Melvin Watt: “Mr. Chairman, when you practice law for 22 years, as I have before coming to Congress, and served on the Judiciary…”

“Mr. Chairman, when you practice law for 22 years, as I have before coming to Congress, and served on the Judiciary Committee for 15 years and never even in all that time dealt with patents, you are tempted to think of patent lawyers and the law of patents as a bunch of technocrats and elevate constitutional considerations and criminal law and other civil rights matters to a higher position. It has been an eye-opening experience for me, the first time to serve on this subcommittee and to see how important patent law is to stimulating, encouraging innovation, and to see how difficult and precise the law needs to be and how far behind the patent law has become in adapting to changes. One of the changes that I think hasn't gotten much attention in this bill that I was surprised at as a member of the Financial Services Committee that has so many regulators of the various parts of our financial system which can promulgate rules, it seemed to me when I found out that the Patent and Trade Office really didn't have the authority to promulgate any meaningful rules, that that was contributing to the problem, because innovations and ideas and inventions and communications are traveling so fast that the law can't always keep up with them. It is in that context that meaningful regulation is important.”