NEW YORK (AP) – In a bid to resolve a sticky mess, a judge has decided that an Argentine company can continue making its sweet-tasting Bazooka gum even though its relationship with The Topps Co. that made the brand famous has long since soured.

U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. told the half-century-old story of the relationship between The Topps Co. Inc. and Productos Stani Sociedad Anonima Industrial Y Commercial as he ruled that the company supplying gum to five South American countries can continue to use what it learned before contracts expired in 1996.

The Argentine company has since been purchased by a British corporation, Cadbury Schweppes PLC.

As Haight described it in a Thursday decision, Topps and the Argentine companies were best friends when they were each family-owned, before Topps became publicly held in 1987.

“This case is a tale of two companies, once friends and collaborators, now enemies and scorched-earth litigators; and of chewing gum,” Haight wrote.

On the road to settling the trademark and contract dispute, the judge described the history of gum, including that ancient Greeks chewed mastiche, a chewing gum made from the resin of the mastic tree.

He said 19th century inventor Thomas Adams accidentally stumbled upon gum as it is now known when he popped a piece of chicle from Mexican sapodilla trees into his mouth as he tried to use the substance unsuccessfully to make toys, masks, rain boots and bicycle tires. He liked the taste and so he opened the world’s first chewing gum factory.

In February 1881, Adams New York Gum went on sale in drug stores for a penny apiece, the judge said.

The current dispute evolved after Topps permitted the Argentine company to make and sell its gum according to five written agreements reached between 1957 and 1985, the judge said.

Productos Stani thus distributed all types of Topps chewing gum – including Bazooka bubble gum – throughout Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, paying Topps a 3 percent license fee.

The companies signed an agreement in which Topps permitted its Argentine friend to buy the rights to receive legal title in 1996 in Argentina of the trademarks “Bazooka,” “Topps” and related trademarks.

In 1999, Topps argued that the rights to the trademark names did not entitle the company to continue to use its secret chewing gum formulas after the various contracts expired in 1996.

Not so, Haight ruled. Topps’ reasoning that the Argentine company received “only the trademarks for Bazooka gum and could not use the technology to make it, runs counter to the law of trademark,” Haight said.

“A trademark is merely a symbol of goodwill and cannot be sold or assigned apart from the goodwill it symbolizes,” he added.

Haight said any use by the Argentine company after 1996 of Topps’ technology did not break any contract between the two companies.

The ruling appears to have given the Argentine company a bigger court victory than it had asked for, since it maintained in court that it has not made any use of protected Topps technology since 1996.

Messages left with lawyers in the case were not immediately returned Monday.