Political Quotes

“It is now my very sincere pleasure to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), the lead Democratic cosponsor of this legislation who came to me with his ideas at the beginning of this Congress and has worked with me throughout this Congress on this legislation. Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Chairwoman, I thank the chairman for his tremendous efforts on this. I believe this is an improvement over the SHIELD Act, which Jason Chaffetz and I authored a couple of years ago. Here is the thing: we have got a nationwide protection racket going on here. It is a little more sophisticated than the gang that says, Hey, we are going to smash the windows of your store unless you pay us 50 bucks a week. What you have here are hugely sophisticated, well-funded patent assertion entities across America; and they did file 62 percent of the patent litigation, not 5 percent, as we heard earlier asserted by one of my colleagues. The payoff here is that if you pay us $50,000, we won't drag you through endless court proceedings that will cost you $1 million or more. All they have to do is assert something very vague, such as we own this patent and you are infringing on it. That is it. That is all they have to assert. It is up to the small business to figure out what that infringement is, which means they have to hire attorneys, they have to go through discovery, which is an incredibly lengthy and expensive process.…”