As the courtroom drama between Apple and Samsung continues to play out, Samsung has been enduring a lot of pretty damning accusations that it knowingly copied Apple designs and technologies for its own smartphones and tablets. Yesterday, though, Samsung got a chance to go on the offensive with some allegations of its own, and it seems to be going with the old two-wrongs-make-a-right argument, suggesting that Apple itself had been stealing its ideas from other companies.

Samsung’s evidence focused on Apple’s pinch-to-zoom patent, of critical importance for how we interact with displays. In order to show that Apple shouldn’t even have the patent in the first place, Samsung brought up a Mitsubishi-designed multi-touch interface from around a decade ago, called Diamond Touch.

As you can see in the video below, there are some very strong similarities between pinch-to-zoom as we know it now and the interaction shown around the 0:38 mark, where a user resizes on-screen objects by touching the corners and “stretching” them.

Samsung also pointed out that Apple met with Mitsubishi in 2003 and was shown Diamond Touch at the time, making it difficult to suggest that Apple might have come up with the same idea separately.

Of course, it probably would have been better for Samsung to try and get Apple’s patent declared invalid before it released products apparently in violation of it, but that’s clearly not the route Samsung wanted to take. It’s still got a long to go towards defending itself, but more evidence like this would certainly be a big help.