UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE

PUBLIC HEARING

ON USE OF THE PATENT SYSTEM

TO PROTECT SOFTWARE_RELATED INVENTIONS

January 27, 1994

COMMISSIONER LEHMAN:  Good morning.  Welcome to our second day of
hearings   on   the   use   of   the  patent  system  to  protect
software_related inventions.

Yesterday we had an excellent series of speakers.  I think we all
learned  a  lot  here,  those  of  us  who came from the Commerce
Department in Washington.  You all gave  us  a  wide  variety  of
opinions  and  I  know that today is going to be just as good and
we're going to be armed with all the information we need  to  im-
prove our patent system when we get back to Washington.

I'd like to just, for those of you who might not have  been  here
today, briefly introd216ere on this panel.

I am Bruce Lehman.  My official title is Assistant  Secretary  of
Commerce and Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks.

And to my immediate right is Ginger Lew, Assistant  Secretary  of
Commerce and General Counsel of the Department of Commerce Desig-
nate, and Ginger Lew was a practicing lawyer until a  few  months
ago  up  here  in  the Bay Area and knows this area very well and
knows a lot of the industries and businesses  that  are  involved
very well.

And then to my far right is  Michael  Kirk.   Mike  Kirk  is  the
current  Assistant  Commissioner  of  Patents  and Trademarks for
External Affairs and the President has nominated him  to  be  the
Deputy Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks.

And to my left, immediate left, is Lawrence  Goffney,  and  Larry
Goffney  the  President has nominated him to be our new Assistant
Commissioner for Patents.  He will be running the  entire  patent
operation,  with  over  3,OOO  employees  at our Patent Office in
Washington, and will play a very critical role in the dev`ment of
these policies.

And then finally Jeff Kushan is a Staff Member of our  Office  of
Legislation  and  International  Affairs and he is the person who
did a lot of the leg work in setting this  up  and  his  name  is
listed, as you know, on the Federal Register Notice.

I'd also like to __ I don't know if Gerry Goldberg  is  here  yet
this morning __ but I want to observe the presence of Gerry Gold-
berg, who is the Director of Group 23O, or  23OO,  which  is  the
Software Examining Group.

Is Gerry __?  I don't see him around here yet.  Okay, well, he'll
be  here  later.  I think many of you know him and I'm certain he
will be available to you if you have private comments to make  to
him.

Finally, I'd like to introduce the young lady in  the  blue  suit
who  just came in is Ruth Ford, who's our Director of Media Rela-
tions, and I know we have a number  of  media  and  press  people
who've  been here and if you have any needs that need to be dealt
with, Ruth will be happy to assist you with that.

So I'd just like to basically revdagain  the  ground  rules  that
we're going to be operating with this morning.

The people who will be testifying today should  have  received  a
schedule  indicating their approximate time that they've been as-
signed to give their remarks and I think we even have that  on  a
table up front.  The list is available there.

And I'd encourage all of the people who are going to  be  talking
with  us  today  to be here at least 2O minutes before your time,
your assigned time slot.  And sometimes we get going a little bit
__  we  get speeded up, maybe somebody didn't show up and so then
we end up having our schedule advanced beyond what we thought  it
would be.

Each person will have 11 minutes for their presentation  and  the
computer  monitor in front of us here will display a green screen
for 9 minutes and then it will turn yellow and  when  the  screen
turns  red that means that the 11 minutes is up.  And I encourage
everybody to be cooperative with us if at all possible and try to
stick to those limits.  Otherwise we'll sort of havh politely ask
you to wrap up.

To the extent that you can finish before  11  minutes,  it's  not
such a bad idea because it gives us a little more freedom to have
a dialogue and ask questions and get really  a  better  sense  of
where you're coming from and understand your testimony better.

In addition to, of course, these oral comments, we're open to ad-
ditional  written comments from everybody, and additional written
comments from all those who are going  to  be  testifying  today,
maybe  something is said by one of the other people that you feel
you have to follow up on, and those can be submitted to us in our
office and I think the address for all of that has been indicated
in the Federal Register Notice that has been  circulated  through
the Internet and was in the Federal Register Notice itself.

That Notice can be retrieved from our FTP site, which  is:   Com-
ments, period, USPT O, period, GOB.

The transcripts of the hearings will be available after  February
7th  and  paper  copies  will be available for a charge of $3Olhe
transcripts will also be available through our FTP site.

Once again, I want to welcome everybody here, and it's  wonderful
to see that we have this kind of interest for a second day in how
we can improve the legal basis for high technology in the  United
States.

I'd like to call on our first speaker, who will be Jerry Fiddler,
CEO and Chairman of Wind River Systems.  Welcome, Mr. Fiddler.