[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 47 (Thursday, March 19, 2015)]
[House]
[Pages H1793-H1797]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE AMERICAN PATENT SYSTEM
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 6, 2015, 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 my friend from New York (Mr.
Katko).
Domestic Violence and Sexual Abuse
Mr. KATKO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about important issues
that face our society, domestic violence and sexual abuse.
As a former Federal prosecutor for the last two decades, I witnessed
how violence affects people of all ages, races, religions, and
socioeconomic conditions. Domestic violence does not discriminate.
Our country has a moral obligation to stand up against those who
exploit their power to commit violence against men, women, and
children.
In an effort to raise awareness and to put an end to domestic
violence and sexual abuse, my district will be kicking off the White
Ribbon Campaign. The White Ribbon Campaign is one of the largest
efforts in the world of people working together to prevent and end
domestic violence and sexual assault against women, men, and children.
The White Ribbon Campaign will begin this Friday, March 20, and run
through March 29.
Vera House of Syracuse, New York, is spearheading the local effort in
my district. Vera House is a comprehensive domestic and sexual violence
service agency that provides shelter, advocacy, and counseling services
for women, children, and men. They also provide education and
prevention programs and community coordination.
Vera House will be providing white ribbons, such as the one on my
lapel here, and white wrist bands, such as the white one on my wrist
here today, in an effort to build awareness and put a stop to domestic
violence and sexual abuse.
From March 20 to March 29, thousands of my constituents in central
New York will be wearing a white ribbon or a white wristband to raise
awareness about domestic violence and sexual abuse.
I encourage my House colleagues to join me and New York's 24th
Congressional District in wearing a white ribbon to put a spotlight on
this very important issue. Wearing the white ribbon demonstrates a
personal pledge to never commit, condone, or remain silent about
violence against men, women, or children.
I hope my country can join me today to support survivors of abuse
while providing alternatives to this destructive cycle.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I hope everyone paid attention to that
wonderful idea that has just been given to us.
These Special Orders play a role here in that we permit ourselves the
opportunity to hear from people for a little bit more than 1 minute to
talk about issues that are significant and who would like to bring them
to the attention of the American people and, of course, to their
colleagues here in Congress.
Today I intend to bring the attention of the American people and my
colleagues to a threat to the well-being of the American people, a
major threat that has gone unrecognized and could well change our way
of life and change the way of life for our children and destroy one of
the basic rights that were written into our Constitution in order to
protect the prosperity and security of our country.
I am talking about the changes that are being proposed in our
fundamental technology law, in our patent system. And I know that
sounds very boring to most people. But the fact is, without a strong
patent system, the American people would be at the mercy of both
competitors, in terms of their labor overseas, but also in terms of the
vicious and totalitarian elements in other countries that might want to
do us harm.
{time} 1245
It is our ability to produce the technology that America needs in
order to make our people competitive and to produce the wealth that is
necessary for a decent standard of living that has made America the
great country that it is. We are a great country not because we have
very powerful and wealthy interests here in the United States, which we
do. We are a great country because ordinary people are permitted to
live decent lives and because our country has not been challenged
throughout its history over and over again and had to waste all of our
resources and all of our wealth on vast amounts of armaments and
drafting all of our people into the military and having a militarized
society in order to have us safe from a foreign threat. No. What we
have done is we have been able to produce wealth dramatically in our
country and had our workers' being competitive with labor from around
the world because we have been technologically superior.
Mr. Speaker, there is a threat to that technology superiority, an
incredible threat that is being foisted off on the Congress and the
American people. I am here to alert my fellow Members of Congress to
this threat.
One needs only to see how important the technology element of our
society has been right here in the United States Congress. There is a
statue here in the Capitol to Philo Farnsworth. Now, who the heck knows
who Philo Farnsworth was? Well, not many. But there is a statue to him
here because he represents a very significant part of the American
story.
Philo Farnsworth was a farmer in Utah, a man who was educated in
engineering, but a man who had very little resources. He set out in
between farming to try to find and discover a technological secret that
had perplexed some of the most powerful and financial interests in our
country.
RCA, at that time under a man named David Sarnoff, was America's
premier technology company, a company that had vast resources and was
deeply involved in trying to find out how to invent a picture tube, how
we would have a tube that showed images rather than just radio waves
that had voice on them. This was a huge challenge and a historic
challenge. RCA pumped millions of dollars of research into this.
[[Page H1794]]
The one who discovered this secret was Philo Farnsworth, an
independent inventor, a man who was a farmer in Utah. He discovered the
secret and then wrote to RCA very naively believing that this big
corporation would honor his discovery and permit him to have the
benefit--or at least a benefit--from this discovery.
Yes, then RCA sent Philo Farnsworth a representative from their
laboratories. When he described what he had found, the scientist from
RCA went away saying, ``We will be in touch,'' and never got in touch.
The next thing that Philo knew was that there was an announcement that
RCA had made a major breakthrough in discovery--only it was exactly the
discovery that Philo Farnsworth had made and had transmitted the
information to RCA.
This became one of the great jury and great legal battles of the
early 20th century. Philo Farnsworth, an individual person, was up
against the most powerful American corporation of the day, RCA, and had
one of the strongest and toughest leaders of that corporation, David
Sarnoff, who vowed not to give him a penny and not to recognize him
because it was RCA that actually came up with this.
Philo Farnsworth was able to mobilize support behind his claim. He
was able to have people invest in his lawsuits, and slowly but surely
they made their way through our court system all the way to the Supreme
Court of the United States. God bless the United States of America. A
single man, a poor, individual farmer who had come up with an important
technology secret had his rights respected by our Supreme Court over
the power and influence of America's most powerful corporation of the
day, RCA.
Philo Farnsworth was recognized as the inventor, the inventor of the
picture tube which has transformed our country and transformed the
world. All the picture tubes you see, and now the screens that we see
on our computers, can be traced back to the discovery of this one
individual, Philo Farnsworth, and the tragedy that his life was
because, over the years, he lived a very poor life. He was constantly
in struggle. He had very little resources. By the time he won the
Supreme Court case, it was late in his life, and he did not benefit, as
he should have greatly, from that.
We have a statue to this wonderful American, a man who stands for
what America stands for, using technology to benefit the people, not
just to enrich huge corporate interests. Indeed, Philo Farnsworth has a
statue here in the Capitol. But you will never see a statue to David
Sarnoff of RCA. That shows you where the heart and soul of America is.
The fact that we had a Supreme Court that decided for the little guy
rather than the huge, powerful corporation showed what kind of country
we have. That is what makes America great. That is what has created the
new technologies that have uplifted our people and made sure that our
people were competitive and, thus, had high standards of living and
that we were secure from foreign threats because we were
technologically superior to those foreign threats.
This is what has made America great, and today it is in jeopardy. The
technological edge of our country will be robbed from us by
multinational corporations who are powerful and are shifting issues
through the Congress that will greatly diminish the patent protection
of the American people. Had these same changes in the law that these
multinational corporations would now foist upon us been the law in the
days of Philo Farnsworth, we would have no picture tube. We would never
have had a Philo Farnsworth. We would never have had the recognition of
the creative genius of the American people. Instead, we would have had
the powerful, rich, multinational corporations running roughshod over
America's creative genius.
No. We have that threat today, and I would ask people to pay close
attention to what is happening here on the floor of House in the next
few months. What has happened is we have to understand that patent
protection of the American people is something that was written into
our Constitution. It is part of the heart and soul of our country.
Benjamin Franklin is well-known as the man who discovered
electricity, but he was also one of the great Founders of our
Declaration of Independence and, yes, one of the people who authored
our Constitution--Benjamin Franklin, the great technology hero, the
hero of liberty and just for all.
If you go to Monticello and visit Thomas Jefferson's home, it is
filled with inventions, small inventions. Thomas Jefferson knew that we
were not going to rely on Big Government, we couldn't rely on big
corporate interests and rich people, but we would rely on the genius of
the American people through technology. Freedom and technology are the
two things that would uplift ordinary Americans. Those things are now
at stake. They are now in danger.
We, in fact, are now facing basic changes to the concept of
intellectual property rights, and especially the rights of our
inventors, and it is being foisted upon this body in what I would say
is a very deceitful manner by powerful interest groups from the
outside. But remember, with the protection that we have had, America
has had the inventions. We have uplifted the standard of living of the
ordinary American.
We built the reaper, which permitted us to harvest huge crops of food
so that Americans were well-fed, and we became the breadbasket of the
world; the cotton gin which made sure that people had clothing. There
was a Black American who invented the machine that permitted the mass
production of shoes. The mass production of shoes was permitted because
a Black American whose other rights were not protected, his rights to
own the intellectual property, the inventions, the patent rights to his
invention, were respected. Because of that, all Americans ended up with
being able to have more than just one pair of shoes. Before this man
invented his invention of how to mass produce shoes, ordinary people
had one pair of shoes and that was it. That was it. When they wore out,
your feet wore out.
We had things like the electric light that we know that Thomas Edison
was so involved with; telephones, Alexander Graham Bell. All the major
inventions that we have were invented by American genius, not of very
powerful corporations, but of the American genius of the American
people.
What we have always had, however, is a situation where big guys did
try to steal the creativity of the little guy, but in our country, they
couldn't get away with it. In our country, the Philo Farnsworths knew
that they would be protected if they created something that uplifted
their fellow man. So Americans and American genius was put to work as
never before in any country's history to make sure ordinary people, and
especially our working people in our factories and our companies, could
be competitive with those factories and companies and the workers
overseas.
Our people don't work harder than the people overseas. That is not
what made us a great country. The fact is people work really hard all
over the world, especially in Third World countries where people live
in utter poverty. They work really hard. But it is the technology that
is put into play, the technology put into play with that hard work and
the profit motive for investing in that technology and creating that
technology, that is what has made the difference in an American people
that are well-fed, American people with great opportunities, American
people who can be proud that they have a decent standard of living and
are able to make decisions for themselves and their families, not just
live in the abject poverty that existed for so long in so much of the
world.
No, it wasn't just our hard work. It wasn't just our natural
resources. It was a Constitution that wrote into it the rights of every
individual citizen. And paramount to those rights, even before the Bill
of Rights in our Constitution, is a provision that guarantees that our
inventors and our writers will be given the right to own, to control
their invention or their book for a given period of time and profit
from it.
Traditionally, our inventors have had ownership rights to what they
have invented for 17 years of protection. During that 17 years, they
would own it, and when they applied for a patent, once that patent was
issued, they would have 17 years to control what they had invented.
Also, until that patent was issued, it has always been, in the United
States, kept totally secret
[[Page H1795]]
what that invention is until the inventor has been actually granted the
rights to own that invention.
Well, these things have led directly to a genius, a surge of genius
in our borders that reflected the fact that our people had freedom and
technology available to them. So these are things that we have taken
for granted because this is what America is all about.
But today, powerful multinational corporations, especially in the
electronics industry, are trying to destroy America's patent system. My
colleagues should now understand this, and the American people should
understand this and be talking to their Member of Congress and their
Senators, because if they succeed in undermining our patent system and
destroying the rights of the little guy to own what he has created and
give the big guys the power to steal from the little guys, we will see
a difference in our country. Within a generation, we will no longer
have these advantages that I just spoke about. What we have today is an
effort by the big guys to change the rules so they can get away with
stealing from the little guys.
Now, obviously, people aren't going to come out and just say:
``Please let's vote for a bill that is going to break down the patent
system so that big, multinational corporations can steal from American
inventors.'' Of course they are not going to say that. So what do they
say? Well, let me put it this way. 25 years ago when I first noticed--
this fight has been going on the entire time that I have been in
Congress.
I noticed that what had happened was that some big corporations were
trying to put into the GATT implementation--GATT is a trade treaty.
They were trying to put into that trade treaty's implementation
language a bill that had to go through Congress, changes in our patent
system that weren't even required by the treaty. I will get into what
they were doing if you really want to see how heinous and sinister this
is.
What were those changes 25 years ago that these big corporations
wanted to make? Number one was saying that, yes, when you apply for
your patent, 20 years after you apply for it, you really have no patent
rights after that at all, even if it takes 15 years to get your patent.
{time} 1300
The American system was the clock starts ticking when you get your
patent, 17 years of protection. These big guys were trying to give our
American inventors maybe no protection. After 20 years, they had
nothing.
But everybody would know about it because the second provision they
were trying to foist off on us was that after 18 months, if a patent
had been applied for, after 18 months, even if the patent had not been
granted, they were going to publish the patent application, so that
every thief in the world would have heard all of the secrets of every
American inventor.
They called it the Patent Application Publication Act, they were so
blatant about it. After we fingered it and drew America's attention to
it, they changed the name, of course.
Then it became an issue of not trying to disclose patents or patent
applications, not trying to limit the amount of ownership that our
patent people had; it became, instead, a battle against the ``submarine
patentors.'' That is what they called it.
That was the bogeyman that was created that day in order to get
people here to vote in a way that would destroy the patent rights of
the American people, the patent rights that I just outlined.
Both of those were going to be eliminated. You are going to have,
instead of no disclosure, you will have full disclosure of your patent
application, even before you are granted the patent, and you are not
guaranteed any specific time, but your patent was going to run out
after 20 years, even if you had never had any time to protect it. That
is what they were trying to do, and we managed to stop them.
We put a coalition together, a bipartisan coalition. Marcy Kaptur of
Ohio and myself have been active on this issue for the last 25 years,
trying to thwart these huge corporate interests who are trying to
neuter the rights of the little guy, of the small inventor, of the
independent operator.
How did we stop them that very first time? Well, we added an
amendment on that said these changes that are being foisted on us
today--or being voted on today--only apply to companies that have over
100 employees.
All of a sudden, those people who were advocating this saying, Oh,
this will be good for everybody, especially the small inventor, all of
a sudden, they had to withdraw the bill.
Well, if it was so good for the little guy, why would they withdraw
the bill? Well, they withdrew the bill because the bill was aimed at
helping huge corporate interests to step on the little guy in the
United States.
We defeated that, but we have been fighting, fighting, fighting for
20 years; and this year, it looks like we have lost the leverage that
we had to defeat these powerful special interests.
That is why it is important for the American people and people
involved in technology development to pay attention to proposals that
are being made here in the House and in the Senate concerning
intellectual property rights, especially concerning the patent rights
that our people have enjoyed, as I say, since the founding of our
country.
Today, we have a bill that is being presented. Again, it can't be
presented on how do we destroy the patent rights of the average
American. They have to find something that sounds so sinister that they
can set up a straw man. They will say, Look at him, we are going to
beat him up. That is what this bill is about.
Just like I said, submarine patents were the reason why they had to
eliminate the right of the small inventor to a guaranteed term or to
have confidentiality in its patent application like before. That was a
submarine patent.
Well, now, they are not saying that. They have had to come up with a
better term that is even more frightening and sickening than submarine
patent. The cynical nature of this type of debate on an issue was
demonstrated by the fact that a corporate leader, who was on the other
side of this issue than I am, has now changed his position and come to
me with a description of how the words ``patent troll'' came about
because, now, we hear that we have got to change the law, not for
submarine patents, but now because patent trolls are preying on the
American people, they are draining us of funds and enriching
themselves, these patent trolls.
Well, where did that word come from? This gentleman that I am talking
about was in a meeting with the heads of some very powerful
corporations. They sat around in a circle to decide what term they
should use.
He said to me: Well, I recommended ``patent pirate.'' Well, that
wasn't sinister enough, so they came up with patent troll.
By the time everyone heard that: Yes, that is the one.
Well, why is it the one? Because it sounds so sinister that it is
going to be able to blind people as to who the real victim is. Now, we
are out to get the patent troll, but it is the little guy, it is the
small inventor, it is the independent inventors that are going to be
damaged severely by an attack on a patent troll.
Now, what is a patent troll, by what they are trying to tell us?
Patent troll--we keep hearing the argument that there are people in our
society that are using, basically, patents that are not really good
patents.
They are patents that really are not legitimate patents, and they are
using these to create litigation that will enrich the lawyers--the
patent trolls--because the patent trolls just reach out with some
illegitimate patent claim, and then they have to get paid off or they
have to go to jail.
Well, how much of this is there? There is some of that, but let us
note this: There are frivolous lawsuits throughout our entire system;
there are frivolous lawsuits in almost every endeavor in the American
economy, but there are also legitimate lawsuits. There are people who
are really damaged and deserve to have the right to sue somebody.
The law that we are facing now, that is being proposed here in
Congress for a patent law, is the equivalent of eliminating the right
of people to sue someone who has done damage to them in order to
prevent a frivolous lawsuit from happening.
Do we really want to neuter the rights of people? Because some people
abuse the system, you are going to
[[Page H1796]]
take the 90 percent of the cases where it is not being abused or 95
percent of the cases where it is a legitimate suit and eliminate that
right in order to handle the frivolous suits? That is what is
happening.
Although we are being told that all of the suits are frivolous and
that the inventors are being portrayed as money-grubbers, these guys
trying to take advantage of these big corporations--yeah, right. The
little guy is trying to take advantage of the big guy, and that is why
we have got to pass a law that dramatically restricts the rights of the
little guy to deal with an infringement by a big corporation.
What this bill is, H.R. 9, and it is waiting to be brought to the
floor. It could be brought to the floor in the next week, month, 2
months; we don't know yet. This bill dramatically undercuts the rights
of legitimate patentholders to enforce their patents.
The patent troll element comes in with this. Today, if you are a
small inventor and a large corporate interest has been infringing on
your invention, if you own it for 17 years--after that, by the way,
everybody can use it for free--but during that 17 years, you have a
right to be compensated for the fact that you are the one who
discovered this.
You invested your time and your effort and your scarce resources in
order to come up with this new discovery, yes; and they have a right
then to try to bring, if a large corporation is using it without paying
them royalties, they have a right to bring suit.
But many of them don't have those resources. They don't have any
money. They are, indeed, independent small inventors up against
corporations that are worth billions of dollars and, I might say,
multinational corporations.
These aren't just an American David Sarnoff. A lot of these
corporations we are talking about are multinational corporations, and
they have nothing to do with the American interests. They have
everything to do with the interest of making money for their
stockholders and their company, which is multinational, which is global
in scope and not an American company necessarily.
We are going to undercut American inventors' rights to try to enforce
their patent from being stolen by multinational corporations. That is
what this bill does.
This is, to me, in my 25 or 26 years here in Congress, the best
example of crony capitalism that I have ever seen. What is crony
capitalism? That is when we pass laws and we set up regulations that
are aimed at--what--helping the big guy in relationship to the little
guy.
Crony capitalism is when the little guys pay and end up having their
rights trampled upon, but the big guys are protected by different laws
and clauses that we put into law here in Washington in the House and in
the Senate.
Well, the bogeyman this time, as I say, is the patent troll. The
patent troll is what? The patent troll is someone--although I wouldn't
call him a patent troll. I would say there is a person who is willing
to join with a small inventor--or independent inventor--to see that his
patent is enforced.
We are not talking about phony patents; we are talking about
legitimate patents. We are not talking about frivolous claims; we are
talking about legitimate claims to patent claims of an inventor, but
the inventor does not have the strength to enforce that against a big
corporation that has an unlimited budget.
This bill would make it dramatically more difficult for anyone to
enlist someone who is not the inventor to help them press their case
against the infringement, the stuff that they had.
By the way, if this law, H.R. 9, was passed and would have been law
at the time of Philo Farnsworth, Philo Farnsworth would have been
beaten up, kicked around, stepped upon, and he would not have had any
benefit from his invention of the picture tube.
Do we want a country in which the big guys are able to do that to the
small inventors? How long are we going to be on top of things? How long
will the standard of living of our people stay high and our businesses
competitive and our country safe and secure because of technological
advances? How long will that last if we are stepping on the little guy
and we fundamentally change the nature of technology law in our
country? That is what is happening.
This bill passed last year in the House, and it was stopped in the
Senate. Let me note that one of the amendments that I personally had to
propose that demonstrate how bad this bill is--although I managed to
win the one amendment that we were able to win--was they wanted to take
away the rights of an inventor to sue the Patent Office if, indeed, the
Patent Office was not legally acting in terms of his patent
application.
In other words, if a government agency was doing something illegally,
using illegal criteria--maybe because someone else was influencing the
decision from the outside, maybe there was just some sort of
personality problem, maybe it was corruption from within--but if an
independent inventor sees that he is being treated and is being dealt
with in a way that is not consistent with the law, the small inventor
has always had a right, just like any other American, to sue and take
his case to court.
This is how blatant H.R. 9 is. That bill contained a provision that
said the small inventor can't take his case to court. They are going to
neuter the small inventor of his right to take it to court; and he has
to, instead, go to an ombudsman at the Patent Office--oh, my, an
ombudsman, how nice.
Eliminating the right of an American citizen and inventor in order
to--what--in order to send him to a government bureaucrat and the
agency that he thinks has done him wrong, rather than having a day in
court.
{time} 1315
That exemplifies everything that is in H.R. 9, and it is so cynical
because what we have got is, again, the American people saying, ``Look
at this straw man.'' It is called ``straw man argumentation.'' Let's
build up a straw man--the trolls--and everybody will think that we are
aiming at the trolls when, in fact, the real targets are the little
guys--the American independent inventors--the little guys who can't
afford without some help from the outside to enforce their patents.
There is nothing wrong with someone investing in an inventor who
says, ``Look, I have got my whole life's savings in this. I have
invented this, but this big corporation refuses to give me any
royalties from my patent.'' There is nothing wrong with trying to help
that inventor enforce his rights--there is nothing wrong at all--but
the straw man is that person who is actually investing in this. Now, he
didn't invent it, and he is going to profit by it. Thus, he is a troll.
No. That person is fulfilling an important role in not permitting
outside people to invest in inventions and with inventors.
By doing that, what we have done is diminish the value of every
American patent. That understanding defeated this bill in the Senate
last year because our American universities understood that, if that
went in, the value of all of these patents that the American
universities have been developing would dramatically go down. It
diminishes the value of all patents when you eliminate that right of
the people to invest in patent enforcement. That makes sense.
So there was an upheaval at almost every American major university
and in many other industries that deal directly with long-term research
and development, like the pharmaceutical industry, for example. They
knew that we could not allow this to happen. That was stopped in the
Senate the last time around. People realized that this type of crony
capitalist attempt was to the detriment of the American people.
We have some of the most powerful multinational corporations still at
play, trying to push this through this session of Congress. People have
to know that H.R. 9 is crony capitalism personified. They need to talk
to their Congressmen, and my colleagues need to talk to each other
about this bill and not just accept what is being handed to them as
something that has made its way through the committee process.
This bill destroys the rights of discovery for the little guy. This
suit basically doesn't do anything to go up against frivolous lawsuits,
but it deems all of the legitimate cases and puts them in the same
category as frivolous
[[Page H1797]]
lawsuits. H.R. 9 causes fees, and fees on defending infringement would
be leveled not on the guys who have committed the crime. We are
actually leveling fees on the people who are trying to enforce their
rights. We are asking people to pay more money in order to enforce
their rights.
It destroys, for example, the treble damage awards. Now, what does
that mean? If you are a little guy, to get a lawyer to help you, that
lawyer has to know he is going to make a profit when getting involved
in a suit against a big corporation. Today, they have what they call
triple damages. If the corporation knows that it is infringing on the
little guy, there are triple damages. They are trying to get rid of
those triple damages and say, ``No, only actual damages.''
What does that mean? The little guy can never afford to hire a
lawyer. The lawyers won't get involved. You can see these big
corporations, they certainly have all of the legal help they need.
Basically, that provision alone neuters the leverage that a small
inventor has to get some legal help in his battle to defend his or her
own property rights.
This bill, by the way, fails to identify--and it even sometimes
protects--lawyers who are operating on bad faith with frivolous
lawsuits, as compared to trying to help--let's deter frivolous
lawsuits, but let's not do it by eliminating the rights of people who
have legitimate claims against big corporations.
There is another bill now emerging. In the House, it is H.R. 9. It is
a disaster. We need to make sure people know that the American people
have been tipped off and that we are not going to let this happen by
the major, huge corporations like Google, which is one of the main
groups behind this trying to rip off these little guys. We are not
going to allow that to happen, and they are not going to rip us off
either.
This has been recognized in the Senate. Like I said, it was stopped
the last time, so there is a bill in the Senate, S. 632. Senator Coons
has put this bill in. This bill reasserts the condition of willful
infringement. Basically, it reinforces the idea that, if a company is
willfully infringing, this is something that someone needs to be paid
for and compensated for because someone intentionally stepped on his
rights. It gives the PTO the discretion to award damages in these cases
when you see that a big company has willfully said, We will ignore the
fact that we know this group invented it. Ignore that. Just go ahead,
and if they try to sue us, we will step on them, or we will get the
rules of the game changed in Congress so that they don't have a chance
to sue us.
S. 632, the Coons bill in the Senate, specifically allows higher
education and smaller entities to be identified as legitimate owners.
Thus, we are protecting the actual little guys and their educational
institutions. What we also have in the Senate bill is something that
identifies bad faith in these demand letters. There are frivolous
lawsuits. It actually gives strength and power to thwart these
frivolous lawsuits without damaging the rights of the small inventor
and the traditional rights of the American people.
We are up against a major fight, but here we have a good piece of
legislation in the Senate, in the Coons bill, S. 632, and in a crony
capitalism bill, H.R. 9, here in the House. The American people have to
at times get involved or things will go haywire in our country. We
don't have the rights and privileges that every American enjoys simply
because they are in the Constitution. Over the years, the American
people have stepped up when they have seen that their rights were being
trampled upon.
The big guys were always around, trying to steal from the little
guys, but as we saw in the case of Philo Farnsworth, we have a
commitment to America's little guys. As for the men and women who maybe
are not rich but who have a creative genius that will uplift all of us,
we have made a commitment to them. H.R. 9 breaks that commitment and
destroys their ability to actually benefit from their own creative
genius.
I would ask my colleagues to spend time reading H.R. 9 and consider
the straw man argument--the trolls. Get beyond the slogan, and see what
effect it will have, and ask small inventors--independent inventors--
and educators what impact the changes in H.R. 9 will have. Once the
legislators here in the House do, and once they understand the damage
that this will do to the American people and how the little guy is
going to be stepped upon, they will vote against it, but they have to
have their attention drawn to this.
People are busy here in Washington. The biggest problem is getting
the attention of our colleagues to pay attention to a bill like H.R. 9.
That is part of what the citizenry has to do if our process is going to
work. They need to be talking to their Congressmen. They need to be
talking to their Senators. Whether you are an educator and you deal
with patents of your educational institution or whether you are an
independent inventor and have an idea that will make Americans more
productive and more competitive or make our country safer, you are the
treasure house of this country, and they are trying to destroy that
treasure right now.
I call on my colleagues to join me in opposition to H.R. 9 and to
work with the Senate to try to have the Senate bill intertwined and to
come to a compromise so we can have a positive bill here in the House
and so we can move forward in a positive way to make sure that
Americans remain prosperous, that Americans remain secure, and that
Americans remain free. That is what our Constitution was all about.
That is what Thomas Jefferson was all about, and that is what Benjamin
Franklin was all about. That is what we are supposed to be all about.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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