LIVONIA, N.Y. — Inventor Tom Wicker sometimes gets breakthrough ideas during walks around his wooded, 15-acre hilltop spread. On occasion, he says, he'll rush down to his printworker's shop on this village's Main Street and "100 pages of math later, I have something that works."

Wicker's brainstorms are all about ratcheting up security to foil crooks in the multibillion-dollar world of counterfeiting. His father spent much of his career doing the same kind of work, making currency and vital documents harder to duplicate, but he died feeling denied due recognition or compensation.

Now, his sons have taken up their father's fight. Tom and his brother David Wicker have attracted formidable allies, and an improbable comeback appears at hand. Tens of millions of dollars are at stake.

Tom Wicker, 44, recalls his father's deathbed words in 1997. "Life's going to be hell," Ralph Wicker whispered, "but if you hang in there, you're going to make this work."

With the proliferation of high-quality color copiers and scanners, counterfeiting has ballooned to a $600 billion-a-year headache, the International Chamber of Commerce estimates.

Back in 1961 when counterfeiting hinged on getting help from engravers and other artisans gone bad, 27-year-old Ralph Wicker was awarded the first of 34 patents in graphic arts. Another invention in 1964 netted $65,000. But the good times didn't last.

Wicker, a former Marine Corps sergeant with a gung-ho spirit but also a weakness for whiskey, gave up a steady job as a lithographer to become a go-it-alone entrepreneur — only to confirm that he was not a businessman.

A pioneering "big dot-little dot" pantograph he devised in 1970 that made the word "void" appear in reproductions was plundered by rivals in the checks-and-forms industry. Over the next decade, he got fitful work as a consultant and bounced his family from town to town in western New York to keep ahead of bills.

While testing his fine-line method, Ralph Wicker befriended Patrick White, a print shop owner who put all the latest color-copier models at his disposal. Shortly before securing a patent in 1991, Ralph presented his work to Secret Service officials who urged him not to share it with others, his sons contend.

It was his proudest breakthrough because of its lofty potential to become a key buffer for the nation's money.

Again, however, the euphoria didn't last. The Treasury stopped taking his calls, his sons say, and then unveiled a technique it called "concentric fine-line printing."

That's when Ralph Wicker called in his attorneys.

In a 1995 lawsuit seeking up to $93 million in royalties, he accused the Treasury Department of pirating his patented method of incorporating fine-line engravings in its newly unveiled $100 bill. The micro-patterns cause distortions when copied.

During the trial, Ralph rejected a $3 million settlement offer, saying it didn't cover his investors' costs. But his all-or-nothing case went down in flames.

While finding that "the United States in fact was infringing" his 1991 and 1993 patents, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims determined that two earlier patents secured in Europe invalidated key parts of his invention.

In 2002, the brothers transformed their expanding portfolio of patents into Document Security Systems Inc., a publicly traded company headed by White and backed by $5 million from investors. Tom Wicker was given 1 million shares. The stock recently surged above $13 a share.