Samsung filed patent-infringement claims against Apple this week, charging that its best-selling iPhone 5 infringes on eight Samsung patents. The claims were added to an existing patent-infringement lawsuit between the two firms in federal court in California, and they come on the heels of a separate court order lifting a temporary ban on the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets.
“As soon as the iPhone 5 was available for purchase, Samsung began its investigation of the product,” Samsung noted in its court filing. “We have little choice but to take the steps necessary to protect our innovations and intellectual property rights,” a company statement added.
According to Samsung, the iPhone 5 violates two of its standards-essential patents and six feature patents, all of which were part of the previously filed patent-infringement lawsuit. Samsung was widely expected to charge that the iPhone 5 infringed on patents related to LTE networking technologies, but that wasn’t part of this filing.
The case won’t go to trial until 2014.
As for the Galaxy Tab 10.1, Apple had previously won a temporary sales ban against the device as part of its own successful patent-infringement lawsuit against Samsung. But that injunction was based on a charge that Samsung had copied the design of Apple’s iPad, a charge that jurors dismissed. So Samsung is free to sell that device in the United States, despite an argument from Apple that the ban should remain in place because the Galaxy Tab 10.1 infringed on other of its patents.
