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