America Invents Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. I thank the gentleman for yielding and urge my colleagues to support the Rohrabacher-Kaptur amendment, which ensures fairness for small and independent inventors. Without it, this bill will destroy American job creation and innovation since it throws out 220 years of patent protections for individual inventors.

Our amendment addresses a major shortcoming of the bill by eliminating the burden of post-grant reviews and reexaminations on individual inventors and small businesses with 100 or fewer employees.

The new procedures and regulations in this bill will make it extremely difficult for the average citizen to ever get a patent or defend one without our amendment. Our amendment clearly gives the Patent Office the authority to issue appropriate regulations that ensure that the new regulatory burdens in this bill do not disproportionately impact individual inventors. This amendment is about ensuring fairness for small inventors.

We urge our colleagues to support the Kaptur-Rohrabacher amendment so all inventors in America have a chance to realize their dreams, and, in realizing their dreams, assuring that we will have robust innovation and job creation in our country.

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Ms. KAPTUR. I would like to refute Mr. Smith's argument. In fact, he has manufactured an argument against our amendment that says it will violate WTO obligations, specifically citing TRIPS. He seems to object to the use of references to American citizens and U.S. companies, but obviously failed to read the entire amendment which allows the Patent Office to issue relevant regulations for properly implementing this amendment. And if he was so concerned about WTO compliance, he should strike section 18 of his own bill which is clearly WTO noncompliant because it creates a special class for only one industry, the banking industry.

I urge my colleagues to vote against the bill and for the Rohrabacher-Kaptur amendment.

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