Ex Parte Britton et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardFeb 20, 201411359212 (P.T.A.B. Feb. 20, 2014) Copy Citation UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE ____________ BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD ____________ Ex parte KATHRYN H. BRITTON, DIETER BUEHLER, WILLIAM P. HIGGINS, YI-HSIU H. WEI, and CHUNHUI YANG ____________ Appeal 2011-007391 Application 11/359,212 Technology Center 2400 ____________ Before JOSEPH F. RUGGIERO, JOHNNY A. KUMAR, and DANIEL N. FISHMAN, Administrative Patent Judges. KUMAR, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON REQUEST FOR REHEARING Appellants request that we reconsider our Decision of November 13, 2013, wherein we sustained the Examiner’s 35 U.S.C. § 102(e) rejection of claims 1-16, all of the appealed claims. We have reconsidered our Decision in light of Appellants’ arguments in the Request for Rehearing (“Request”), and we find no error therein. We, therefore, decline to make any changes in the prior Decision for the reasons which follow. Appeal 2011-007391 Application 11/359,212 2 Appellants’ arguments in the Request for Rehearing focus on the contention that, with respect to independent claim 1, the Decision “appears to not [have] addressed this very important argument by Appellants” that the binding logic “includes program code that has been produced from a security policy and executes in memory of a data processing system to provide an interface for a virtual role framework to operations for a specific role of a component.” Request 3 (emphasis ours). These arguments are unpersuasive because the Board explicitly adopted (Decision 4) as its own the Examiner’s findings and conclusion stated in the Answer. In particular, the Examiner’s findings and conclusion (Ans. 7 and 9) were based on the cited portions in column 7 of Barto which addressed the disputed feature of claim 1. Furthermore, Appellants’ Specification describes “the binding logic can include program code generated by an metamodel-driven code generation tool such as the Eclipse(TM) Modeling Framework (EMF) (Eclipse is a trademark of the Eclipse Foundation) which utilizes the data model of the security policy.” Spec. ¶ 0009 (emphasis ours). Therefore, as stated by the Examiner, Barto teaches that the security module includes a rule interpretation engine (for example Eclipse), for analysis and to be interpreted as part of an overall security policy (i.e., to produce a logic that includes security access clauses for the specific roles of the user who has been authenticated/authorized to different Aspects (access heterogeneous applications). Ans. 7. In other words, Barto’s rule interpretation engine that is generated by using Eclipse (a software development tool for generating program code) meets the disputed limitation of claim 1. Appeal 2011-007391 Application 11/359,212 3 As such, all the claim limitations have been considered as the Examiner has identified specific teachings in Barto that meet the above- identified disputed limitation. Therefore, contrary to Appellants’ contentions (Request 3), the Decision did not contain any error by adopting the Examiner’s reading of the claim term “binding logic comprising program code” produced from the security policy (see Ans. 7 and 9; Decision 4-5). Appellants further contend that “Appellants are unable to ascertain the claim construction findings of the Board in respect to the critical claim terms ‘role’ and ‘security policy’.” Request 4. These arguments were addressed in our Decision and our analysis will not be repeated here. Based on the Examiner’s claim construction and analysis of the prior art teachings (see Ans. 4-5), which we adopted, we agreed with the Examiner that the context of the requestor in Barto corresponds to the claimed “role,” and the security regulations that limit the role in Barto correspond to the claimed “security policy.” Decision 4-5. Appellants’ arguments on page 4 of the Request are unpersuasive because: (1) Appellants have not presented any evidence to persuade us that the Examiner’s interpretation is incorrect; and (2) the Examiner’s assertions are consistent with Appellants’ disclosure in paragraphs 17, 19, and 22 of the Specification describing the disputed claim terms. Therefore, we find no error in our Decision to agree with these findings and conclusions. CONCLUSION Based on the foregoing, we have granted Appellants’ request to the extent that we have reconsidered our original Decision of November 13, 2013, but we deny the request with respect to making any changes therein. Appeal 2011-007391 Application 11/359,212 4 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). REHEARING DENIED msc Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation