Webb legislation aims to stop 'theft' of U.S. technologies
Virginia’s retiring U.S. Sen. Jim Webb has reintroduced legislation to stop technologies developed with the support of U.S. taxpayers from being given away to China or other countries.
Webb said American companies operating in China are often required to transfer their intellectual property and proprietary technology to China as a prerequisite for doing business there. Many of those technologies were developed using U.S. tax dollars through grants, loans, loan guarantees and other federal incentives.
“If taxpayers supported the development of the technology, they own a piece of it, and it can’t just be given away,” Webb said in a press release. “Federal dollars that go toward (research and development) funding, loan guarantees and public-private partnerships in order to develop the next generation of technologies here are supposed to be making American businesses competitive and generate American jobs, not to help develop other industries such as those in China.”
In cases where technologies are developed with the support of American taxpayers, Webb said his legislation prohibits companies from transferring the technology to countries “that by law, practice or policy require proprietary technology transfers as a matter of doing business.”
The transfer of publicly supported proprietary technologies by American firms to China, and potentially other countries, “clearly and unequivocally places the competitive advantage of the American economy at risk,” Webb said.
Examples of China profiting from U.S. taxpayer-funded technologies abound, he said, including technology transfer by nuclear power plant design and construction companies, the automotive industry, clean energy industries, and other sectors of the economy.
In 2010, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a report that asserted China’s master plan for the development of science and technology “is considered by many international technology companies to be a blueprint for technology theft on a scale the world has never seen before.”
The report warns that China’s “persistent” intellectual property theft is “compounded by the indigenous innovation industrial policies which compel technology transfers in order to have access to the China market.”
In a January 2010 letter to Obama administration officials, the heads of 19 U.S. business and industry associations — including the Business Roundtable, National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — wrote of “systematic efforts by China to develop policies that build their domestic enterprises at the expense of U.S. firms and U.S. intellectual property.”
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