The Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Patents 121
l2718 writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced today a large donation by Mark Cuban and Markus 'Notch' Persson to the EFF Patent Project. Notably, part of Cuban's donation is for the creation of the 'Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents' (the first holder is current staff attorney Julie Samuels). Time will tell if the new title will help her advocacy work. Cuban said, 'The current state of patents and patent litigation in this country is shameful," said Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks. "Silly patent lawsuits force prices to go up while competition and innovation suffer. That's bad for consumers and bad for business. It's time to fix our broken system, and EFF can help.' Notch added, 'New games and other technological tools come from improving on old things and making them better – an iterative process that the current patent environment could shut down entirely. '"
Re:Guy is no dummy (Score:5, Informative)
Those two statements may both be true, but they aren't strongly related. He's a billionaire because he sold a shitty website to Yahoo!, at the height of the dot-com bubble, for $6 billion. Yes, Yahoo paid him six billion dollars for a website. Not even a website that was making much money, either. They subsequently, unsurprisingly, took a huge write-down on broadcast.com's value, which collapsed to near nothing. So, Cuban got lucky in riding the bubble and cashing out before it burst.