This is just great. As Mike Masnick reports on Techdirt, Mark Cuban is putting his money behind efforts to crack down on patent abuse. I’m becoming a huge fan of Cuban: he stars on ultra-capitalist Shark Tank, one of the best shows on TV, and he also gets that patent law is anti-capialist (see Mark Cuban: Patent law is killing jobs).
Mark Cuban Funds EFF’s New ‘Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Patents’
from the go-julie dept
Some fantastic news from EFFland, where Mark Cuban and Markus ‘Notch’ Persson have agreed togive EFF $250,000 each in order to fund its latest efforts to stop bad patents. This includes naming EFF attorney Julie Samuels “The Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents.” This is a job title that only a few people deserve and, knowing Julie, she’s one of them. Over the years, EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] has done some really great work on patents, but they’ve often seemed like a backburner issue compared to other things — so we’re excited to see what comes next.
EFF does not oppose patents: see Adi Kamdar, Daniel Nazer, Vera Ranieri, Defend Innovation: How to Fix Our Broken Patent System, Electronic Frontier Foundation (Feb. 2015) (“The patent system is in crisis. Patents—particularly software patents—have become a tool for intimidation and expensive litigation, chilling the very innovation the patent system was supposed to encourage. … Since the mid-1990s, software patents in particular have proven to hinder rather than support innovation. … despite recent Supreme Court decisions that have dialed back some of the excesses of the patent system, patent quality remains low. … PART 1 – THE PROBLEM A. The root of the problem: Too many bad patents. … The U.S. patent system has one primary purpose, embodied in the Constitution itself: to encourage innovation.3 The basic bargain is simple: in exchange for disclosing their inventions (so that others may build upon them), inventors get a “limited private monopoly” on those inventions.4… the current patent system isn’t doing a very good job of fulfilling its purpose. The United States Patent Office is issuing far too many weak and overbroad patents, particularly on software. And many of the courts that end up reviewing those patents seem unwilling to second-guess the Patent Office. Instead of promoting innovation, these patents become landmines for companies that bring new products to market. … 2. The Patent Office isn’t helping When the Patent Office reviews a patent application, one of its tasks is to search for prior art (publications and uses from before the filing date of an application) that might show the claimed invention is not new or is obvious in light of what came before. This is a difficult task. … If the Patent Office misses key prior art, it will issue patents on existing or obvious ideas. Unfortunately, the Patent Office doesn’t do a good job looking for prior art when it reviews applications for software patents.”) See Independent Institute on the “Benefits” of Intellectual Property Protection; Patent Trolls, Bad Patents, and Incompetent Examiners are Not the Problem
