US Dictrict Court judge Lucy Koh today granted a request from Samsung for the dissolution of a preliminary sales injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1. The case had been taken out of Judge Koh’s hands for a bit, but was remanded to her docket by the Court of Appeals.

Apple can still win a permanent ban if its request is granted, but for now, Samsung can continue to sell the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the US.

The lift of the sales ban may only be temporary, and Judge Koh explicitly states that she is not commenting on the merit of either party’s case, saying in a footnote, “”[t]he Court is not in any way commenting on the merits of any of the parties’ post-trial motions.”

This comes only an hour after Samsung also filed a formal request to add the iPhone 5 to the list of products cited as infringing eight of Samsung’s own patents in the smartphone arena, according to FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller.

In September, Samsung had made the court aware of its plans to add the iPhone 5 to the trial, now scheduled for December of this year. As reported by Mueller, the new October 1 filing says that, “”as soon as [the] iPhone 5 was available for purchase, Samsung began its investigation of the product and within a week “determined that the iPhone 5 practiced its patented technologies.”

Samsung feels that the iPhone 5 infringes similar patents to the ones cited in it’s current eight-patent suit, and wishes to save the court the time and effort it would take to file a separate suit with only the iPhone 5 as the target. The filing says, “[t]he iPhone 5 has the same accused functionality as the previously accused versions of the iPhone, so the proof of infringement of the patents-in-suit by the iPhone 5 is the same as for other Apple devices already accused of infringement in this litigation.”

As Judge Koh is known for not liking time-wasting tactics, we can only assume that Samsung is trying to curry favor a bit here by adding to an already active case, rather than create a whole new one for a new device that essentially, they claim, infringes the same Samsung patents.

• SourceFOSS Patents