Oh man, ridiculous patents again. If you actually read the patent:
- load a file from a URL
- search this file for links
- also download links with the URL as root
Well, I recommend studying the CVS Trees of wget - I've linked the history of the Makefile.in here. That goes back to 1999 in the CVS. wget has a parameter -m that implements exactly the algorithm described. Mirroring itself - and that's what this great and oh-so-innovative patent is about - is as old as FTP and the mirror script. Only here it's about web mirroring. Of course, that's incredibly innovative and naturally has to be protected by patent.
Yet another example of why we don't want software patents and why the industry minister is lying when he calls software patents innovation-promoting.
At heise online news there's the original article.