Apple-Samsung court battle reignites over iPhone 5

Consider yourself preemptively re-served, Apple.

Samsung really, really wants everyone to know, even before the iPhone 5 hits the streets, that it is not yet attaching but is definitely planning to attach the iPhone 5 to its long-running court battle in U.S. District Court of Northern California.

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At least Samsung had the good grace to wait until the phone was announced, unlike one Chinese company.

No, this is not the court battle it lost. This is another legal fight with Apple, which started in April of this year and is not scheduled to go to trial until March 2014.

This battle involves eight patents on data transfer, media syncing, touch screen technology, and more. Last night Samsung amended its complaint to include the iPhone 5:

“Samsung anticipates that it will file, in the near future, a motion to amend its infringement contentions to add the iPhone 5 as an accused product. On September 12, 2012, Apple announced that it will release the iPhone 5 on September 21, 2012. Based on information currently available, Samsung expects that the iPhone 5 will infringe the asserted Samsung patents-in-suit in the same way as the other accused iPhone models. Samsung plans to file a motion to amend its infringement contentions to address the iPhone 5 as soon as it has had a reasonable opportunity to analyze the device. Because Samsung believes the accused functionality of the iPhone 5 will be similar to the accused functionality of other accused Apple products, Samsung does not believe that amendment of its infringement contentions should affect the case schedule.”

There was no huge need to file last night, which makes me suspect that the timing of the announcement is part of Samsung’s campaign to disrupt Apple’s massive pre-sales ramp-up to iPhone 5 sales.

The iPhone broke all records in pre-selling two million units in its first 24 hours on sale. Fans — not necessarily of the saner sort — are already camping out for it, and U.S. sales alone could hit 50 million.

This court battle may be Samsung’s best bet to win against Apple after its billion-dollar failure, as two of the patents are FRAND patents. In other words, they are standards-essential, which theoretically means that no cellular communications device could be made without infringing on them.