[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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