[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.

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