One of NTP's appointed attorneys, James Wallace Jr., said in an interview that NTP was seeking booklets describing wireless services from Telenor ASA, a large Norwegian communications service provider. Those documents might have been relevant to whether NTP's patents for wireless push e-mail had been trumped by "prior art," a term for technology already available before a patent is sought.

David Long, an attorney representing RIM, responded in an interview that NTP was sent hard copies of the exact technical treatise from Telenor that NTP refers to. "It's just disturbing," he said of NTP and the Telenor footnote. "They'll use charged words like that and they are misleading. It sounds like we're up to no good and we're hiding [the document], and that couldn't be any further from the truth."

In response, Wallace said RIM and a RIM consultant, Thomas Pavelko, do not dispute that NTP was delayed by weeks in gaining access to the documents, however. RIM has sought to inform the court how it feels about NTP. In one passage from its own filing last week, RIM says NTP appears to resort to "ad hominem attacks" on RIM "whenever [NTP] has no response on the merits."

RIM adds in a footnote that NTP's rhetoric has even resorted to "waving the American flag at RIM," which is based in Waterloo, Ontario. By contrast, Arlington, Va.-based NTP has no Web site or phone number and is only a patent holding company with no dedicated employees, Wallace said.

While RIM does not refer to NTP as a patent "troll," as many observers of the dispute have done, it does disparage patent licensing companies generally for producing lawsuits to extract royalties.