Ex Parte Ward

Patent Trial and Appeal BoardNov 20, 2013

11704069 (P.T.A.B. Nov. 20, 2013)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www.uspto.gov APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 11/704,069 02/08/2007 Jonathan Ward 20103/060256 2367 83417 7590 11/20/2013 AT&T Legal Department - HFZ ATTN. Patent Docketing One AT&T Way Room 2A-207 Bedminstor, NJ 07921 EXAMINER OBAID, FATEH M ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 3627 MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE 11/20/2013 PAPER Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE ____________ BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD ____________ Ex parte JONATHAN WARD ____________ Appeal 2011-008902 Application 11/704,069 Technology Center 3600 ____________ Before, JOSEPH A. FISCHETTI, BIBHU R. MOHANTY, and MICHAEL W. KIM, Administrative Patent Judges. FISCHETTI, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL STATEMENT OF THE CASE Appellant seeks our review under 35 U.S.C. § 134 of the Examiner’s final rejection of claims 1-20. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b)(2002). We reverse. Appeal 2011-008902 Application 11/704,069 2 Claim 1, reproduced below, is representative of the subject matter on appeal. 1. A method for inventorying circuits, the method comprising: calculating a facility requirement value corresponding to a required number of service pairs required to serve a location with a predetermined service quality; determining that an available plurality of service pairs equal to the facility requirement value are available to the location; creating a circuit tag corresponding to the available plurality of service pairs; creating a plurality of service tags, each of the plurality of service tags respectively corresponding to each of the available plurality of service pairs, the plurality of service tags being sequential and including the circuit tag; and storing the circuit tag and the plurality of the service tags in an inventory database. THE REJECTIONS The Examiner relies upon the following as evidence of unpatentability: Dodson US 6,091,735 July 18, 2000 Ishii US 2006/0181420 A1 Aug. 17, 2006 Corley US 2006/0215636 A1 Sept. 28, 2006 The following rejections are before us for review. The Examiner rejected claims 1-3, 5-15, and 17-20 under 35 U.S.C. Appeal 2011-008902 Application 11/704,069 3 § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Dodson in view of Ishii. (Ans. 3-7). The Examiner rejected claims 4 and 16 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Dodson in view of Ishii and in further view of Corley. (Ans. 7-8). ANALYSIS Each of independent claims 1, 14, and 18 require, in one form or another. “calculating a facility requirement value corresponding to a required number of service pairs required to serve a location with a predetermined service quality” (emphasis added). As to this limitation, the Examiner found that Dodson “explain[s] the circuit identifiers and the service entitlements to establish the service orders [sic] that is required number of services pairs in 3:23-52 ‘FIG. 2 is a flow diagram showing how the relationship between the customer and the customer service entitlements is established.’” (Ans. 9). Appellant argues, however, that in Dodson, “the process depicted in FIG. 3 determines whether the customer has the requisite permission for the service” and “is not concerned with calculating a facility requirement value, or any value corresponding to a required number of service pairs.” (App. Br. 14). We agree with Appellant because we find that in Dodson, the process starts with an already existing number of ports and circuits appurtenant to each port, such that “the network provisioning and maintenance management system software package detects that a port has been enabled.” Appeal 2011-008902 Application 11/704,069 4 Thus, while these existing circuits are enabled and identified by the process in Dodson, there is no disclosure of calculating a facility requirement value corresponding to a required number of service pairs required to serve a location with a predetermined service quality tied to the number of ports with their associated circuits. This is confirmed in Dodson: The process starts after a customer is connected to a port at a remote node and the network provisioning and maintenance management system software package detects that a port has been enabled. The network provider first establishes a unique circuit identification for each port 30. Since there is one or more ports per customer, the circuit identification is unique to each port. The network provider then sends the circuit identifications and customer names to the service providers 32. Dodson, col. 3, ll.25-33. We thus disagree with the Examiner (Ans. 10) that the assigning of an already known circuit requirement to known ports constitutes the calculation of the requirement. Moreover, the Examiner has not explained why a person with ordinary skill in the art would have known to use calculating a facility requirement value corresponding to a required number of service pairs required to serve a location with a predetermined service quality, as the method by which the port assignments are made. Accordingly, we do not sustain the rejection of the independent claims 1, 14, and 18 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a). Claims 2-13, 15-17, 19, and 20 depend from one of claims 1, 14, and 18 and because we do not sustain the rejection of claims 1, 14, and 18, the rejection of the dependent claims likewise cannot be sustained. We reverse the Examiner’s decision rejecting claims 1-20 under Appeal 2011-008902 Application 11/704,069 5 35 U.S.C. § 103(a). REVERSED llw