WASHINGTON (Bloomberg) - EBay Inc., the world's biggest online auctioneer, agreed to buy a Virginia company's patents to end a lawsuit over its "Buy It Now" sales option.

Financial terms were not disclosed. San Jose, California- based EBay said the settlement of the six-year-old dispute won't affect 2007 results or its 2008 forecast. The company reported net income of $348 million on sales of $7.67 billion last year.

EBay said it will buy three patents from Great Falls, Virginia-based MercExchange LLC related to fixed-price sales, plus related technology. Closely held MercExchange sued EBay in September 2001. A jury in 2003 awarded $30 million after finding EBay's "Buy It Now" feature infringed MercExchange's patents for an online marketplace. The award was later cut to $25 million on appeal and resulted in a change in US patent law.

The agreement "gives us access to additional intellectual property that will help improve and further secure our marketplaces," EBay General Counsel Mike Jacobson said in a statement.

MercExchange founder Tom Woolston declined to specify how much EBay paid, or what MercExchange will do now.

"We thought it was best to put it behind us, so we wrapped it up," he said.

The lawsuit led to a Supreme Court ruling that said patent owners, while entitled to damages, do not automatically get a court ruling to block sales of products found to violate their patents. Such blocks often led to large settlement payments by losing companies, which faced loss of business or even shutdown.

After that ruling, US District Judge Jerome Friedman in Norfolk, Virginia, refused to force EBay to stop using the "Buy it Now" feature as an alternative to its auction method.

Fixed-price sales accounted for about 38 percent of the total value of items sold on EBay last year, the company reported on January 23. The company said it modified certain functions to work around the MercExchange patents.

Before the Supreme Court's EBay ruling in May 2006, patent owners almost always received court orders to block products. Since then, judges throughout the US have denied such orders in cases where the patent owner is not a competitor of the company making the infringing products.