The patent battle between Apple and Samsung shows no signs of slowing down, with Samsung this week filing suit against the iPhone maker on its home turf - Seoul, South Korea.
A Samsung spokesman said the company filed the suit against Apple in the Seoul Central District Court over its "continued infringement" of three utility patents in its iPhone 4S and iPad 2.
"Samsung will continue to assert its intellectual property rights and defend its investment in innovation in order to ensure our continued growth in the mobile industry," the spokesman said.
Samsung said this lawsuit is separate from the proceedings filed against Apple in Seoul back in April 2011 regarding infringement of telecommunications standards-related patents.
April 2011 was when the battle between Samsung and Apple officially kicked off, with Apple suing Samsung for copying the look and feel of its iPhone and iPad in its flagship Galaxy S line of devices. Samsung responded with a countersuit that targeted Apple for infringing on five patents relating to wireless networking technology, though it later dropped a countersuit filed in a U.S. federal court to streamline its proceedings.
But similar suits have been filed all over the globe, with many of the recent proceedings focusing on the German courts. Earlier this month, two cases in Germany were dismissed - one that Samsung brought against Apple regarding 3G essential patents and one that Apple brought against Samsung regarding slide-to-unlock technology.
But as patent blogger Florian Mueller noted this morning, "Samsung's litigation track record against Apple has been abysmal as far as Samsung's offensive claims against Apple are concerned."
"For Samsung, it's absolutely essential to succeed on some offensive counts against Apple in at least a couple of jurisdictions," Mueller wrote in a blog post. "Otherwise, other industry players would have doubts about the strength of Samsung's patent portfolio. There won't be a face-saving exit for Samsung before it has made a decent amount of headway with its own assertions."