Dana Rohrabacher: “Today I rise to alert my colleagues and to alert the American people that a bill is being marked up in the Committee on…”

“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.…”