NTP v. RIM
The patent fight that nearly switched off BlackBerry in the US in 2006 and ended in a $612.5 million settlement.
NTP was essentially a patent-holding company, founded in 1992 by inventor Thomas Campana and attorney Donald Stout to manage Campana's patents on wireless email. In 2001 it sued Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, and in 2002 a Virginia jury found RIM liable for infringement.
The court threatened an injunction against the BlackBerry service in the US, where Congress and half of Wall Street had the devices in hand. Meanwhile the Patent Office was provisionally rejecting NTP's patents on re-examination. RIM didn't wait for the outcome and paid up in March 2006. The case became the textbook example of an injunction threat being worth more than the patent itself — leverage the Supreme Court curbed that same year in eBay v. MercExchange.