The Patent Truth

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Sandy Rios

A radical overhaul of the U.S. Patent system is rapidly approaching.   S23 passed 95-5 in the Senate in January and HR 1249 seems to be on track to be called in the House in the next few days.   And now suddenly there is pushback.  Congressmen are confused.  Staffers are confused.  The public is largely unaware and the pressure is on…from someone…somewhere to get this sweeping overhaul passed quickly.

How does one navigate a position on this?  Harry Reid, Pat Leahy, Orrin Hatch, Lamar Smith, and Eric Cantor sing the bill’s praises.  So do President Obama and Gary Locke.  International corporations like Intel and Google are eager for its passage.  Smaller companies and entrepreneurs fiercely oppose.  James Sensenbrenner, Dana Rohrbacher and Phyllis Schlafly claim it is blatantly unconstitutional.  Patent attorneys paid by multinational corporations swear it is not.  Given the confusion, which side does one take when one must take one?

COMMON SENSE

What is the rush?  If the bill is as good as proponents claim, can’t it withstand a bit more scrutiny?  Didn’t we recoil as a nation when the healthcare bill was pushed through Congress without careful scrutiny?

Since it is multi-national corporations pushing this, what is their motive?  Is it concern over producing more American jobs?  Building the domestic economy?  Or will their ability to lay claim on patents more easily allow these global giants to give away American superiority in invention to the Chinese in return for market access?

Should Congress be concerned that passage of HR 1249 will allow corporations like G.E. and Microsoft (major backers of 1249) to dominate the U.S. patent process as never before, freezing out thousands of small inventors from a process that has made the U.S. the leader in innovation for the past 200 years?  Opponents of the bill warn “yes!”

CONSTITUTIONALITY

Several Congressmen have signed a letter requesting a review of the constitutionally of HR1249. What is their motive?  Will they become rich by the challenge?  Is there any personal gain?

Patent attorneys paid by international conglomerates are eloquent in their emphatic declaration that HR1249 is constitutional.  They assure us Article I Section 8 doesn’t really mean the “first to invent” gets the patent, but instead actually means the “first to file” the papers. Trouble is, in spite of their explanations, there is enough historical evidence on the matter to prove the opposite.  Chief Justice John Roberts, writing June 6th the 7-2-majority opinion on a patent challenge stated this, “Since 1790 the patent law has operated on the premise that rights in an invention belong to the inventor.”

Anyone interpreting Article I Section 8 and the subsequent decisions of 1790 differently will eventually have to make their case to the current justices when HR1249 is inevitably challenged in court; And to the Tea Party to whom constitutionality is a preeminent issue.

DANGERS FROM CHINA

Is there real danger from China on this bill? In a letter to Speaker John Boehner in April of this year, the Inventors Network of the Capital Area, a group of entrepreneur inventors, wrote the following:

“We are deeply concerned that the proposed ‘first to file’ provision has an overlooked but unusually dangerous defect that seriously threatens our national defense… Under the ‘first to file’ provision of H.R. 1249, Chinese hackers who steal U.S. R& D secrets can easily become the very first to file U.S. application patents covering those technology secrets and thereby own that new technology even in the U.S., instead of now just being able to copy it in China.”

The Chinese have been able to copy much of what we have, but they don’t create it. Already, GE, headed by Obama Jobs Council Chief Jeffrey Emmelt, has turned over many GE patents and technology to China in return for entry into the Chinese Market.

In 2007 when a similar “patent reform bill” was being considered by the House, Yongshun Cheng, Senior Judge of Beijing’s High Peoples Court said, “the bill is friendlier to the infringers (China) than to the patentees…this is not bad news for developing countries.”

General Electric has already signed agreements making available to the Red Chinese important patent and trade secret information, which they possess. Microsoft is now building a new invention/technology complex in China. And China is demanding this intellectual property information from U.S. corporations as a condition of trade.

Do we seriously think the Chinese have American jobs in mind as they enter these agreements?

Awareness of these troubling truths may make a decision on this patent reform bill not so confusing after all.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

URL to article:  http://www.sandyrios.com/blog/?p=72

Go Ahead. Call Me Extreme

Go Ahead.  Call Me Extreme.

 A pro-lifer answers Democrat plan to label others ‘extreme.’

by

Johanna Dasteel

Representative Schumer revealed that the Democratic Caucus plans to label the opposition and their Tea Party ideas as extreme.  I know what it is like to be on the receiving end of that political denigration. 

My advocacy for human personhood amendments is oft times labeled extreme for this day and age even by pro-lifers.  Such amendments are simple enough:  they reconcile an observable reality with the language of our laws.  Namely, that a human being is a person, and our laws are written to protect persons. 

Though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label.  Perhaps the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists. 

Let me repeat that: Perhaps our nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I can’t claim to be clairvoyant, but I think it’s safe to assume that you may not agree with me. Would it matter if I told you that those words are not original to me?

You see those words are not mine, but are the words of the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. 

Dr. King too was called an extremist and he responded, again, I quote: “But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label.” He said, “perhaps… the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

Dr. King wasn’t coming up with a new idea, rather he was going back to our country’s origins, to the idea enumerated in our Declaration of Independence that all people are created equal and have the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. 

Pro-lifers are accustomed to being called extreme.  But what is liberty and the pursuit of happiness without the right to life? Protecting all members of our human species as persons is just going back to common sense.  What Dr. King might call creative extremism.

The Schumers, Pelosis, and Reids of the world love to hype straw man doomsday scenarios in which recognizing the rights of preborn people will lead to the penalizing and jailing of pregnant mothers for mundane or everyday behavior such as eating junk food or playing sports. 

They even go so far as to argue that the government would start harassing mourning mothers after they have suffered the loss of a child through miscarriage. Now the hypocrisy in that alone should confound you.  What is there to mourn and why would it be so distasteful to question the mother if we cannot admit that she is a mother in the first place? 

In Colorado, where I’m from, before the decriminalization of abortion, the state had a long history of being a pro-life state and NOT ONCE was any mother prosecuted or investigated after a miscarriage.

A personhood amendment solely states that no member of our species shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. 

The hurlers of the extremist invective shout that birth control, IVF and human embryonic stem cell research is threatened by protecting a preborn human being’s right to life.  But unless these are life-threatening instead of life-saving practices, is there reason to claim that constitutionally recognizing human beings as persons threatens them?   More straw men blown over by logic.

They will never risk admitting that all human beings should not be recognized as equal persons; to do so would betray the lies on which they base their own advocacy.  They will instead trot out the tired and disproven claims of decades ago that acknowledging preborn babies are people will force mothers to the back-alleys where they will die along with their children.

Julie Kay, International Planned Parenthood Federation attorney and acolyte of “admitting babies are people is extreme”theory, described the country of Ireland as “the jewel in the crown of the pro-life movement.” 

She said this because Ireland is a pro-life nation that protects the rights of the preborn child as equal to that of his or her mother.  Ireland treats abortion as a criminal action.

If we are to believe what Planned Parenthood and their Democratic Caucus claim__that treating preborn children as equal citizens will criminalize women’s behaviors when they are pregnant, that there will be more back-alley abortions, that women will be defending themselves in frivolous lawsuits and some even will die, we would also have to believe that it is – right now - doomsday in Ireland – that, according to the logic of the Cecile Richards and Harry Reids of the world, it must be doomsday in Ireland.

You would think that.

But you would be wrong.

Ireland has no back-alley abortions.  Ireland is abortion-free.

UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund – UNICEF reports Ireland to have the lowest maternal mortality rate in the world.  Let me put that another way: women not dying from abortion being illegal in Ireland!

Our nation careens toward bankruptcy but Pelosi and Schumer strategize to label even trivial cost cutting to a multitrillion debt as extreme.  President Obama excuses abortion by saying that knowing when life begins is above his pay grade.  Harry Reid declares he would shut down the government before defunding Planned Parenthood.

The only thing that stands in our way of restoring the rights of the preborn and eliminating abortion is fear.  Fear that is unfounded.  Ireland is a testament to that fact. 

We don’t need to be the victims of Pelosi, Schumer, Reid, or Planned Parenthood’s extreme propaganda. 

Go ahead.  Call me extreme.  Coming from you, I will wear it as a badge of honor.

(Johanna Dasteel is senior congressional liaison at American Life League.)

Cheap at Twice the Price

Planned Parenthood spends $200K on ad blitz
to save $300 million in taxpayer funding