Hello and welcome to another MLEX podcast. Great to have your company today. My name's James

Panicki. I'm Mlex's Australasian managing editor coming to you from a very wet and windy Melbourne, Australia.

Today we're asking you to check the smartphone that you have in your pocket or sitting somewhere on your desk right now.

Even if it's not an iPhone, the grid of software icons that define Apple's iconic mobile device will be familiar to you. In fact, the design of the grid, known as a graphical user interface or GUI, has become the iPhone's calling card.

The problem is that a similar grid has also become the calling card of Apple's main rival Samsung,

and that has led to litigation between the two companies that's been bubbling away

now since 2011. But now it's crunch time. A federal jury will be impaneled this week in Silicon Valley

and the eight jurors will have to decide whether the GUI is divisible from the profit of a complete iPhone

and we'll get into the detail of that in just a moment.

But this is a question that could ultimately reshape US patent law

and also has antitrust implications.

M-Nex's chief global digital risk correspondent,

Mike Swift, has been following this story from Silicon Valley since it began.

Mike, great to talk to you.

It's great to be here, James. Now, can we start by explaining what exactly is at stake in this trial?

Well, a whole lot of money, at a minimum, $400 million, but actually probably significantly more than that.

This is the third trial between Apple and Samsung in litigation that began back in 2011. And this is a case that actually has gone all the way

up to the United States Supreme Court and has now landed back at the trial court for really a

final reckoning for how much Samsung

has to pay Apple in damages. And why has it taken seven years and four trials for Apple and

Samsung to litigate these patent and antitrust questions? I mean, this is a massive amount of time.

Couldn't this have been dealt with swiftly in one

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