What follows is a list of headers to recent patent news stories. Hopefully I will get around to turning these into stories, but at least the headers will alert you to recent happenings you can check out on your own if it is relevant. US Department of Justice "cancels" patent rights for a patent owned by the German company Bayer AG, citing antitrust violations. Forces Bayer to license technology to more than one US company. West Interactive gets $4.4 million+ from First Data Resources over interactive telephone patents. Ovonics asks International Trade Commission to halt nickel metal hydride batteries imports from Japan. Coherent and Clark Instrumentation settle over laser mode locking patents. On the 25,027 day of its existence, ATT was awarded its 25,000th patent, averaging about 480 patents a year. Data General sues IBM over seven patents dealing with OS software. Qualcomm pays InterDigital $5.5 million to settle lengthy patent battle over CDMA patents. Nintendo is ordered by a jury to pay Alpex Computer $208 million for infringing Alpex's electronic cartridge patent. Genetics Institute is challenging Amgen's European patent of the gene responsible for the protein erythopoietin. Texas Instruments cracking down on Taiwanese makers of dynamic RAMs, seeking patent royalties, as much as $383 million per year. Court awards two inventors $96 million after company reneged on marketing technology that was licensed dealing with energy saving devices. Scientist uses DNA sequences to solve Hamiltonian path problem of combinatorial mathematics, a precursor of the PTO's headache of including biotechnology in it software prior art searches. Think of Hopfield's paper on using neural nets for the traveling salesman problem to predict where DNA computing will end up. Company awarded patent on a software driven, hardware-reconfigurable microprocessor, blurring all distinctions between hardware and software, again another headache for the PTO's prior art searches. A ruling against Texas Instruments in Japan may spur MITI to argue that Japanese courts broaden patent protection rights. NIH arguing with University of Utah and Myriad Genetics over patent rights to the discovery of the BRCA1 breast cancer susceptibility gene. European Commission unifying rules on design protection for spare auto parts, protecting new cars for three years. Analog Devices and Texas Instruments prepare for patent battle over digital signal processing technology. Altera and AMD exchange patent lawsuits over PLD technology. Sega provides Atari with $90 million in return to access to Atari video game technology, settle a 70 patent legal dispute. Australia, citing its stronger intellectual property laws, tries to woo foreign companies from Singapore and Hong Kong Seaway Technologies is awarded a patent to scare dolphins away from tuna nets with artifically generated killer whale sounds. MTI sues CMD Technology over RAID related patents. MTI has 19 patents, with 20 more pending. Cisco may be infringing IBM patent over net router technology. British and American groups argue over the issue of patenting the BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast cancer genes. The British group is against commercializing DNA, and may stop sharing data with the Americans. European Telecommunications Standards Institutes drops plan to force vendors to pool their telecommunications patents. Startek settles suit with MCC for a few million dollars, far less than the $26.75 million awarded by a jury to Startek, which would have put MCC out of business. The technology concerned vertically stacked memory modules. Harris sues IXYS over IGBT patents. Motorola settles patent dispute with Jerome Lemelson by donating money to Lemelson's Inventors Foundation. Genetics Institute sues Ortho Pharmaceutical. Datapoint and VTEL settle patent lawsuit over video conferencing technology. Tektronix and LeCroy reach an out-of-court settlement over four US and foreign patents infringement allegations. Greg Aharonian Internet Patent News Service (for subscription info, send 'help' to patents@world.std.com ) (for prior art search services info, send 'prior' to patents@world.std.com ) (for WWW patent searching, try http://sunsite.unc.edu/patents/intropat.html )