of lawyers.
Third, this bill, and I know this is going to sound funny, but it
actually obliterates the Patent Office as part of the U.S. Government.
It really does. That bill, the bill I am talking about, the 21st
Century Patent Reform Act, would take the Patent Office, which has
never had a scandal in our country's history, because the patent
examiners, God bless those hard-working people, they have never had a
scandal in the sense that our patent examiners have been found guilty
of passing on information or taking bribes. They have always done their
job without fanfare.
But they want to take that organization now and turn it into a quasi-
private, quasi-government corporation like the Post Office, opening
these patent examiners up to influences and forces that they have never
had to deal with before.
The patent examiners work hard. They make decisions that will tell us
who owns what properties that are worth billions of dollars, and now we
are going to just for no reason, without looking at this, turn it into
a Post Office, like private corporations, like where huge corporations
can have their people on the board of directors and it can accept
gifts.
This makes no sense at all. It is like taking our courts and opening
them up to outside influence. It is crazy, but that is what is part of
the bill.
There has been an army of lobbyists in this town spending millions of
dollars, and these lobbyists are not just from huge American
corporations; they are from corporate interests from throughout the
world trying to influence this Congress, this House and the U.S. Senate
to pass this legislation, and they are trying to keep it as quiet as
possible.
Tonight, they are so upset because these 26 Nobel Laureates are
calling attention, calling to the attention of the American people this
horrible, horrible change that they are trying to make in our legal
protections.
Well, if it were not for democracy on the air, talk radio, because
the mainstream media has never paid attention to this, and hopefully,
the mainstream media will pay some attention to these Nobel Laureates,
but throughout this entire battle, for 3 years, the mainstream media
would not pay attention to this battle.
So I went to the talk shows and other people went to the talk shows
and democracy on the air mobilized the American people. And when that
bill went through this House, we were able to get out of it about 60
percent of the bad stuff.
Then it went over to the Senate. However, in the Senate, Senator
Hatch is trying to push a piece of legislation, S.507, that is just as
bad as the worst piece of legislation that was introduced here in the
House.
What is going to happen? Action will take place in the Senate. People
will have to call their U.S. Senators and their Congressmen, because
once it takes place in the Senate, it will come back to the House in a
conference committee, and behind closed doors, the decision will be
made as to what the patent system will look like, and behind closed
doors is where these lobbyists from these multinational corporations,
from these huge predator corporations will have their most influence
unless we can kill it in the Senate, unless the Senate votes it down
and refuses to let it through the Senate.
It will be decided by the close of this session of Congress.
If we are able to mobilize the American people and let them know that
a decision is being made that changes the fundamental protections we
have had as Americans, we can win this. But every American has to
participate. Every Member of Congress has to participate.
And let me note that I had lost my battle to offer a substitute to
the patent bill when it came to the floor. I lost my battle. And it was
the gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. Kaptur], a Democrat, and this is a
totally bipartisan effort, but the gentlewoman from Ohio introduced a
piece of legislation, an amendment to that same patent bill, that gave
us the victory that we had. We won that because of that amendment, and
we took out 60 percent of the bad stuff of that patent bill.
We have had broad-based bipartisan support because people, once we
get their attention, once they listen to the Nobel Laureates pleading
and saying something must be wrong here, what is going on, they
understand that we are making a change that will hurt the American
people, that will ensure that our children have a lower standard of
living because they will not have the technological edge against our
adversaries.
The entrepreneurs, the small businessmen, the individual inventors,
the professors, and now the Nobel Laureates are pleading with us to pay
attention. Please, please look and see what is happening here.
How can anyone vote for a piece of legislation that will disclose all
of America's economic and technological secrets to our worst
adversaries to use against us? How is that possible?
Please get involved. Do what Americans have to do to keep this a free
country, and that is, participate in the decisionmaking process from
the community back to Washington, DC. We are not meant to be a country
that is ruled from a central capital.
That brings me to the final point I would like to make. Yes, this
patent battle is symbolic. It is important in and of itself, but it is
also symbolic. It is symbolic of something else that is happening in
this post-cold war world that worries me tremendously.
What worries me is, I see the centralization of power, this sort of
momentum that is taking place, that will leave Americans vulnerable to
the predators of the world and will leave
[[Page H7259]]
the American people on a desolate island that lacks freedom and lacks
prosperity in the years ahead because we have given away our
authority and given away our constitutional protections to
multinational organizations, whether it is the World Trade
Organization, the World Environmental Organization, the United Nations,
or the continued squandering of our defense dollars in order to defend
Europe or Africa or other places.
The fact is, European security is not worth the tens of billions of
dollars we spend by stationing troops there. Let them defend
themselves. We should be a strong military power, but we should make
the decisions ourselves. We should not be submitting our troops to the
United Nations. We should not be submitting our economic decisions to
global organizations who are run by unelected officials, who someday
will make decisions detrimental to our people, and we will have no
recourse through the ballot box to change those decisions. We will find
ourselves vulnerable because we have given authority to foreigners who
are not elected to make the fundamental decisions for our country or
for the security of our troops.
This change in the patent law, trying to harmonize us with another
country like Japan, which will prove, I believe, to be catastrophic, is
just one of many moves to create a global marketplace, a global
economy.
I believe in free trade, but that is free trade between free
individuals. That is not a world-regulated trading system with an
unelected bureaucracy making decisions for us.
Our multinational corporations seem to want to invest in
dictatorships so they can make a 15-percent profit off slave labor,
rather than a 5-percent profit over here using free Americans who are
proud and have rights protected by the Constitution. No, they would
rather go overseas and invest in Communist China.
These things are elite. America's political and economic elite seem
to have lost faith with the fundamental vision our Founding Fathers had
of a country of free and prosperous people where even the common man
had opportunities and guaranteed rights that were undreamed of in the
whole history of mankind. If we lose that vision, we will lose our
freedom and our children will not live decent lives, and this bothers
me. This patent fight is only one indication of that attitude.
Let us fight this battle together. Let us pick up the torch that
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin talked about.
Mr. Speaker, as I yield back the balance of my time, I submit for the
Record the letter I referred to earlier in my remarks.
An Open Letter To the U.S. Senate:
We urge the Senate to oppose the passage of the pending
U.S. Senate Bill S. 507. We hold that Congress, before
embarking on a revision of our time tested patent system,
should hold extensive hearings on whether there are serious
flaws in the present system that need to be addressed and if
so, how best to deal with them. This is especially important
considering that a delicate structure such as the patent
system, with all its ramifications, should not be subject to
frequent modifications. We believe that S. 507 could result
in lasting harm to the United States and the world.
First, it will prove very damaging to American small
inventors and thereby discourage the flow of new inventions
that have contributed so much to America's superior
performance in the advancement of Science and technology. It
will do so by curtailing the protection they obtain through
patents relative to the large multi-national corporations.
Second, the principle of prior user rights saps the very
spirit of that wonderful institution that is represented by
the American patent system established in the Constitution in
1787, which is based on the principle that the inventor is
given complete protection but for a limited length of time,
after which the patent, fully disclosed in the application
and published at the time of issue, becomes in the public
domain, and can be used by anyone, under competitive
conditions for the benefit of all final users. It will do so
by giving further protection to trade secrets which can be
kept secret forever, while reducing the incentive to rely on
limited life patents.
Nobel Laureates in support of the letter to congress, re:
Senate Bill 507
Franco Modigliani, (1985, Economics) MIT.
Robert Solow, (1987, Economics) MIT.
Mario Molina, (1995, Chemistry) MIT.
Ronald Hoffman, (1981, Chemistry) Cornell.
Milton Friedman, (1976, Economics) University of Chicago.
Richard Smalley, (1996, Chemistry) Rice.
Clifford Shull, (1994, Physics) MIT.
Herbert A. Simon, (1978, Economics) Carnegie-Mellon.
Douglass North, (1993, Economics) Washington University.
Dudley Herschbach, (1986, Chemistry) Harvard.
Herbert C. Brown, (1979, Chemistry) Purdue.
David M. Lee, (1996, Physics) Cornell.
Daniel Nathans, (1978, Medicine) Johns Hopkins.
Doug Osheroff, (1996, Physics) Stanford.
Har Gobind Khorana, (1968, Medicine) MIT.
Herbert Hauptman, (1985, Chemistry) Hauptman-Woodward Medical
Research Institute.
John C. Harsanyi, (1994, Economics) UC Berkeley.
Paul Berg, (1980, Chemistry) Stanford.
Henry Kendall, (1990, Physics) MIT.
Paul Samuelson, (1970, Economics) MIT.
James Tobin, (1981, Economics) Yale.
Jerome Friedman, (1990, Physics) MIT.
____________________