Fellow monks,
May focus you attention on an issue that might trouble at least all Europeans that work with the web and cgi. The European Patent Office has granted some very strange patents, examples of which are collected at the European Software Patent Horror Gallery. With the permission of the people there I quote two examples:

• a) dynamic webpages
  Mainclaim:
  A service agent for fulfilling requests of a web browser client coupled to a network; comprising: a control program agent tangibly embodying a program of instructions executable by a supporting machine environment for performing method steps for receiving a request initiated at said web browser client and fulfilling the request by a providing a result, said method steps comprising: displaying an HTML document to said web browser; invoking a control program agent; receiving data entered by the user from the HTML document and passing said user entered data to said control program agent upon invocation as input parameters to said control program agent that were returned from said HTML document; using an API set for invoking executable command files and programs accessible via a associated command file object.
  
  Which means:
  Creating dynamic webpages by invoking a script: This seems to cover any webserver that processes HTML forms and invokes a program via a common gateway interface, such that this program returns a webpage.
• database queries
  Mainclaim:
  An information retrieval system for retrieving information from a database, comprising: a parser for parsing a natural language query into its constituent phrases to produce a syntax analysis result; virtual table for converting phrases of the natural language query to retrieval keys possessed by the database, said virtual table accounting for particles that modify the phrases; a collating unit for preparing a database retrieval formula from the syntax analysis result by selecting a virtual table that is used to convert the phrases of the natural language query to keys possessed by the database; and a retrieval execution unit for retrieving data from the database on the basis of said database retrieval formula.
  
  Which means:
  Database retrieval system for responding to natural language queries with corresponding tables: translating natural language questions into database queries by using undisclosed parsers and virtual tables.

note: The links leading to the European Patent Office may or may not lead to the information.
Their website is slow and I got some errors.

Many things we can do with Perl are affected, as is telnet and others.
If you want to do something, you can sign the petition against software patents.
Any comments are welcome.

neo - horri - phyte

Update: Malkavian is right, you can do more than just sign a petition, and that is what those people really want to do. It is the purpose of their collection and workgroup activities. But they also realize that many people do agree but are not willing to spare the time to do more than filling in a form. This is the reason, why they asked me to provide a link to the petition. This is the reason why I did just that. Otherwise I fully agree with Malk

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