Have you been following the Apple vs. Samsung saga in Europe? It is an exemplary case of over-reaching intellectual property rights showing that patent rights, design rights, copyright rights and trademark rights should be severely limited by law in the future.

Companies like Apple should not be able to appropriate commercial design rights to rectangles with rounded edges.

Apple has sued Samsung for violation of its German-registered iPad2 design, a design that Apple has in fact stolen from numerous prior art tablets, as we have pointed out in recent LawPundit postings.

Worse, companies like Apple began with theft. The name “Apple” did not belong to the company, but rather is a word in the English language that belongs to us, the people. Words do not belong to corporations. It was stolen — from us — with no adequate compensation being paid into the tax coffers for its appropriation.

You may say that I exaggerate, but the fact is that I could not today issue or sell a computer or phone product under the name Apple if I wanted to. That word has been stolen, right out of the language for that purpose.

Where is the legal theory that permits that appropriation? Where is the Constitutional provision in the U.S. Constitution that allows English-language words to be appropriated “for free”, and then to be used for commercial purposes, excluding all other citizens from using those English-language words for the same purposes?

After all, corporate names and trademarks could be fantasy words that do not otherwise exist in the language. Apple could have named itself e.g. Tsiloponom (monopolist backwards) and no one would have objected.

Similarly, Apple at its origin could have called itself e.g. Wozniak-Jobs after the names of its founders. Not a great marketing ring, we admit.

No, the company “took” (and we mean took) the world Apple. It was a taking from the people, because that word through millennia of usage was already well-known long before Apple started its company and thus gave the company a great deal of starting goodwill via that name — for free.

The only people who have paid for that name indirectly were the people – that’s us — who no longer could use that word to name phones or computers or anything else that the Apple firm trademarked, but had to relinquish the word apple to the Apple firm.

It is a mystery to this writer why the laws grant all kinds of absurd IP rights to companies to terrorize the commercial world with their government-granted monopolies, while the law at the same time permits companies like Apple to appropriate a people’s word like apple for free and obtain trademark rights to that word with respect to computers, phones, tablets, etc.

But there is a solution to this problem.

We, the society members that are at the base of everything, also have our rights, and we need our governments to be paid for, so that not all the money goes into the private pockets of greedy corporations and their owners.

Accordingly, we suggest that a new tax law on trademarks be implemented to be paid on the basis of the number of product units sold under that trademark. That tax should be stiff and we suggest it should initially be assessed at 10% of the retail value of any product sold under any trademark.

This will help to reduce the federal government deficit and reimburse the people for the words stolen from them by the corporations.