The Securities & Exchange Commission is appealing a judge's dismissal of the commissions insider trading lawsuit filed against billionaire Mark Cuban.

Bloomberg reports that "The SEC today filed a notice of appeal at U.S. District Court in Dallas without indicating what arguments it may make. A judge had dismissed the agency's lawsuit in July, saying Cuban's alleged promise to keep information confidential about Mamma.com Inc. didn't bar him from trading the company's stock."

The SEC's insider trading case against Mark Cuban is proving to be quite different from the usual open and shut matters we've come to expect from the commission. As Jonathan Berr reported yesterday on DailyFinance, some major legal experts have defended Mark Cuban's insistence that he didn't qualify as an insider when engaged in the trades in question.

Worse news for the SEC: Cuban has taken the unusual step of suing the SEC for denying him proper access to documents that detail the SEC's allegations and evidence against him.

When the SEC sued Mark Cuban for insider trading in shares of Mamma.com, the case was unique from the beginning. First of all, Cuban didn't settle instantly and paid a small fine without admitting or denying guilt -- something that seems to be a rarity these days. He even blogged about the charges.

Now, the feisty Mavericks owner has taken the unusual step of suing the SEC for denying him proper access to documents that detail the SEC's allegations and evidence against him.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, accuses the commission of improperly rejecting requests to access some evidence, being too slow to respond to some requests, and not trying hard enough to find all the documentation Cuban's attorneys requested.

When Tribune Co. (OTC: TRBCQ) owner Sam Zell took the publishing and media giant private about a year ago, little did he know that his move would completely backfire, leading to a bankruptcy just under a month ago. With way too much debt, one of the nicer possessions in Zell's closet has been the Chicago Cubs. Outspoken billionaire Mark Cuban wants to buy them, but at a discount to Zell's asking price of course.

Cuban's balking at the approximately $1 billion price tag that seems to be the asking price for the Cubbies. Cuban probably is thinking that Tribune and Zell are in such dire straights that he can hold out a bit and score the Cubs for a much lower price -- perhaps $600 million or so. Zell, who is going to have to generate some asset sales regardless of how Tribune navigates through bankruptcy, needs to make this sale. In fact, all of the flash wrapped up in Tribune's assets that don't have a core function in its business probably will have to go. Time for egos to take a vacation.

Tribune Co. was for a time a great collection of media assets. Just like any other newspaper publisher, it was caught off-guard when most news seekers turned to the internet for instant news -- not late news like newspapers generally supply. Local content and freshness has been what has saved many publishers, but who knows if this will last.

For now, Zell's huge misstep with Tribune is going to demand he bite his tongue and rake in some cash. It's nice to know that two outspoken rich guys will be the ones getting to deal with each other soon, and perhaps Cuban will use his blog to chip away at the Cubs' price even more.

Mark Cuban disclosed in a 13-D filed this morning that he has a 9.4% stake in Carmike Cinemas (NASDAQ: CKEC).

Unlike Mr. Cuban's personal blog, the 13-D lacks much in the way of color: There is the standard disclosure that he acquired the stake for investment purposes and may buy more or sell some or all depending on his mood.

According to the company, "Carmike Cinemas, Inc. is a U.S. leader in digital cinema and 3-D cinema deployments and one of the nation's largest motion picture exhibitors. As of September 30, 2008, Carmike had 250 theatres with 2,276 screens in 36 states. Carmike's digital cinema footprint reaches 2,147 screens, of which 430 are also equipped with 3-D capability. Carmike's focus for its theatre locations is small to mid-sized communities with populations of fewer than 100,000."

The company has been reporting huge losses as it sinks under the weight of a crippling debt load and economic malaise. But Cuban's one of the smartest people in business, so maybe there's some upside to be had. The shares have lost about 90% of their value since the beginning of 2007.

Say it ain't so, Mark Cuban.

Yesterday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged the billionaire with insider trading. The regulatory agency claims that Cuban sold shares of mamma.com, a Canada-based Internet search company, with the advance knowledge of a yet-to-be-disclosed private equity offering of company shares.

Cuban allegedly sold his shares under the assumption that the private offering would greatly dilute his holdings. Selling as he did prevented the loss of some $750,000, the SEC claims in its charges.

He denies the charges and vows to fight.

Mamma.com changed its name to Copernic Inc. (NASDAQ: CNIC) in 2007. As a result of the highly publicized charges against Cuban, I expected to see trading volume in CNIC increase from its current average volume of 45,000 shares.

Sure enough, volume yesterday was at more than 350,000 shares. The lemmings are so predictable. They see something on the news and they place a trade.

No matter that the reasons for the company being in the news have little to do with the business, its current state or its future potential. The company is in the news because of insider trading, period.

Now, is that a reason for a stock to go up in value?

The breaking news is that the SEC is charging Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, with insider trading related to sales of shares in Mamma.com, Inc., now Copernic, Inc. (NASDAQ: CNIC). The entrepreneur billionaire allegedly dumped 600,000 shares in the Internet search engine company when he found out it was raising money by selling shares in a private offering. This information was not publicly known.

The SEC filed its complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, saying that in June, 2004, Cuban was invited to participate in the stock offering after he agreed to keep the information confidential. Knowing the offering would be conducted at a discount, Cuban then sold his entire 6% ownership within a few hours after he learned about it. When the financing was announced the next day, the company's shares dropped more than 10% due to dilution concerns. Cuban thus avoided more than $750,000 in losses.

If these allegations are true, this is a classic case of insider trading. The public had no way of knowing the stock price would drop, while Cuban and other insiders did. The SEC release didn't mention what other insiders did, but it seems, for now at least, that only Cuban acted on the information.

I've had about all the news of corruption I can take. Of course, I don't mean to sound accusatory, or find Mark Cuban guilty before he has been properly tried, but it's just the timing of it. When the world is swirling into a global recession based on greed, and probably at least a little bit of corruption, these news items are definitely ones I can do without.

CEOs have been doing the old soft shoe at quarterly report time since the market first form, but dancing now seems to have become a favored pastime of CEOs include Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Jerry Yang of Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) and (surprise? hardly) Mark Cuban (also a yahoo).

Yang busted some moves recently dancing with the star of Where the Hell is Matt?, the outstanding internet feature following adventurer and dancer (I use the term loosely) Matt Harding. Don't miss the video at the end of this post, if you're not familiar with Matt. - it's perhaps the most charming, uplifting video I've seen in years.

Of course, who can forget Steve Ballmer's dance at the podium during a Microsoft presentation? And, of course, Mark, 'Gimme the Cubs" Cuban performing on Dancing with the Stars?

Come to think of it, many CEOs are already quite accomplished at performing the fan dance with their balance sheets. Ex-Gov. Spitzer has shown his fondness for the hustle and the shag, while Donald Rumsfeld is still waiting for the cakewalk to begin. Senator Craig seems to favor the swing, while President Bush appears dead-set on taking on the Persian Dance before he waltzes out of the White House.

And me? Having lived through the Vietnam Era, I'm doing the Time Warp again.

Thanks to Portfolio.com

After a hiatus that led many to suspect that Mark Cuban's ShareSleuth experiment had gone the way of the hula hoop, Chris Carey is back with a scathing report on China Fire & Security Group Inc. (NASDAQ: CFSG), which bills itself as a "leading total solution provider of industrial fire protection systems in China."

The ShareSleuth report found evidence of the usual suspects in pump and dumps: exaggerated resumes, disclosure issues, associations with characters of ill repute and a lot of hype combined with little evidence of a strong operating business.

Another major red flag: CEO Brian Lin told Mr. Carey in an email "that you should be careful since you don't know how strong our business is and how many big deals we are close to completion. CFSG SHORT SELLERS WILL BE SQUEEZED - SOON!!"

An email from a CEO to a journalist of that nature is highly irregular, securities lawyer Howard Sirota of Sirota & Sirota told me in a phone conversation. He added that it is a violation of Regulation Fair Disclosure, an SEC regulation requiring that material information be disseminated simultaneously to market participants: "It goes back to the concept of full and fair disclosure. That statement wasn't made in a public dissemination to the entire market. This is selective disclosure, an effort to effect the price of the stock by giving information to a selected market participant. The idea of full and fair disclosure is a level playing field. This is like whispering to one analyst 'We're gonna beat expectations."

Be sure to check out this story from ShareSleuth -- the site could develop into a tremendous resource for investors.

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Internet pioneer, is not too happy with how the Internet's infrastructure is evolving. Cuban points out how "each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions 'dead and boring'. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted."

Cuban points out that until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers, the Internet is dead, as the platform is not evolving fast enough to allow really smart people to come up with groundbreaking ideas. Throughput to the home has not increased more than 5mbs in the past 5 years, and few people's throughput is going to increase to more than 10mbs in the next 5 years, he noted.

GigaOm.com's Om Malik agrees, saying most of the smart people who orginally built out the Internet are now developing the content and not the infrastructure. All the smart people who built the equipment and the pipes are now building Web 2.0 products.

Malik goes on to say "the future, however, is in two-way, symmetrical Internet, where applications such as Kyte.TV and Sling Media can actually be put to use." Malik goes into much greater detail, which should be required reading for those who are investing in technology and the Internet. The blogs can be found at GigaOm.com and BlogMaverick.com. Both Cuban and Malik agree the Internet's infrastructure is due for a serious wake-up call.

It's been nearly 25 years since Donald Trump since Donald Trump bought the New Jersey Generals off the ill-fated USFL. Now another obnoxious mogul, Mark Cuban, is trying to start a new football league.

According to CNNMoney's Chris Isidore, "there are as many as three different groups looking at trying to start yet another league in the coming years. Two of the efforts would try to start leagues in the spring, when the NFL is in hibernation and some of the former leagues, like the USFL, briefly succeeded."

Bill Hambrecht and Cuban are looking at starting the UFL, and Cuban has argued on his blog that the league's collective bargaining agreement structure is :not designed for a competitive environment. Competition for top players, even if the UFL gets just a few, increases prices at the top end for all teams. Every star will get paid more, but still have to fit under the cap. That forces teams to use more low cost players, at the expense of signing the middle of the roster. That gives us access to quite a few very, very good NFL players ..."

Hambrecht has suggested that each team would be able to sell 1/3rd of its shares to the public through IPOs. So not only would the USFL provide opportunities for billionaires to own teams, but also average Joe's: Cool!

The always interesting, if not always sane, Mark Cuban has a fascinating idea for how to shore up the housing market on a long-term basis: Let people take them their houses public:

The rules could be very simple
1. The house is appraised by a company approved by the exchange that lists the houses.
2. "Shares" are set with a Par Value of 10pct of the appraised value. For a 100k dollar house, there are 10 shares potentially available. However at no point in time can more than 40pct of the "shares" in a home be sold. We dont want the opportunity for "hostile takeovers"
3. The price of the shares will of course be set by the market. In a hot market it will be set above par, in a tough market like today, it will sell below Par.
4. All Proceeds from the sale of shares MUST be used to pay down any debt on the home.

At first glance, this idea makes a ton of sense to me. It would be appeal to investors because it allows them an opportunity to profit from potential upside in the real estate market. I can certainly see REITs jumping into this kind of security if it ever comes to fruition. It would also provide a nice alternative to foreclosure for people who are close to losing their homes. It would also create a real-time market for homes that aren't for sale -- It would help people interested in the industry get an idea of what homes are worth.

Hopefully this novel idea will get the attention it deserves. I don't even like Mark Cuban, and I'm intrigued.

ShareSleuth, Mark Cuban's pet project (He calls it journalism) that seeks to uncover fraudulent companies has a new target: Orthopedic Development Corporation.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with ShareSleuth, the basic idea is this: Cuban hired a guy named Christopher Carey to do investigative research into companies that may be engaging in deception and then write about them on the website. The way that Cuban pays for it is where it gets a little controversial: Before the "picks" are posted on the website, Cuban is told about them and he shorts them. This is all disclosed on the website, and Cuban bills it as a new type of financial journalism.

While I don't have any problem with what Cuban and Carey are doing, I'm not so sure it should be called journalism: Journalism is paid for through the sale of publications and advertising. ShareSleuth is more reminiscent of the work of Manuel Asensio, an investor who put out research reports slamming stocks he was short.

The site received a fair amount of negative publicity, and its latest pick differs from its first two picks, Xethanol (AMEX: XNL) and Utek (AMEX: UTK). Orthopedic Development isn't public and, as such, Cuban has no financial stake in the company. The choice of a non-public company may be an effort to appease those who complained about the supposed conflict of interest in the earlier picks, but I'm not impressed.

The problem with exposing a non-public company is this: Who cares? There's no way that we can seek to profit from the expose, and it's just not very interesting. Public fiascoes are much more fun to follow.

Meanwhile, Mark Cuban is writing about his colonoscopy on his blog. That could possibly be less interesting than the piece on Orthopedic Development.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst of 2006. Check out the other nominees for Most Annoying Money Expert of 2006. Be sure to cast your vote.

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban is best known as the eccentric owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA team. But he got his start as an entrepreneur at the age of twelve, selling garbage bags. His other early money-making efforts included providing disco dancing lessons and a chain letter that earned him more than $1,000. The foundation of his fortune, though, came about through starting and selling technology companies. Unlike so many others in that field, Cuban managed to avoid the dot-com bust by diversifying his portfolio. He's now one of the world's 500 richest people, according to Forbes.

Cuban is a confessed admirer of Ayn Rand, particularly a fan of her novel, The Fountainhead, and also of objectivist philosophy; he leans toward the libertarian end of the political spectrum, though he doesn't get much involved in politics. A casual man, Cuban rarely wears a suit and never wears a watch. He purchased his stake in the Dallas Mavericks from H. Ross Perot in 2000, and has since been a very visible and outspoken supporter of the team, often appearing at games in a Mavericks jersey. He's been fined a number of times by the NBA for criticism of referees and league officials, though he matches his fines with donations to charity. In one notable incident, Cuban's complaint that a league manager wasn't smart enough to run a Dairy Queen eventually resulted in Cuban working the counter at a Dairy Queen in Texas, where delighted fans lined up around the block to be served by him.

Other widely reported incidents include a 2003 scuffle with professional wrestlers Eric Bischoff and Randy Orton, which turned out to be a scripted stunt. In 2006, when film director M. Night Shyamalan expressed concern over the marketing experiment of simultaneously releasing Steven Soderbergh's film Bubble in theaters and on DVD, Cuban called Shyamalan an "idiot."

Makes one wonder who Mr. Shyamalan might vote for as the Most Annoying Money Expert of 2006.

The Dallas Maverick's owner Mark Cuban has pulled the plug on a planned weekly NBA basketball show, Mark Cuban's Radio Maverick, for Sirius Satellite Radio, Inc. (NASDAQ:SIRI). An ISDN line was to have been installed in Cuban's home so that he could do the show from there. Cuban has received offers to host radio shows before. He's outspoken, inventive, and audacious; the show might have been worth a listen.

Why this decision? He explains his reasons on his popular blog: BlogMaverick. He agreed to the idea of a show only as long as Sirius had a deal with the NBA. Which it does. Basically, Cuban states he felt his presence would enhance the NBA's brand. The show would have paid him nothing; but he likes to help out when he can. "To be a good NBA partner," as he puts it.