Howard Berman: “Madam Speaker, I would like to take a moment to try and address the arguments made by my friend, the gentleman from…”

“Madam Speaker, I would like to take a moment to try and address the arguments made by my friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), because I think that the thrust of his argument is actually served and met by our bill, not opposed. He is concerned, legitimately, about the likelihood that poorly financed independent inventors will have their patents challenged in expensive re-examinations requested by big corporations with deep pockets. The problem is, the way the law is now, those corporations do not go to reexamination. They ignore reexamination, because if they go to reexamination, their ability then to challenge in court on the issues they brought up in reexamination is eliminated. So they, instead of challenging the small, independent inventor in a relatively cheap, relatively quick, somewhat informal or more informal reexamination process, that is ignored and, instead, they wait until the patent is granted. Then they go into Federal court on lengthy, incredibly expensive litigation which can take years and years at enormous expense, which these corporations can afford if it is justified in the context of their own business plans, and grind that patent holder down in court. What we are trying to do, and it is really a small change, is to take away the roadblock that causes people who want to challenge the validity of a patent to ignore the reexamination procedure and go to court instead.”