Ex Parte Chen et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardJul 21, 201412262900 (P.T.A.B. Jul. 21, 2014) Copy Citation UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE ____________________ BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD ____________________ Ex parte XIANGFU CHEN, JOHN G. DE FREITAS, SHIU F. POON, and RICHARD E. SALZ ____________________ Appeal 2012-000569 Application 12/262,9001 Technology Center 2400 ____________________ 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. Appeal 2012-000569 Application 12/262,900 2 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). Appeal 2012-000569 Application 12/262,900 3 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. Appeal 2012-000569 Application 12/262,900 4 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). Appeal 2012-000569 Application 12/262,900 5 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 Appeal 2012-000569 Application 12/262,900 6 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. Appeal 2012-000569 Application 12/262,900 7 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- Appeal 2012-000569 Application 12/262,900 8 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 Appeal 2012-000569 Application 12/262,900 9 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 msc Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation