Zoe Lofgren: “I thank Mr. Conyers and Chairman Goodlatte. I am glad we are here today addressing these issues of abusive lawsuits in…”

“I thank Mr. Conyers and Chairman Goodlatte. I am glad we are here today addressing these issues of abusive lawsuits in the patent system. As has been mentioned by others, we do have a problem, it is widely agreed to, among patent assertion entities, sometimes called patent trolls. These lawsuits, these abusive lawsuits that are brought, can easily cost $2 million to $10 million apiece, and that is why, when a meritless lawsuit is threatened, it is easy to extort a smaller payment to make it go away, and that is what we are trying to deal with here. This is a big issue for small businesses. Professor Colleen Chien of Santa Clara University, now with the White House, did a study and found that more than half of these suits were against companies with less than $10 million in annual revenue. And that is why this bill, it is not a perfect bill, but why this bill has such broad support. It is genuinely a bipartisan bill. I am a cosponsor of this bill, along with the Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, Mike Honda, Peter DeFazio, Jared Huffman, and many others. At a time when the country is saying, ``Can't you just work together?'' we have. Reasonable people can differ, which is why we have this debate here today. We have 40 members in the House Judiciary Committee. Only five members voted against reporting this bill out. That is remarkable. The White House has just issued a very strong statement of administrative policy. They support this bill.…”