With Nikon's recent APS mirrorless kit lens patent suddenly revealed, I have to ask the question: why patent lenses?
Lenses are not something you just knock out in a month or two. From initial design work to finished lens in customer hands is typically about a three-year process with Nikon. Even once you've got a design you don't get finished product very fast, as glass takes time to create, cure, grind, and polish.
Patents tend to get seen one to two years before the lens is in customer hands. Thus, patenting a lens design is an early-warning system for competitors and a clue that maybe they should be working on similar designs or at least products to deflect yours. Note I said similar. As in focal length/aperture decisions, not exact copies of the optical definitions. I don't know of anyone who is getting strong benefits from seeing other company's exact optical design. That's probably because they're all using variations of the same software in their design process.
Now, if you'd discovered a new type of glass, or completely new way to create a lens element (Canon's DO comes to mind), I can see the point in filing for a patent. But to "protect" the upmteenth iteration of a basic mid-range kit zoom? Someone is looking through rose colored glasses and not seeing the weeds.
Corporate habits are hard to break. Lens patents are a corporate habit. But I'll bet that a real analysis of the situation would reveal that lens patents actually cost the company money and gain them nothing. Let's put that in perspective. Let's say that a customer is hesitant about buying a Nikon 1. They see the APS mirrorless patent and now they have the justification for waiting to buy a Nikon mirrorless camera (implication of a camera with a bigger sensor coming). That's a real cost. Heck, it's basically FUDing yourself [FUD = fear uncertainty and doubt, a marketing tactic often attributed to IBM]. Partly due to the language issues, the Japanese camera companies are not very good at understanding and monitoring the Internet in their largest markets (US and Europe). Thus, from a corporate perspective, they have blinders on with regards to this type of "cost."
Meanwhile, all the competitors now know something different is brewing in Nikon's mirrorless R&D. In the case of an APS mirrorless kit lens, the big news to the competitors is the possibility of YAM (yet another mount). They'll be studyiing the likely mount position to see whether they need to adapt their similar lens designs to accomodate yet another mount distance. Not a big thing, actually, because if a third party lens maker hasn't already studied what exists and what was likely and what was potentially possible and adjusted their lens designs accordingly, they aren't much of a competitor. But what if the lens in the patent was a 12-70mm APS mirrorless (18-105mm equivalent)? Yeah, they'd all be running with the patent information to their software to see why they hadn't come up with that. They'd now have a year or two to try to ferret out the clues they'd need to do something competitive.
Note that those pages are not on the subsidiary sites! They are posted on nikonimglib.com.