In Silicon Valley, a Man Without a Patent

In Silicon Valley, a Man Without a Patent - New York Times: "GEOFF GOODFELLOW is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came up with an idea that resulted in a $612.5 million payday. But he will never see a penny of it. He remains little known even in Silicon Valley and, perhaps most surprising, he doesn't really mind.

And herein lies one of the stranger tales about innovation and money in the world of technology.

A high-school dropout, Mr. Goodfellow had his light-bulb moment in 1982, when he came up with the idea of sending electronic mail messages wirelessly to a portable device — like a BlackBerry.

Mr. Goodfellow, an early participant in Silicon Valley's grass-roots computer culture, disdained the notion of protecting his ideas with patents. And Thomas J. Campana Jr., a Chicago inventor with no such qualms, patented the idea of wireless electronic mail almost a decade after Mr. Goodfellow's original work.

Mr. Campana, who died in 2004, was a founder of NTP, and his patent push yielded a bonanza for the company, which will receive $612.5 million in a settlement reached last month in its patent infringement suit against Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

NTP hired Mr. Goodfellow as a consultant; invoices show he was paid $4,000 a day — about $19,600 in all — for several days' work in 2002, including two trips to meet with lawyers in Washington. As part of a formal contract, he signed a nondisclosure agreement, prohibiting him from revealing any information or consulting with any other parties during the period of the lawsuit.

In 1982, he published his idea on a widely read Arpanet mailing list called Telecom Digest in a note titled "Electronic Mail for People on the Move.""