[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 17]
[Senate]
[Pages 23363-23364]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LEGISLATION

  (At the request of Mr. REID, the following statement was ordered to 
be printed in the Record.)
 Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, we live in a nation of the most 
creative and inventive people in the world, but apparently some of my 
Republican colleagues do not appreciate them or their efforts. Thanks 
to the ingenuity, the inspiration, and the hard work of thousands of 
our fellow citizens, the United States enjoys the best in artistic 
expression and technological advancement, but that seems to mean little 
to those Senators. We enjoy the fruits of the labors of all the 
inventors and authors and artists--and of all the people who work in 
connection with them--not only as individuals but as a nation, but not 
everyone here recognizes the debt we owe them. In the twenty-first 
century, it is intellectual property that keeps this country at the 
forefront of the world economy, and what preserves our force as a 
global power, and I would think that those across the aisle would value 
the importance of that power.
  Affording that intellectual property the most straightforward and 
reasonable protections, and giving law enforcement officials the 
resources to give those protections genuine power, would seem to be a 
sensible goal. Indeed, failing to do so would be unconscionable. In the 
United States, copyright industries alone account for 12 percent of the 
gross domestic product, and employ more than 11 million people. Those 
copyright industries have been adding workers at an annual rate that 
exceeds that of the economy as a whole by 27 percent, and those 
industries have achieved annual foreign sales and exports of almost $90 
billion. But some Republicans are preventing the Senate from passing 
the most important intellectual property legislation before the 
Congress this year, and they are hiding behind anonymous holds. This is 
wrong.
  Senator Hatch and I, and many of our colleagues on the Judiciary 
Committee, have been working on this legislation for some time now--
most recently doing so late at night and through the weekends. We have 
done so because of the crushing need to ensure that the intellectual 
property laws are adequate to the legitimate and pressing concerns 
raised by many about the effectiveness of those laws. We have a package 
of strong and significant measures that would bolster protection of the 
intellectual property that drives our nation's economy and that would 
ensure law enforcement has the tools it needs to offer that protection. 
There was no reason not to send this package to the House immediately, 
and work with our colleagues there to ensure it became enacted into 
law, as soon as humanly possible.
  In blocking this legislation, these Republicans are failing to 
practice what they have so often preached during this Congress. For all 
of their talk about jobs, about allowing the American worker to 
succeed, they are now placing our economy at greater risk through their 
inaction. It is a failure that will inevitably continue a disturbing 
trend: our economy loses literally hundreds of billions of dollars 
every year to various forms of piracy.
  Instead of making inroads in this fight, we have the Republican 
intellectual property roadblock. It is a barrier that stands in the way 
of the CREATE Act, a noncontroversial bill the text of which has 
already passed both the Senate and House. The CREATE Act clarifies an 
important component of the Bayh-Dole Act that, when read literally by 
the courts, runs counter to

[[Page 23364]]

Congress's intent. By failing to make this clarification Congress is 
creating a deterrent to forming the very same public-private research 
partnerships meant to be encouraged by that Act. These partnerships 
have proved incredibly beneficial to universities, the private sector, 
the American worker, and the U.S. economy. All are placed in jeopardy 
by Congressional inaction.
  The roadblock has also scuttled the ART Act, a bill that passed the 
Judiciary Committee and then the full Senate by unanimous consent. This 
legislation would have provided new tools in the fight against bootleg 
copies of movies snatched from the big screen by camcorders smuggled 
into theaters. And it would have adopted a creative solution developed 
by the Copyright Office to address the growing problem of piracy of 
pre-release works. Our anonymous Republican friends have ensured that 
these problems are left unaddressed by the 108th Congress.
  The PIRATE Act, too, passed the Senate by unanimous consent. That 
bill would have given to the Attorney General new tools in the fight 
against piracy of books, music, movies and other creative works. 
Senator Biden's Anticounterfeiting Act, which would have marked a step 
forward in the fight against software piracy, was also included in the 
intellectual property package. We can tell our software companies that 
they will have to wait at least another year for the remedies promised 
by this legislation. And it is important to note that the Business 
Software Alliance tell us that $29 billion in software was stolen in 
2003 alone.
  There are other noncontroversial provisions in this legislation as 
well, such as language that would help ensure that the Library of 
Congress is able to continue its important work in archiving our 
nation's fading film heritage. Some of America's oldest films--works 
that document who we were as a people in the beginning of the 20th 
century--are literally disintegrating faster than they can be saved.
  None of these were partisan provisions. And when Senator Hatch and I 
put our names on the same piece of legislation, you can bet that the 
result is never a bill that veers very far to the right or the left. He 
and I have worked together to produce a great deal of good intellectual 
property policy over the years, and I am sorry to see that some on his 
side of the aisle have blocked our efforts at similar progress this 
year.
  We can foresee the disappointing result of this roadblock: our 
copyright holders will suffer, our patent holders will suffer, and so 
too will the American worker. In yet another important area, the 
Republicans that control the House of Representatives, the Senate, and 
the White House, have failed to respond to the needs of the American 
people. That is a shame.

                          ____________________