mr. marino. the chair: the gentleman from pennsylvania is recognized for one minute. mr. marino: thank you, mr. polis. madam speaker, i rise in support of the polis-chaffetz-marino-connolly amendment. trolls assert a claim in a letter with little or no specificity and often it is unclear who owns the patent being asserted or how the patent was even infringed. it is time the entities sending out these mass mailers do their due diligence just as we expect in just about every other area of the law. this amendment requires the entity sending the letter to include the person who holds the rights to the patent, in order to raise a claim that the opposing party received an adequate letter, putting them on notice of their inge fringe -- infringement. patent trolls have been playing a shell game and hiding who was actually holding the rights to the patent and often who was supplying the money to the litigation. i fully support this amendment and this amendment will shine some much-needed light on this dark practice and i yield back. the chair: the gentleman yields back the balance

mr. marino that is in regards to demand letter transparency acts. even the recipient of one demand letter can even be a death sentence for a small, one, two, three-person company. the threat of a demand letter alone can jeopardize a company's ability to raise funds, can scare away potential customers, and god forbid actually defending a patent lawsuit can cost hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars of legal bills. which to a one or two or three-person company is simply a matter of shutting the doors because they cannot afford to do that. at the rules committee yesterday i offered my bipartisan amendment, based on legislation that i introduced with representative marino and representative deutch. that would provide a comprehensive approach to increased transparency and accountability in the demand letter process. and while our amendment was not made in order, i'm grateful we did include at least some slight provisions regarding who owns shell corporations, amendment 4 was allowed. we plan to continue to press forward on the need to address this