Melvin Watt: “I yield myself the balance of my time. Let me first say I agree with Mr. Sensenbrenner. The Rules Committee says that…”

“I yield myself the balance of my time. Let me first say I agree with Mr. Sensenbrenner. The Rules Committee says that this is a technical amendment, that it would make technical edits and a few necessary changes to more substantive issues. This is a very substantive manager's amendment; there is no question about that. There are many good parts to this bill, and a broad coalition of people supported the bill which was reported out of committee. But the one and only necessary part of the bill is the ability to give the Patent and Trademark Office its full funding. That was the whole purpose for which we started off this process. This whole reform process was conceived to address poor-quality patents and to reduce the backlog of patent applications, which now exceeds a 700,000 backlog of patent applications. And the reason it exceeds 700,000 is because the Patent and Trademark Office has not had the money because their fees that they have been charging have been diverted to the general fund. Without a clear path to access its own collection of fees, the PTO cannot properly plan or implement the other changes in the bill and fulfill its primary function of reducing the backlog and examining patent applications. The compromise that this manager's amendment proposes has been described by a patent news blog as, it says, It's still Lucy--that's the appropriators--holding the football that it will never let Charlie Brown have. That's really what we see here.…”