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In her black robe and strand of white pearls, Lucy Koh projects the serious, deliberate demeanor befitting a U.S. District Court judge. The Harvard-educated former federal prosecutor has served on the California state bench and as a partner in a Silicon Valley law firm, where she litigated technology patent lawsuits. For all her earnestness, Koh, 43, could not resist needling the lawyers skirmishing before her at a hearing last June in San Jose.

“Last time you were here,” the judge noted, “you said that you had a business relationship—I forget what the number was—$8 million, $8 billion?”

“I think it was in excess of $7 billion,” said attorney Harold McElhinny. That’s how much McElhinny’s client, Apple (AAPL), pays annually for components made by Samsung Electronics (005930), the company Apple is suing for patent infringement. Apple is Samsung’s single biggest customer, responsible for 7.6 percent of the Korean company’s 2011 revenue of $109 billion. The dependence runs both ways: Apple’s absurdly lucrative iPad and iPhone operations would grind to a halt without Samsung’s parts. Yet here in Koh’s courtroom, the companies were bashing each other’s brains out.

“Seven billion,” Judge Koh mused. “Can we all just get along here? Can I send you out to ADR?” she wondered, referring to alternative dispute resolution, a form of private mediation. “I will send you with boxes of chocolates,” the judge said. “I mean, whatever.”

Nine months later, the case of Apple v. Samsung shows no sign of abating. Rather than conciliate, Apple returned in February to the federal courthouse in San Jose to sue Samsung again, claiming the Korean manufacturer “slavishly copied” Apple. An unrelenting recidivist, in Apple’s portrayal, Samsung has “continued to flood the market with copycat products, including at least 18 new infringing products released over the last eight months.”

The clash reflects life in the tech big leagues: Apple sharply reminding a formidable rival who’s boss. At the same time, Apple v. Samsung is remarkable for its scale. The combatants barely notice the millions of dollars in legal expenses they’re each spending annually to flog the other in an epic struggle that will surely test their multibillion-dollar symbiotic relationship. The battle also signals a broader conflict pitting Apple against multiple mobile-device manufacturers in some three dozen legal and regulatory actions pending in 10 countries. Beyond Samsung, Apple’s notable antagonists include Motorola Mobility (MMI) and HTC (2498). As Silicon Valley sophisticates underscore, however, the phone and tablet makers are mere proxies for another foe—Android, the operating system Google (GOOG) gives away to manufacturers. Google employs a come-one, come-all business model radically at odds with Apple’s and, in the late Steve Jobs’s view, existentially threatening to his company.

In the last 18 months of his life, Jobs, who died on Oct. 5 at age 56, was obsessed with crushing Android. He explained to his authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, that the litigation against device manufacturers was meant to communicate an unmistakable message: “Google, you f–king ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft.” Jobs swore he would “spend my last dying breath” and “every penny” in Apple’s coffers “to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this.”

One problem with nuclear attacks, even those of the metaphoric variety, is that the targets may retaliate with nukes of their own. That is precisely what has happened. For every Apple allegation, a rival has countered that Apple is not as uniquely innovative as Jobs liked to boast. To the contrary, Samsung, Motorola, and others insist that some of Apple’s most valuable patents—such as those protecting the minimalist design of the iPhone and iPad—were never valid in the first place.

By pushing the launch button on his legal ICBMs, Jobs bequeathed a significant risk to his successors. Apple may succeed in forcing competitors to deactivate a few phone features, or maybe even yank an entire model or two from a major market. But Apple has many rivals: If one falters, others will step in. Samsung’s website lists no fewer than 134 phone models. Apple, by contrast, has only two core products at issue in the patent war: the iPhone and iPad. Unlikely as it might seem, if a competing manufacturer manages to persuade a judge or a trade commission somewhere in the world that Apple has relied on a faulty patent for something important, the Cupertino (Calif.)-based juggernaut could suffer profound reputational damage and—more important to stakeholders—market-share erosion.