Dana Rohrabacher: “People need to know that H.R. 1908 will be coming to the floor on Friday. I call it the ``Steal America's Technology…”

“People need to know that H.R. 1908 will be coming to the floor on Friday. I call it the ``Steal America's Technology Act,'' and we need to defeat this bill. We need to have the support of the public and of our colleagues, and we are asking for that support today. I would like to close with one story. It is a story of a statue of a man downstairs. If someone is going through the Capitol, he needs to look at the statue. There are many statues here, but it is a statue of a man named Philo Farnsworth. He was the personification of an individual inventor. He discovered, with his creative genius, the picture tube, the secret that created the picture tube for television. RCA had spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to find that secret. Philo Farnsworth made the mistake of trusting David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, with the secret, thinking we are going to work together to develop this for all humankind. Sarnoff immediately cut off all communications with this man and tried to steal this invention, claiming credit for RCA itself. For 20 years, poor Philo Farnsworth, the personification of the little guy, was being beaten down by David Sarnoff because he didn't want to pay the royalties or give the credit to this one little guy, this one lone American.”