Marcy Kaptur: “On the manager's amendment, you know what's really sad about this bill is that it is very complicated, and it's a work…”

“On the manager's amendment, you know what's really sad about this bill is that it is very complicated, and it's a work in progress as we sit here on the floor. It's too important for America and for the future of our industrial and economic base to be treated this way, and I know that the Chair of the subcommittee and the full committee are listening as I speak today. We shouldn't be drafting this in a manager's amendment on the floor. There's been some inference that the AFL-CIO supports this bill. The AFL-CIO does not support this bill. They support the fact that it is being improved but they do not support the bill. In addition to that, there's something very important I was not able to address earlier, and that is that this bill prematurely reveals inventors' secrets. In 1999, the Patent Act required the Patent Office to publish on the Internet a patent application 18 months from the date of filing, but the act also allowed inventors to opt out from that if they agreed not to file for patent in another nation. That's the so-called opt-out provision. Now, between 20 and 33 percent of U.S.-origin patents opt out of the system. They're small people. They're trying to get the venture capital to start up their company and so forth, and the average time the Patent Office takes to process a patent is 31 months.”