Ex Parte Chen et al

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Jul 21, 2014

12262900 (P.T.A.B. Jul. 21, 2014)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
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BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
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Ex parte XIANGFU CHEN, JOHN G. DE FREITAS,
SHIU F. POON, and RICHARD E. SALZ
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Appeal 2012-000569
Application 12/262,9001
Technology Center 2400
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Before ST. JOHN COURTENAY III, THU A. DANG, and
LARRY J. HUME, Administrative Patent Judges.

HUME, Administrative Patent Judge.

DECISION ON APPEAL
This is a decision on appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) of the Final
Rejection of claims 1–11. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We AFFIRM.

1 According to Appellants, the real party in interest is International Business
Machines Corporation. App. Br. 2.
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STATEMENT OF THE CASE2
The Invention
Appellants’ “invention relates the field of Web services and more
particularly to policy processing in a policy document.” Spec. ¶ 1 (“Field of
the Invention”).
Exemplary Claim
Claim 1, reproduced below, is representative of the subject matter on
appeal (emphasis added to disputed limitation):
1. A method for directional optimization of policy
statements in a policy document, the method comprising:
loading in a document data processing system executing
in memory of a host computing platform a policy document
referenced for a Web service;
extracting a policy from the policy document;
determining whether the extracted policy is bi-directional
or direction agnostic; and,
creating a single run time presentation for the extracted
policy when the extracted policy is direction agnostic, or
creating separate run time presentations for each direction of
the extracted policy when the extracted policy is bi-directional.

2 Our decision relies upon Appellants’ Appeal Brief (“App. Br.,” filed
Mar. 28, 2011); Reply Brief (“Reply Br.,” filed Aug. 15, 2011); Examiner’s
Answer (“Ans.,” mailed June 13, 2011); Final Office Action (“Final Act.,”
mailed Oct. 28, 2010); and the original Specification (“Spec.,” filed
Oct. 31, 2008).
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Prior Art
The Examiner relies upon the following prior art as evidence in
rejecting the claims on appeal:
Räsänen et al.
(“Rasanen”)
US 6,888,821 B2 May 3, 2005
Rejection on Appeal3
Claims 1–11 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) as being
anticipated by Rasanen. Ans. 5.
GROUPING OF CLAIMS
Based on Appellants’ arguments (App. Br. 6–9), we decide the appeal
of the rejection of claims 1–11 on the basis of representative claim 1.
ISSUE
Appellants argue (Id.; Reply Br. 2–4) the Examiner’s rejection of
claim 1 under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) anticipated by Rasanen is in error. These
contentions present us with the following issue:
Did the Examiner err in finding Rasanen discloses the step of
“determining whether the extracted policy is bi-directional or direction
agnostic,” as recited in claim 1?
ANALYSIS
We only consider those arguments actually made by Appellants in
reaching this decision, and we do not consider arguments which Appellants

3 We note the rejection of claims 5–7 under § 101 as being directed to non-
statutory subject matter was withdrawn by the Examiner. Ans. 8.
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could have made but chose not to make in the Briefs so that any such
arguments are deemed to be waived. 37 C.F.R. § 41.37(c)(1)(vii).
We disagree with Appellants’ arguments with respect to claim 1, and
we adopt as our own (1) the findings and reasons set forth by the Examiner
in the action from which this appeal is taken and (2) the reasons and
rebuttals set forth by the Examiner in the Examiner’s Answer in response to
Appellants’ arguments. However, we highlight and address specific findings
and arguments regarding claim 1 for emphasis as follows.
Appellants contend:
[The] Examiner purports to have located the teaching of
determining whether or not a policy that has been extracted
from a policy document is bi-directional or direction agnostic in
column 10, lines 53 through 67 and column 12, lines 3 through
58 of Rasanen.
Column 10, lines 53 through 67 of Rasanen, however,
does not relate to a policy extracted from a policy document—
but to mapping rules for mapping media flows to a streaming
service.
App. Br. 8. Appellants further summarize their argument in the Reply Brief,
i.e.,
Thus, to the extent that a “traffic class” is not fairly
equated to a “policy” and further to the extent that the
assignment of a traffic class as “streaming” is not necessarily
the same as “direction agnostic”—there is no proven correlation
set forth by the Examiner that “streaming” necessarily requires
that no sense of directionality exists for the “traffic class”—
Examiner has failed to locate each claimed teaching of claims
1, 5 and 8 in the singular Rasanen reference.
Reply Br. 4 (emphasis added).
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We note Appellants’ Specification is largely silent on precisely what
is meant by the recited “policy” and “policy document.” To the extent
Appellants appear to define these terms, with respect to the recited “policy”
term, we note Appellants describe:
WS-Policy is a specification that allows Web services to
use XML to advertise the message exchange policies of the
Web service, such as relates to security, and Quality of Service,
for Web service consumers to specify policy requirements.
WS-Policy represents a set of specifications that describe the
capabilities and constraints of the security (and other business)
policies on intermediaries and endpoints. Examples include
required security tokens, supported encryption algorithms, and
privacy rules, to name a few. WS-Policy further specifies how
to associate policies with services and endpoints.
Spec. ¶ 4. With respect to the recited “policy document,” Appellants
describe:
The description layer 145 can include both a [Web
Services Description Language] WSDL document 135 and a
WS-Policy document 140. The WSDL document 135 can
describe an interface to the Web service including available
operations, while the WS-Policy document 140 can specify
security policies requisite for message exchanges with the Web
service described by the WSDL document 135.
Spec. ¶ 15. “Importantly, different policies 185 can be specified within the
WS-Policy document 140 and extracted to determine whether each of the
extracted policies is direction agnostic or bi-directional in nature.” Spec.
¶ 16.
Thus, we find the recited “extracting a policy from the policy
document” may reasonably be construed as identifying or extracting a
particular security policy from a policy document that contains a number of
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security policies therein which may be used in exchanging messages with a
Web service.
In addition, Appellants’ Specification does not provide an explicit
definition of what is meant by the phrase “direction agnostic,” except to say,
“[e]xtracted policies that are bi-directional can be identified and separate
direction-aware runtime presentation of each of the identified policies can be
created” (Spec. ¶ 18), and “[f]or each extracted policy that is not bi-
directional and hence directionally agnostic, a direction agnostic runtime
presentation of the directionally agnostic policy can be created.” Id.
(emphasis added).
Therefore, under a broad but reasonable construction, we conclude a
direction agnostic policy includes a policy that is not bi-directional.
Responsive to Appellants’ arguments in the Appeal Brief cited supra,
the Examiner finds Rasanen teaches a policy document in the form of a
Policy Decision Function (PDF) which relates to policies for Web services.
Ans. 5 (citing Rasanen col. 10, ll. 54–55); and see Rasanen col. 2, ll. 17–36,
and Fig. 3 (PDF 222). The Examiner also finds Rasanen discloses
assignment of various Quality of Service (QoS) signaling flows to allow a
maximum authorized QoS class to be assigned to a streaming service
(Ans. 8–9 (citing Rasanen col. 6, ll. 6–20)), and further finds that such
assignment of a QoS class for a given media flow of a connection between
two users (or mobile terminals) is equivalent to a conversational or bi-
directional flow, and that a flow between a mobile terminal and a server is
equivalent to a streaming or “direction agnostic” flow. Id.
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As a matter of claim construction, we agree with the Examiner’s
findings above that the recited “determining whether the extracted policy is
bi-directional or direction agnostic” reads on Rasanen’s disclosure of
determining whether a flow is either “conversational,” hence bi-directional,
or “streaming,” hence direction agnostic, i.e., not bi-directional, as discussed
supra.
We agree with the Examiner because, during examination, a claim
must be given its broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the
specification as it would be interpreted by one of ordinary skill in the art.
Because the applicant has the opportunity to amend claims during
prosecution, giving a claim its broadest reasonable interpretation will reduce
the possibility that the claim, once issued, will be interpreted more broadly
than is justified. In re Yamamoto, 740 F.2d 1569, 1571 (Fed. Cir. 1984); In
re Zletz, 893 F.2d 319, 321 (Fed. Cir. 1989) (“During patent examination the
pending claims must be interpreted as broadly as their terms reasonably
allow.”).
Further, “[i]n the patentability context, claims are to be given their
broadest reasonable interpretations . . . limitations are not to be read into the
claims from the specification.” In re Van Geuns, 988 F.2d 1181, 1184 (Fed.
Cir. 1993) (citations omitted). Any special meaning assigned to a term
“must be sufficiently clear in the specification that any departure from
common usage would be so understood by a person of experience in the
field of the invention.” Multiform Desiccants, Inc. v. Medzam, Ltd., 133
F.3d 1473, 1477 (Fed. Cir. 1998). Absent an express intent to impart a novel
meaning to a claim term, the words take on the ordinary and customary
meanings attributed to them by those of ordinary skill in the art. Brookhill-
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Wilk 1, LLC v. Intuitive Surgical, Inc., 334 F.3d 1294, 1298 (Fed. Cir. 2003)
(citation omitted).
As for Appellants’ contention in the Reply Brief that “there is no
proven correlation set forth by the Examiner that ‘streaming’ necessarily
requires that no sense of directionality exists for the ‘traffic class,’” we find
the Examiner’s findings cited above remain unrebutted by any evidence of
record. Appellant’s assertions amount to unsupported attorney argument,
and therefore we give them little weight. See In re Geisler, 116 F.3d 1465,
1470 (Fed. Cir. 1997); see also In re Huang, 100 F.3d 135, 139–140 (Fed.
Cir. 1996).
Therefore, lacking specific definitions of the disputed limitations
discussed above, or any evidence of record that would rebut the Examiner’s
findings, we find the Examiner’s claim construction to be broad but
reasonable. Accordingly, Appellants have not provided sufficient evidence
or argument to persuade us of any reversible error in the Examiner’s reading
of the contested limitations on the cited prior art. Therefore, we sustain the
Examiner’s anticipation rejection of independent claim 1.
As Appellants have not provided separate arguments with respect to
independent claims 5 and 8, or dependent claims 2–4, 6, 7, and 9–11,
rejected on the same basis as claim 1, we similarly sustain the Examiner’s
rejection of these claims under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b).
REPLY BRIEF
To the extent Appellants advance new arguments in the Reply Brief
(Reply Br. 2–4) not in response to a shift in the Examiner’s position in the
Answer, we note that “[a]ny bases for asserting error, whether factual or
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legal, that are not raised in the principal brief are waived.” Ex parte Borden,
93 USPQ2d 1473, 1474 (BPAI 2010) (informative). Cf. with Optivus Tech.,
Inc. v. Ion Beam Appl’ns. S.A., 469 F.3d 978, 989 (Fed. Cir. 2006) (“[A]n
issue not raised by an appellant in its opening brief . . . is waived.”).
CONCLUSION
The Examiner did not err with respect to the anticipation rejection of
claims 1–11 under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) over Rasanen, and we sustain the
rejection.
DECISION
We affirm the Examiner’s decision rejecting claims 1–11.
No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with
this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(1)(iv) (2011).
AFFIRMED

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