Google Vice President for Corporate Development David Lawee believes Apple's win against Samsung in a federal district court last month was a "wake-up call." It appears that the search giant will become more aggressive in patenting its own technologies in an effort to avoid a "thermonuclear world."
"I'm hoping that we're kinda over the hump in terms of how people value patents, and the 'thermonuclear' world is not the world we're going to live in," Lawee told Bloomberg TV on Tuesday, referring to Steve Jobs' promise to go "thermonuclear" on Android over the belief that Google ripped off the iPhone. Lawee suggested that prior to the current smartphone wars raging in courts around the world, Google didn't appreciate the value of patents, and didn't build up a "sufficient" portfolio.
"We actually didn't invest in the patent ecosystem," Lawee said. "We weren't patenting things as aggressively as we should have been. We didn't really believe 'rounded corners' were patentable. We just didn't buy into that notion of protecting your IP, and it was a wake-up call."
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