Samsung has made good on its threat to file a suit against the iPhone 5 after announcing on Tuesday that it had submitted a complaint, Reuters reports. Court documents reveal that the South Korean electronics maker has added the device to an existing lawsuit against Apple in California.
“We have little choice but to take the steps necessary to protect our innovations and intellectual property rights,” the company said in a statement.
Samsung declared its intentions to target the iPhone 5 shortly after Apple announced the new handset last month, though it did say it would first analyze the device. In fact, the company had threatened to go after the iPhone 5 even before it was announced, since it believed that an LTE-capable iPhone would violate its patents.
According to Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents, Samsung’s filing states that it took less than a week for the company to “[determine] that the iPhone 5 practiced its patented technologies.”
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Samsung is fresh off a minor win after Federal Judge Lucy Koh removed the preliminary sales ban against its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet. The company is, however, coming from behind in its legal fight against Apple, as it was hit with a $1.05 billion judgment in the US in August.
Though the Galaxy smartphone maker is likely to have the upper hand in terms of LTE-related intellectual property, as one check found that it had twice as many patents submitted to a European standards body as Apple had, Samsung could face difficulty if it is leveraging standards-essential LTE patents against the iPhone 5, since IP required for the technology would likely have already been committed to licensing agreements.
Image Credits: Christof Stache / Getty Images, FOSS Patents
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