Mark Cuban, Minecraft creator donate big to help EFF

[Sabre]

Ars Tech

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is poised to expand its work on patent reform, announcing major gifts from two donors. Mark Cuban made his fortune during the dot-com boom of the 1990s and now owns the Dallas Mavericks. Markus "Notch" Persson is best known as the creator of Minecraft. Each will give the San Francisco nonprofit a quarter of a million dollars.

"The current state of patents and patent litigation in this country is shameful," Cuban said in a press release. "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."

Julie Samuels is currently running EFF's "Defend Innovation" project, and she will now occupy the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents. Thanks to Cuban's $250,000 donation, EFF will also be bringing another patent lawyer on board in January.

Persson is also donating $250,000. He says current policies put the nation on a "dangerous path." He argued that "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."

The patent system is in desperate need of reform, so we're happy to see EFF expand its patent reform efforts. But as we said when EFF announced the Defend Innovation project earlier this year, it's disappointing that EFF has continued to shy away from calling for the abolition of software patents altogether. The press release announcing the new donations talks about "reforming software patents" and "fixing software patents." So the organization continues its longstanding practice of not calling for their abolition, even though Cuban himself is on record as an advocate of ending all software patents.

When we talked to Samuels in June, she expressed agreement with the Supreme Court's trio of decisions restricting software patents in the 1970s and early 1980s. Those decisions are theoretically still binding precedents. But Samuels told us that "political realities" prevented EFF from officially endorsing the elimination of software patents. "We want to push for positions that are politically feasible," she told us.

Samuels is probably correct that abolishing software patents is not "politically feasible" in the short term. But while giant tech companies like Google and Cisco might be hemmed in by those political limitations, EFF shouldn't be. The role of a principled civil liberties organization like EFF is precisely to stand up for civil liberties even when the odds of victory seem slim.

Considerations of political expediency has not stopped EFF from advocating the abolition of warrantless wiretapping or the repeal of the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA. Nor are "political realities" a good reason for EFF to compromise its principles on software patents. There are already plenty of technology companies on Capitol Hill lobbying for patent reform legislation that is "politically feasible."

Love seeing this kind of thing!!!

[Mr Kleen]

Way to put your $$$ where your mouth is.