Milton Harris, a professor turned Chief Scientific Officer, and Robert Chess, CEO of Nextar is giving UAH, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, an "endowment".

The University of Alabama in Huntsville will receive $25 million as part of a patent settlement with a former UAH professor and a California-based pharmaceutical company, the school said Friday.

David Letterman is not the only person with a Top Ten List.  The EFF, aka Electronic Frontier Foundation:  "Defending Freedom in the Digital World", has a Patent Busting Project underway with a Top Ten list.  Wired News says in the article entitled EFF Publishes Patent Hit List:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is spoiling for a fight, and on Wednesday it named the top 10 patents it wants killed, or at least redefined.

Two of the ten "threatening" patents owners the EFF has singled out include radio titan Clear Channel and beloved video game maker Nintendo.

"These patent owners have been threatening people that just can't defend themselves," said Jason Schultz, staff attorney at the EFF.

Patent No. 7,020,704, which was filed in 1999, could be problematic to web media streaming.  Of course, according to the article, the popular iTunes service would not be immuned.

A company formed after the burst of the Internet bubble to control assets of defunct ZapMedia Inc. has received a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that could potentially send shock waves through industries that distribute digital audio and video content over the Internet.

I would have never had guess that a vent no larger than a pinhole could be worth so much money, but Jack Evans could receive that much from GM if he wins a court battle scheduled to begin the end of this year.

Evans claimed that GM stole his design for an engine cooling system when he worked as a consultant for the company in the 1980s.

It looks like a patent battle will be playing out on the small screen. The participates are Netflix, who has $228 million in cash with no debt and 4.9 million subscribers, and Blockbuster, a company that seems to have trouble reinventing itself. Even though they are most certainly biased, Blockbuster's comments are disturbing: