10102174 (B.P.A.I. Jul. 12, 2012)

Ex Parte Cheshire

Board of Patent Appeals and InterferencesJul 12, 2012

10102174 (B.P.A.I. Jul. 12, 2012)

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. 10/102,174 03/19/2002 Stuart D. Cheshire APL-P2768 1937 62096 7590 07/12/2012 PVF -- APPLE INC. c/o PARK, VAUGHAN, FLEMING & DOWLER LLP 2820 FIFTH STREET DAVIS, CA 95618-7759 EXAMINER CHOJNACKI, MELLISSA M ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2164 MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE 07/12/2012 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 BOARD OF PATENT APPEALS AND INTERFERENCES ____________________ Ex parte STUART D. CHESHIRE ____________________ Appeal 2010-003855 Application 10/102,174 Technology Center 2100 ____________________ Before SALLY C. MEDLEY, STEPHEN C. SIU, and JENNIFER S. BISK, Administrative Patent Judges. BISK, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL Appeal 2010-003855 Application 10/102,174 2 DECISION ON APPEAL This is an appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner’s rejection of independent claims 1, 5, 8, 12, 15, 19, 22, 27, 34, 39, 42, 45, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, and 58.1 Claims 29, 30, 48, and 49 have been canceled. App. Br. 3. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We reverse. STATEMENT OF THE CASE The claimed invention relates to computer networks. More particularly, the invention relates to a “method and apparatus that allows a client to issue repeated multicast queries for the sake of reliability, without the inefficiency of receiving redundant identical replies every time.” Spec. 2:11-13. When issuing a Domain Name Service (DNS)2-format query, the requesting entity places the previously received answers into a section of the query packet that normally is unused. A potential responder only sends an answer to the client if the proposed answer is not already contained in the query. See generally Spec. 2. Claim 1, reproduced below with emphasis added, is illustrative of the claimed subject matter: 1. A computer-executable method to obtain information that is represented using domain name system (DNS) resource records, at a requesting entity in a domain, comprising: 1 Appellant does not appeal the rejection of dependent claims 2-4, 6, 7, 9-11, 13, 14, 16-18, 20, 21, 23-26, 28, 31-33, 35-38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 51, 54, and 57. App. Br. 3. Accordingly, for the purposes of this Appeal we treat these claims as canceled. See Manual of Patent Examining Procedure § 1214.05 (rev. 8, July 2010). 2 The DNS is the hierarchical naming system for computers or other resources connected to the Internet. See P. Mockapetris, RFC 1034, Network Working Group (Nov. 1987), available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1034. Appeal 2010-003855 Application 10/102,174 3 multicasting a DNS request query asking for information identified by a DNS name, a query type and a query class as defined in IETF RFC 1035 from a computer system, wherein the query includes: a questions section containing the DNS name, the query type and the query class, wherein the query type indicates that the information contained in the query is one of the following types: a host address, a canonical name of an alias, a CPU and OS used by a host, a mail exchange for the domain, an authoritative name server for the domain, a pointer to another part of the domain name space, or a start of the zone authority, and wherein the query class indicates a network protocol family or an instance of a network protocol, a non-empty answer section containing at least one answer to the request query known by the requesting entity, wherein the list of known answers includes known addresses which correspond to the DNS name in the question section of the request query; receiving at the computer system responses to the multicasted request query that contain additional answers that are not in the list of known answers, wherein the list of known answers is in the request query, and wherein a responding entity suppresses responses to queries that contain answers that are included in the list of known answers in the query; and adding the additional answers to the list of known answers; wherein sending the list of known answers along with the request query suppresses the known answers in the received responses. Appeal 2010-003855 Application 10/102,174 4 THE REJECTIONS Claims 1, 5, 8, 12, 15, 19, 22, 27, 34, 39, 42, 45, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, and 58 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 102(e) as being anticipated by P. Mockapetris, RFC 1035, Network Working Group (Nov. 1987), available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1035 (“Mockapetris”).3 Ans. 3-30. THE CONTENTIONS Appellant argues that all pending independent claims are patentable because Mockapetris does not disclose a query message that includes a non- empty list of known answers to that query in the answer section of the message.4 App. Br. 24-28; Reply Br. 26-30. The Examiner responds that the “SLIST” disclosed in Mockapetris equates to the claimed “list of known answers” and therefore Mockapetris anticipates all pending independent claims. Ans. 32. 3 The Examiner listed claims 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, and 58 as rejected on the summary page of the Final Rejection, but did not list these claims in any specific rejection. Final Rej. 1-23. Because Appellant assumes in the Appeal Brief that these claims are part of the rejection at issue (App. Br. 3), and the Examiner listed these claims as part of the rejection in the Answer (Ans. 3) and detailed the grounds of rejection (Ans. 24-30), we consider the omission of specific rejections of claims 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, and 58 in the Final Rejection to be harmless clerical error. 4 Appellant sometimes refers to this limitation as “a non-empty question field that includes a list of answers to the query known by the requesting entity in an answer section.” See, e.g., App. Br. 24 (emphasis added); Reply Br. 27. However, this language is not present in any of the claims at issue. Because we agree with Appellant’s argument that “Mockapetris nowhere explicitly or implicitly discloses including any information from the SLIST in any section of a query” (App. Br. 26), we do not address this argument. Appeal 2010-003855 Application 10/102,174 5 ISSUE Under § 102(e), has the Examiner erred in determining that Mockapetris discloses a query message that includes a non-empty list of known answers to that query in the answer section of the message? ANALYSIS Based on the record before us, we find that the Examiner has not sufficiently shown that Mockapetris discloses “a non-empty answer section containing at least one answer to the request query known by the requesting entity, wherein the list of known answers includes known addresses which correspond to the DNS name in the question section of the request query.” Mockapetris discloses a message format with five sections: Header, Question, Answer, Authority, and Additional. Mockapetris § 4.1. This message format is used for all communications of the DNS protocol. Id. The header, among other things, specifies whether the message is a query or a response. Id. The question section “describe[s] a question.” Id. “The answer section contains [Resource Records] that answer the question.” Id. Mockapetris also describes a “resolver,” which transforms a client request into a query message and concurrently keeps track of multiple client requests by creating “state information” for each query. Mockapetris § 7.1. Included in the recorded state information is an “SLIST,” a data structure to which the resolver adds “all of the known addresses for the name servers.” Mockapetris § 7.2. The resolver then uses the state information, including the SLIST, “to select the next name server address to query.” Id. We agree with the Examiner that as described, the SLIST can reasonably be equated to the claimed “list of known answers [that] includes Appeal 2010-003855 Application 10/102,174 6 known addresses which correspond to the DNS name.” However, we fail to see that Mockapetris discloses including the SLIST, or any of the known addresses stored in the SLIST, in the query message. The Examiner’s response to Appellant’s argument does not adequately explain where or how Mockapetris discloses this required limitation. See Ans. 31-36 (describing the function and contents of the SLIST and stating, without support, that the SLIST equates to the entire limitation at issue “a non-empty answer section containing at least one answer to the request query known by the requesting entity, wherein the list of known answers includes known addresses which correspond to the DNS name in the question section of the request query.”). Thus, the Examiner’s explanation fails to indicate any disclosure in Mockapetris that can be interpreted as a query including “a non-empty answer section containing at least one answer to the request query known by the requesting entity.” We are therefore persuaded that the Examiner erred in rejecting independent claim 1. For these reasons, we do not sustain the Examiner’s anticipation rejection of (1) independent claim 1; (2) independent claims 5, 8, 12, 15, 19, 22, 27, 34, 39, 42, and 45, which contain the same limitation; and (3) independent claims 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, and 58, which recite commensurate limitations. App. Br. 24. DECISION The Examiner’s decision rejecting claims 1, 5, 8, 12, 15, 19, 22, 27, 34, 39, 42, 45, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, and 58 is reversed. REVERSED Appeal 2010-003855 Application 10/102,174 7 babc