Ex Parte Britton et al

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Feb 20, 2014

11359212 (P.T.A.B. Feb. 20, 2014)

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