At which point, you explain you've been running it since 1993 (webserver with CGI), which blows the prior art right up. No law company would really follow that in a European court, 'cos they know they'd lose, and have to shell out. It's non-enforcable.
Also, for the database query one, it refers to parsing of natural language. However, using SQL, or a strict computational language is not covered by the above patent.
It's meant to be able to extract the meaning of a user with no batabase training who says something like: "Give me a list of all the beers which are dark please, computer."
And that's what I was referring to in my previous post of seeing that around in many places prior to the patent publication date.
Your regular database queries are safe.
I'll wholeheartedly agree that nothing shields you from that dreaded letterhead, but, just because a good many lawyers are vultures, doesn't mean they're stupid.
If you give them that bit of prior art, which they know will completely blow their case out of the water in any court, they won't persue it.
It's an annoyance, but, not insurmountable.
Cheers,

Malk

In reply to Re: Re: Re: European Software Patents vs. Perl? by Malkavian
in thread European Software Patents vs. Perl? by neophyte

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.