From: Francisco José Tapia <fjtapia@gmail.com> Subject: [boost] Conflict with patent
I am a teacher of programming in a Technical Professional Training School in Madrid ( Spain).
Few notes in addition to what was said: 1. As you and others had clearly shown the idea and the code was created a long before this patent. So if "patent holders" would like to sue you they have no basis to do this, and likely they would loose their patent in such case. In such case, if this "patent" somehow related to the code your write they will shoot themselves a foot as it can't be valid due to prior existence. 2. They need to sue you in US. They US patent laws are not valid in Spain. and AFAIK such "patent" is not even patentable in Europe. 3. If everyone would search full patents list to find out if his idea is patented in US he will spend much more time on searching then coding. My suggestion forget about all this patent insanity... Especially it has no real basis and somehow may be relevant in US only.
I am writing you because today, looking for other think I discovered a US patent “Positional access using a B-tree” ( US patent Number 7,120,637B2 Oct, 10, 2006), and I don't know if this patent prevent the publication of the code in your library,
Even if the patent had basis (which it has not) it does not prevent publishing the code as you are not under jurisdiction of US, so actually this code can be fully and legally used outside of US. As for example MP3 encoders can be used and distributed outside US without limitations. And if you are worried about you may add a notice that ensures that users would be aware of the fact that the code may be violate some patents (which it does not)
The idea about the counter trees you can find in “The art of computer Programming “ Donald Knuth, and I have a previous version of this code wrote 10 years ago and presented in my exposition in the Oposiciones a Catedrático de Informática ( Madrid 2001)
In such case the patent holders should be afraid of you and not you of them :-) My $0.02 Artyom