As expected, Samsung has filed a lawsuit against Apple’s latest iPhone — the iPhone 5 — alleging the smartphone infringes patents it holds.  Commenting on the action in a statement given to Reuters, Samsung said: “We have little choice but to take the steps necessary to protect our innovations and intellectual property rights.”

We’ve contacted Samsung for further comment and details of the disputed patents and will update if we hear back. At the time of writing Apple had also not responded to a request for comment.

According to Florian Mueller of the FOSS patents blog, the lawsuit was filed about an hour before the Northern District Court of Californian’s Judge Koh’s dissolved a preliminary injunction banning sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in the U.S. — an overhang from another big bout of patent litigation between the two companies in which Apple won damages of more than $1 billion.