[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 68 (Wednesday, May 12, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H3070-H3071]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       SUCCESS OF UNITED STATES SOFTWARE INDUSTRY IS JEOPARDIZED

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Ryun of Kansas). Under a previous order 
of the House, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is recognized 
for 5 minutes.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I came to the podium today to talk about 
technology, but hearing the eloquent statement by the gentleman from 
Michigan (Mr. Stupak), I want to associate myself with his comments, 
particularly since I lost my cousin, Mark Brown, of the Kent County 
Sheriff Department, who died in the line of duty several weeks ago.
  I just want to tell my colleagues there are many things we can do for 
our law enforcement officers, but I want to say that it has made me a 
person who stops when I can and thank our uniformed police officers for 
their duty of getting up every day and wondering if they are coming 
home, and I know other Members feel as I do.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to address some good news in our economy, 
and that is the incredible success of our software industry. None of us 
can turn around without reading of a new brilliantly creative and 
dynamic invention by the software industry. There is plentiful good 
news in this segment of our economy. But there are two things that this 
Congress needs to help this industry with that I would like to address 
tonight.
  The first thing is that the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Executive 
needs to be more aggressive to make sure that our trading partners 
across the seas stop stealing software from American software workers. 
We have a lot more software workers than we used to. In 1990, we had 
290,000 employees in software.

                              {time}  1915

  We now have over 60,000 Americans involved in developing software, 
and they put their hard-earned efforts and their creative genius in it. 
And then all too frequently, people across the waters, our good trading 
partners, steal that software that they have designed with their hard-
earned labor. And we are making an effort, the administration, and I 
laud the administration for their efforts to try to get some of our 
trading partners to agree to stop those practices, to have more 
vigorous enforcement of copyright protections and intellectual property 
rights.

[[Page H3071]]

  But now that we have just started to get some of those agreements on 
paper, it is time to get them in reality. And during the upcoming WTO 
talks in Seattle this fall, we are encouraging the administration and 
all of our trading partners to join us in making sure that we shine a 
spotlight on some of those agreements to find out if those agreements 
indeed are being honored, to help our trading partners recognize that, 
while we go forward on trade, we are going to go forward on protecting 
intellectual property; that, while we have got agreements in writing, 
now we have to have them in reality. Obviously, we hope, with our 
growing relationship with China, we will have this discussion.
  Recently, I spoke with the ambassador from China, was in the 
audience, and reminded the ambassador that we are happy about the 
progress that we have made in our agreements with China in the hopes 
that they would help stop some of this piracy of intellectual property 
rights but that we wanted to use our future discussions to make sure 
that we help China move forward in reality to prevent the piracy that 
has gone on.
  And I do not mean to single out China. This has been a difficult 
situation in many parts of the world. I simply think that we have got 
to be more aggressive in asserting our rights.
  Secondly, Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about what I think is one of 
the saddest failures of American public policy recently, and that is we 
have been abject failures at training people to fill high-tech and 
software jobs.
  We have had tens of thousands of jobs go begging every year, go 
begging, because we have not educated our youth to take these jobs in a 
very high-paying industry, a very dynamic industry. And we ought to, in 
this Congress, look for every single way we can to develop the 
opportunities for our children so that they can take the jobs in the 
high-tech industry and, in fact, we do not have to go offshore, where 
we have been forced to go.
  It is time for us to recognize our responsibility to our children and 
to our economic futures to make every child have access to training so 
that they can go into the software industry and the high-tech industry.
  One little project we are working on in my district in the north 
Seattle area is with Edmunds and Shoreline Community College to try to 
build a tech center, the Puget Sound Technology Center, to try to get 
thousands of kids who now want access to this training to give them 
that opportunity to help fill these spots.
  Mr. Speaker, these are the two things. This Congress can help truly 
the most dynamic industry perhaps in human history since the invention 
of the wheel, stop piracy of the hard-earned work of our software 
workers and let us make sure that our children can get into the 
industry.

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