Back in October, cell phone giant Nokia slapped Apple with a lawsuit alleging infringement of its wireless standard patents. Now, Apple is fighting back with a countersuit in what they call a “response” to Nokia’s legal action.

Nokia’s lawsuit focuses on ten different GSM and wireless LAN patents that it owns, claiming that the iPhone infringes on them, according to AppleInsider. Apple’s defense claims that Nokia’s patents are all related to existing standards, which means they have been committed to be licensed freely by competing companies.

Sounding more like sour grapes than anything else over losing market share to the iPhone, Nokia is not only seeking special licensing terms from Apple but also access to Cupertino’s own patents. “Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours,” said Apple General Counsel and senior vice president Bruce Sewell in a terse statement on the subject.

“In dealing with Apple, Nokia has sought to gain an unjust competitive advantage over Apple by charging unwarranted fees to use patents that allegedly cover industry compatibility standards and by seeking to obtain access to Apple’s intellectual property,” the countersuit reads. “Nokia needs access to Apple’s intellectual property because Nokia has copied and is now using that patented technology.”

The suit features a quote from Nokia’s executive vice president and general manager of multimedia from back in 2007. When asked to compare Nokia’s products to the iPhone, Anssi Vanjoki replied, “[If] there is something good in the world, we copy it with pride.”

“True to his quote,” Apple claims, “Nokia has demonstrated its willingness to copy Apple’s iPhone ideas as well as Apple’s basic computing technologies, all while demanding Apple pay for access to Nokia’s purported standards essential patent.”

Apple says that Nokia “remained focused on traditional mobile wireless handsets with conventional user interfaces” while the iPhone leapt ahead of the pack and revolutionized the industry. As a result, Nokia then rapidly lost market share for its high-end mobile phones as customers started choosing the iPhone.

There are 13 different patent violations cited in Apple’s countersuit, a tactic presumed to be employed mostly to give Cupertino more leverage in negotiations against the Finland-based Nokia. Experts familiar with such cases expect both companies will reach a licensing deal outside of the courts in order to avoid a lengthy legal battle.

Nokia claims ownership of the technology related to Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications, wireless local area network (WLAN) and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UTMS), all widely used around the world by many companies. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes that what Nokia is really after is one or two percent of every iPhone sold, which would add up to $6-12 per device.