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.
-----
"Computeri non cogitant, ergo non sunt"