14 DAY TRIAL // Two weeks after Apple sued Samsung claiming that the latter's Android devices copy Apple's products, the second largest mobile phone maker in the world filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California, alleging that Apple infringes a number of 10 Samsung patents.
This is not the first legal action Samsung takes against Apple, but follows three other similar lawsuits that Samsung filed in different countries in Europe and Asia.
According to Samsung, the Apple iPhone 3G, the Apple iPhone 3GS, the Apple iPhone 4, the iPad 3G, and the iPad 2 3G infringe all of the said 10 patents, which are described below.
At the same time, the mobile phone maker alleges that the iPod Touch and the iPad and iPad2 (the WiFi-only version) are infringing the last three patents on the list ('179, '626, '055).
While the first seven of the patents are related to various communications standards, including transmitting/receiving packet data, UMTS/CDMA/HSDPA technologies, and the like, the last three of them are related to the user interface of mobile phones.
Previously, Samsung filed lawsuits against Apple in South Korea, Germany and Japan.
According to a recent blog post from Florian Mueller, Samsung's patents might be inventions related to increasing efficiency of data communications over various networks.
It does not come as a surprise that Samsung managed to come up with this patent infringement claim so soon, as the company already announced that it would respond actively to Apple's initial lawsuit.
However, unlike Apple, which claims that Samsung's handsets are ripping off its iPhone and iPad devices, and that the icons on these phones are resembling more and more to those it users on its devices, Samsung based its claims on patents it holds in various communication technology fields.
Here is the complete list of the patents Samsung claims the Apple's devices infringe in the new lawsuit: U.S. Patent No. 7,675,941 on a "Method and apparatus for transmitting/receiving packet data using pre-defined length indicator in a mobile communication system"
U.S. Patent No. 7,362,867 on an "apparatus and method for generating scrambling code in UMTS mobile communication system"
U.S. Patent No. 7,447,516 on a "method and apparatus for data transmission in a mobile telecommunication system supporting enhanced uplink service"
U.S. Patent No. 7,200,792 on an "interleaving apparatus and method for symbol mapping in an HSDPA mobile communication system"
U.S. Patent No. 7,386,001 on an "apparatus and method for channel coding and multiplexing in CDMA communication system"
U.S. Patent No. 7,050,410 on an "apparatus and method for controlling a demultiplexer and a multiplexer used for rate matching in a mobile communication system"
U.S. Patent No. 6,928,604 on a "turbo encoding/decoding device and method for processing frame data according to QOS"
U.S. Patent No. 6,292,179 on a "software keyboard system using trace of stylus on a touch screen and method for recognizing key code using the same"
U.S. Patent No. 7,009,626 on a "systems and methods for generating visual representations of graphical data and digital document processing"
U.S. Patent No. 7,069,055 on a "mobile telephone capable of displaying world time and method for controlling the same"
More info on them can be found here