The European Commission announced this week that it plans to open an investigation on the methods Samsung Electronics have been using to license its technology patents.

Filing on behalf of the European Union as its antitrust enforcer, the Commission released a statement today which makes clear their intention to “assess whether Samsung Electronics has abusively, and in contravention of a commitment it gave to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, used certain of its standard essential patent rights to distort competition in European mobile device markets.”

The “standard essential patent rights” referred to here are the basics required of just about any mobile device that is declared fit for purpose and sale. The company’s recent spate of lawsuits against tech firms such as Apple stem from some of the self-same patent infringements which Samsung feels are theirs alone.

Much like the “Look and Feel” debacle which plagued the Apple vs. Microsoft cases of the 1990s, it falls upon regulators such as the European Commission to decide which features of a product are the bare essentials, and which ones substantiate copyright and patent theft.

It’s a little more complicated than the following example, but if Samsung sued Apple on the basis that the latter’s mobile phones also contained an onscreen keypad with which to dial a number (when it had been previously agreed by the petitioner that this was a fairly basic function which most smartphones share), Samsung would quite likely lose the case, and quite possibly face sanctions for conducting themselves in a flagrantly mercenary manner.

Samsung has declined to comment on the matter, though the recent development of a judge ruling that it can no longer sell their Galaxy Tab in its current form in Germany won’t have helped matters.