[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9135-9136]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 JOIN ME IN OPPOSING THE INNOVATION ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Rohrabacher) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, today I rise to alert my colleagues and 
to alert the American people that a bill is being marked up in the 
Committee on the Judiciary this coming Thursday, H.R. 9. This bill is a 
grave threat to the rights of the American people to own the 
intellectual property rights that they have created with their own hard 
work and their own innovative skills.
  The bill that is being marked up is called, in fact, the Innovation 
Act. It is one of the worst misnomers that I have seen in my time in 
Congress. This should be called the ``Anti-Innovation Act.'' This is 
yet the latest of a decades-long attack on the patent rights of the 
American people that were placed into the Constitution by our Founding 
Fathers.
  For decades now, large multinational corporations, very powerful 
economic entities that have influence on government, have been trying 
to neuter the patent rights of the American people. Why have they been 
doing this? Why do they want to eliminate or to dramatically reduce the 
rights of our inventors to control what they have invented? Because 
these are big guys who don't want to pay the little guys when they 
steal from them.
  The fact is that our Founding Fathers knew it was important for 
someone who has created something, whether it is a writer or an 
inventor, to have the right to control his or her creation for a 
certain period of time. The time period has been 17 years, 
traditionally, since the time of our Constitution. Our Founding Fathers 
knew this was important to our country's well-being, not just in terms 
of the rights of the individual, which we agree with as Americans and 
which were written into our Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights.
  Only one place is the word ``right'' used in the body of the 
Constitution, and that is in the section dealing with providing our 
inventors and, yes, our writers with the right to control what they 
have created for a certain period of time in order to profit from it.
  Our big corporations and these multinational corporations that have 
no loyalty to the United States, these people who are continually going 
overseas to China and elsewhere are trying to neuter this so that they 
can take any new innovation without having to pay the person who has 
actually been the inventor and created this. That is totally contrary 
to what our country has been all about.
  We have had the strongest patent system in the world--the strongest 
in the world. What has that given the American people? It has uplifted 
our standard of living of ordinary people. Yes, these folks in the 
multinational corporations, they live very well. Well, the American 
people have lived well because we have had the technology, whether it 
is agricultural technology or transportation technology or any of the 
other type of energy technologies that we have. These have uplifted us 
and created more wealth for our society.
  Americans' security, prosperity, and, yes, freedom have been due to 
our technological advantages. It is not that our people worked harder. 
It is not that we had such natural resources. There are countries all 
over the world where people work hard and have natural resources. It is 
our freedom and our respect for the individual rights of our citizens 
that have given us prosperity and security and freedom.
  Now these powerful multinational corporations have targeted our 
patent system; and, yes, their motive, as I say, is to steal, let the 
big guys steal from the little guys. That is what this supposed 
Innovation Act, which, as I say, should be called the ``Anti-Innovation 
Act,'' is all about.
  In fact, there is a legitimate problem of frivolous lawsuits in our 
country. There is no doubt about that. It is not just in the area of 
technology. It is throughout our medicine and everywhere else. But 
there have been a number of people who have taken patent law and 
claimed rights that they weren't given by the Patent Office and issued 
frivolous lawsuits to people to try to get them to pay money to them. 
They are called patent trolls.
  This excuse for changing our patent system is a lame excuse in the 
sense that we don't need to destroy the patent rights of the little guy 
in order to cure this problem. Every provision of the Innovation Act--
every provision--limits the rights of legitimate patent holders in 
order to protect their own creation.
  Let's not eliminate our freedom to handle those people, those few 
people, who are abusing it. I ask my colleagues to join me in opposing 
that and alerting the American people to this challenge to their 
freedom and their security and their prosperity.

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