On the recordDecember 18, 2012
There is a requirement to report the names, so this bill requires in this report to have the names of the applicants and other identifying information that could be used by powerful outside groups--yes, read that foreign and multinational corporations--to make these applicants potential targets even before their patent is granted. Anonymity could easily be accomplished by a simple change to one section of this bill. Perhaps the PTO could create a unique identifier for each applicant so that they could easily be tracked but without giving risk that the public would know about this and be able to identify the inventor. We can make this a good bill. We just need to take a couple words out of it or one small section out of it, because as the ranking member suggested, it does a lot of good, but it does a lot of harm, much more harm, unless we take this out of the bill. So I would ask my colleagues to oppose this legislation until it is perfected so we are not going to hurt the little inventors and hurt our country's ability on the technology front by trying to make a few technical corrections to the way the Patent Office does its job.
