good points raised by cuban, but i have to say, he's offered zero solutions to the problem, just gripes. i don't think anyone's come up with a good solution yet for patents probably because there are an over-abundance of them (millions, possibly billions pending), you can't just do away with the system suddenly, hell i think i have 1 or 2 myself.
but let's just play devil's advocate and say that the government refused to grant anymore new patents and grandfathered all the current patents, you would still need something else to take its place, perhaps say the latest trend of open source licenses, though some of the issues with some of these licenses seem to be on similar bad footing of corporate abuse.
i don't have any solutions myself, but i think china's ip laws are relatively lax and a good example of what would happen if there weren't patents or at least very poor enforcement. basically you'd have a bunch of companies competing against each other possibly reverse engineering or out right stealing things, at the end of the day, you, the consumer, would possibly have a better set of choices and these companies would be innovating to compete, not necessarily strangling you financially with patent litigations.
my major gripe with patents are the same as cuban, these big corporations are using it as a new line of business/revenue stream and are throwing their weight around with the protection of another big corporation (a.k.a. the government), this a major loophole in the system, what was meant to quite possibly protect the little guy, the small company, has now backfired and become a major liability. e.g. nobody in their right mind would file a suit against ibm, they would surely find some infringement in their arsenal of patents and make you hurt for a good long time. you're suing ibm for using your algorithm, they'd turn right around and sue you for something along the lines of using the bathroom on an airplane (http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-961803.html).
the problem is truly systemic. when governments/companies/countries become too powerful, it really becomes easy to abuse/manipulate the system, absolute power corrupts absolutely. that's why there needs to be more refinement of government to handle these things, to make sure that the system works.