On the recordMarch 1, 2011
I wish to thank the chairman of the committee for his work on this patent bill. I still have a few small problems with it, but I am extremely grateful for his consideration of our amendment. Most people don't understand there are no tax dollars taken from the general fund for the Patent Office. It is all fees paid when you file a patent or a trademark or a copyright. Unfortunately, over the last 10, 15 years, $800 million of those fees have not been left at the Patent Office. They have been taken and used somewhere else. So when you pay a fee for a patent, that money isn't going to pay for the examination of the patent. Right now, we find ourselves with 718,000 patents waiting for first action. If I file a patent today, what we will see is that 26 months from now my patent will have first action--the first reading by an examiner. If we want to create jobs and stay on top of the world in terms of innovation, we cannot allow that process to continue. So what the amendment does is say we are not going to take the money people use to pay for a patent application and spend it somewhere else; we are actually going to spend it on patent applications. That is what it was set up for. Quite frankly, it is immoral to take money for a specific purpose for advantaging an American company or inventor or a university and not apply that money for the intended purpose under the statute.
