Marcy Kaptur: “Mr. Chairman, across our country we see the dismantling of jobs and business in this country. This particular bill, H.R.…”

“Mr. Chairman, across our country we see the dismantling of jobs and business in this country. This particular bill, H.R. 1561, dismantles the Patent and Trademark Office as we have known it. If one reads article 1, section 8, it says, the Congress shall have the power to secure for inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Throughout the over 200-year history of our country, that has been done through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The bill before us on page 11 reads, the Director can provide that searches be done by commercial entities. That is not what the Constitution says. That is not the U.S. Patent Office. That is a commercial entity. Yes, searches will be outsourced from the U.S. Patent Office. You could say they would be contracted out. That is not the U.S. Patent Office. We have plenty of examples in this world of copycatting of inventions, of counterfeiting of intellectual property, particularly by the Chinese and by patent thieves and by submarine patents. There are plenty of things going on in this world that contracting out or outsourcing of the Patent Office does not help because you cannot secure the honesty or the integrity of those instrumentalities.”