During the recent Senate Hearings surrounding Apple's taxes in Ireland, there was another concern of Apple's, Intellectual property. Cook stated that "I actually think that we require much more work on IP in this country... The U.S. court system is currently structured in such a way that it's currently difficult to get the protections a technology company needs, because the cycle is very long."

"For us, our intellectual property is so important to our company," Cook argued. "I would love to see the system strengthened to protect it."

Well, it appears that President Obama was listening because today he called on Congress to take several steps to make it more difficult for so-called patent assertion entities (PAEs) to collect money from alleged infringers of their patents. PAEs, often called patent trolls, are patent-owning companies whose main business model is demanding license fees instead of making products based on their patents.

Congress and the White House need to take steps to curb patent abuse by companies that "essentially leverage and hijack somebody else's idea and see if they can extort some money out of them," Obama said in a statement.

Lawmakers in both the Senate and the House of Representatives are also pushing for bills targeting patent trolls.

Even after Congress passed a patent reform law, the America Invents Act, in 2011, many tech companies and digital rights groups have continued to complain about abusive actions by PAEs. In 2012, companies defined as PAEs filed more than 2,500 lawsuits, about 60 percent of all patent lawsuits in the U.S., according to a report released Tuesday by the President's Council of Economic Advisers, the National Economic Council, and the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy.

That's about 1,000 more lawsuits than PAEs brought in 2011, the report said. In 2010, PAEs brought just 731 patent lawsuits, representing 29 percent of all patent lawsuits filed, said the report, referencing research by Colleen Chien, a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law.

Obama also asked Congress to pass legislation providing incentives for patent-owning companies to make their licensing fee demand letters public, and to allow district court judges more discretion in awarding attorney's fees as a sanction for abusive patent lawsuits. Congress should also require companies that send demand letters, file infringement lawsuits or seek a patent review by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to file updated ownership information, allowing transparency about who is bringing those actions, Obama said.

The new challenges for patents on computer-enabled inventions endorsed by the White House would be part of a post-grant review proceeding at the USPTO for business method patents.