There was never any dispute that Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian firm that introduced the world to the BlackBerry in 1999, came up with its own technology to power the wireless e-mail device.
But Thomas Campana Jr., co-founder of a small McLean firm called NTP Inc., noticed an uncanny resemblance between the BlackBerry technology and a technology he had developed years earlier.
When he and business partner Donald Stout contacted RIM in 2000 about obtaining a license for the NTP technology, however, they didn't get a response.
Six years later, the dispute has been settled, with RIM agreeing to pay $612.5 million to NTP to resolve the patent dispute.
Campana died in 2004. His widow, who lives outside of Chicago, will split most of the settlement with Stout, with the rest going to NTP's 20 shareholders, according to sources close to the talks.
In Northern Virginia, the company that has been at the center of one of the most-watched legal battles in the business community really isn't much of a company.
Its sole purpose when it was formed in 1991 was patenting and licensing radio wave technology innovations developed by Campana, an engineer from the Chicago area.
A year earlier, Campana built a prototype of a device that would wirelessly receive e-mail from a central server, but his invention was never sold.
More spent in legal fees
RIM maintained that its device arose from a two-way paging technology that existed before Campana's patents. NTP argued that the technology RIM was using had already been invented and patented -- by NTP. The two sides continued to disagree, and after NTP failed to convince RIM that it was entitled to licensing fees, the company sued.
Stout told The Washington Post last year that RIM has had to spend more in legal fees -- $25 million to $50 million -- than it would have cost to license the company's technology.
NTP remains a small company, but its quest for what it thought was its due put it in the national spotlight, at least among the millions of people who feared that their beloved BlackBerrys could be shut off.
The battle may be over, but NTP's win could have long-lasting effects on RIM.
Tech industry analyst Tim Bajarin said the settlement may cause BlackBerry to raise its subscription fees, but added that he does not see a wider impact on the tech industry resulting from the case.
The settlement means that corporate clients who had been reluctant to adopt BlackBerry's service might now sign up with the company.
"There were a lot of companies who were starting to look seriously at alternatives," said Bajarin, president of the technology research firm Creative Strategies Inc.
