in reply to Re: European Software Patents vs. Perl?
in thread European Software Patents vs. Perl?

Unfortunately, whether a patent is frivolous, obvious, or just plain nefarious does not shield one from letters written on the letterhead of a law firm. I rather suspect that anyone who receives such a letter is in for a fairly significant cash outlay.

If either of these patents hold, and are enforcable on this side of the Atlantic, then we might as well shut down our web site. We have had a www server since 1993, and have been using CGI and query forms (and Perl, btw) since early 1994 to query a relational database and retrieve specified results.

In fact, when was the Common Gateway Interface Specification first proposed? It had to have been before 1994, if we were already using it.

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"Computeri non cogitant, ergo non sunt"

  • Comment on Re: Re: European Software Patents vs. Perl?

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Re: Re: Re: European Software Patents vs. Perl?
by Malkavian (Friar) on Nov 21, 2000 at 19:25 UTC
    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
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