Lisa Rapaport at Bloomberg in SEC Asks Apple CFO for Information on Nokia Patent Litigation Settlement writes that:
"The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission asked Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer for information on the financial terms of a patent litigation settlement with Nokia Oyj. (NOK1V)"Read the whole article here.
In our view, it is high time that government authorities started going after this monopolist, who is here raising the defense of "confidential" information for the details of its settlement with Nokia.
Alleging that patent infringement settlements can be treated as "confidential" is an absurd view since they are material to the entire patent field and to who owns what, who is licensed to whom, and who is infringing whom.
NOTHING in this field should be confidential because the rights of all are affected and because patents are not "private civil rights" but rather government granted exceptions to normal rights of use and ownership.
Patents are an artificial protection provided to monopolists (let us not speak here of "inventors", a virtually lost breed) by means of pervasive government interference -- via patent laws and rules, and by their enforcement in the nation's courts -- essentially violating the basic theoretical process of capitalism and the free market system.
The public, who finances the entire massive government mechanism that protects these monopolists, has the right to know what is going on. No hiding behind closed doors should be permitted.
If you are against "big government", take a look at the USPTO, which may be hiring as many as 2000 new patent examiners in the next year pursuant to the new patent reform law. The flow of patent applications is massive and continues to rise, year by year. The factories are empty. People have no jobs. Housing is at a standstill. But everyone has a patent certificate on their wall.
Where are your tax dollars going? Here is one example, the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) headquarters as of the year 2009:
The James Madison Building in Alexandria, Virginia, one of five buildings housing USPTO headquarters, these being the offices for top USPTO officials (what do they do there?).
Photographed on August 11, 2006 by user Coolcaesar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usptojamesmadisonbuildingsouthside.jpg)
The sign in the photograph prophetically reads "one way": surely meaning more big government in store and not less in intellectual property law, with the gigantic ever-growing agencies profiting from monopolists and monopolies "made in the USA". The real manufacturing industry is found elsewhere, e.g. "made in China", "made in India", "made in Korea" or "made in Vietnam" and that is a major reason why the American economy is in such dire straits.
Rather than "making new products" the major industry of the country has become "patenting new products". I was once said that China was "a paper tiger". That was long ago. America since has become "a paper economy".
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