Ex Parte Damick et al

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Sep 24, 2014

11395540 (P.T.A.B. Sep. 24, 2014)

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.
11/395,540 04/03/2006 Jeffrey Joseph Damick 10587.0108-00000 1830
100692 7590 09/24/2014
AOL Inc./Finnegan
901 New York Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20001
EXAMINER
DRABIK, SARAH E
ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
2455
MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE
09/24/2014 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 JEFFREY JOSEPH DAMICK and
SEAN CUNNINGHAM
____________________

Appeal 2012-003787
Application 11/395,540
Technology Center 2400
____________________

Before JOSEPH L. DIXON, JAMES R. HUGHES, and ERIC S. FRAHM,
Administrative Patent Judges.

DIXON, Administrative Patent Judge.

DECISION ON APPEAL

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STATEMENT OF CASE
Appellants appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner’s
Final Rejection of claims 1, 3–14, and 24. Claims 2, 15–23 have been
cancelled. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We affirm.

The claims are directed to router-host logging. Claim 1, reproduced
below, is illustrative of the claimed subject matter:
1. A method comprising:

receiving, at a router associated with local network at a
user location, a request from a first machine on the local
network, the request including a first-machine identifier and a
request to access through the router a first location on the
Internet;

after receiving the request from the first machine,
accessing a first-machine network access rule;

determining, by the router and based on the accessed
first-machine network access rule, to grant the first machine
access to the first location on the Internet;

logging, at the router, the request from the first machine
into a first-machine log for requests from the first machine, the
logging into the first-machine log being based on the first-
machine identifier and including the determination to grant the
first machine access to the first location on the Internet;

receiving, at the router, a request from a second machine
on the local network, the request from the second machine
including a second-machine identifier and a request to access
through the router a second location on the Internet;

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after receiving the request from the second machine,
accessing a second machine network access rule;

determining, by the router and based on the accessed
second-machine network access rule, to deny the second
machine access to the second location on the network;

sending, from the router over the Internet to a computer
system at a third location on the Internet, the first-machine log
and the second-machine log;

sending, to the computer system at the third location on
the Internet, a request to view a report of requests from the first
and second-machines; and

enabling the report of requests from the first and second
machines to be received from the computer system at the third
location on the Internet.

REFERENCES
The prior art relied upon by the Examiner in rejecting the claims on
appeal is:
Cirasole
Andersen
US 5,987,606
US 6,122,740
Nov. 16, 1999
Sept. 19, 2000
Wu
Fellenstein
Balasubrahmaniyan
US 2003/0200455 A1
US 2003/0233447 A1
US 2006/0064469 A1
Oct. 23, 2003
Dec. 18, 2003
Mar. 23, 2006

Allan Macphee, Understanding Digital Certificates and Wireless Transport
Layer Security (WTLS)”, Version 1.1, (2001). (“Macphee”)

REJECTIONS
The Examiner made the following rejections:
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Claims 1, 3–5, 8, 10–14, and 24 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C
§103(a) as being unpatentable over Andersen, Cirasole, Balasubrahmaniyan,
and Fellenstein.
Claims 6 and 7 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C §103(a) as being
unpatentable over Andersen, Cirasole, Balasubrahmaniyan, Fellenstein, and
Wu.
Claim 9 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C §103(a) as being unpatentable
over Andersen, Cirasole, Balasubrahmaniyan, Fellenstein, and Macphee.

ANALYSIS
Claims 1, 3–9, 11, 12, 14, and 24
Regarding independent claim 1, Appellants contend that “[b]ecause
Cirasole teaches that client-based and local server-based filtering systems
have serious problems and drawbacks, and proposes an ISP-based system to
solve them, one of ordinary skill in the art would not have modified
Andersen to ‘move such content filtering functionality to a local network
server rather than implementing it on an individual client,’ as asserted in the
Final Office Action” (App. Br. 14). Appellants also contend that “in
Balasubrahmaniyan, it is the URL filtering server 108, not the firewall 104
(i.e., the router), that filters URL requests based on access rights or rules”
(App. Br. 16). Thus, Appellants argue, Balasubrahmaniyan fails to disclose
“determining, by the router [associated with the local network] and based
on the accessed first-machine network access rule” and “determining, by
the router [associated with the local network] and based on the accessed
second-machine network access rule” whether to grant access to certain
Internet locations (App. Br. 15–17). We disagree with Appellants.
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First, we are not persuaded by Appellants’ argument (see App. Br. 14;
Reply Br. 2–3) that Cirasole teaches away from modifying Andersen to
perform Internet location filtering at the local network level. Andersen
discloses that having a local server perform filtering for multiple client
computers “makes it far more difficult for a computer literate end-user to
modify or thwart the system” (Cirasole, col. 2, ll. 25–27). Thus, at least in
this respect, local server filtering has an advantage over filtering on the
client computers. Although Cirasole also discloses the local server filtering
“suffers from many of the disadvantages of the single-user configuration in
that it requires time-consuming local service to initiate and maintain the
system on the local server” (Cirasole, col. 2, ll. 27–30), this disadvantage is
merely a tradeoff to operating a local server filtering system, and does not
amount to a teaching away. Further, that Cirasole discloses an improved
system of performing filtering at an ISP server, as opposed to a local server
(see Cirasole, col. 2, ll. 52–65), is also not a teaching away. That is, the
disclosure of Cirasole’s allegedly better system of filtering at an ISP server
is not a teaching away from the system of filtering at a local server which
has at least some advantage. See, e.g., In re Gurley, 27 F.3d 551, 554 (Fed.
Cir. 1994) (“A known or obvious composition does not become patentable
simply because it has been described as somewhat inferior to some other
product for the same use.”).
Second, we are also not persuaded by Appellants’ argument (App. Br.
16–17; Reply Br. 4–5) that Balasubrahmaniyan fails to disclose
“determining, by the router,” whether to grant access to Internet locations
based on certain access rules, as recited in claim 1. Specifically, we disagree
with Appellant that “the URL filtering server 108, not the router, applies
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access rights or rules to make URL filtering determinations” (Reply Br. 4).
Balasubrahmaniyan discloses “[f]irewall 104 filters the request for the URL
and routes the request for the URL to a server that hosts the website
requested by computer 102” (Balasubrahmaniyan, ¶ 27) (emphasis added).
Even if the firewall, i.e., “the router,” must forward a request to
Balasubrahmaniyan’s URL filtering server because the requested URL is not
in the IP cache list or exclusive domains list of the firewall (see
Balasubrahmaniyan, ¶¶ 27–28), it is ultimately the firewall that must
determine whether to grant access to the requested location based on the
result returned from the URL filtering server. That is, one of ordinary skill
in the art would have understood that Balasubrahmaniyan’s firewall must
perform some determination of the URL filtering server’s response such that
“[i]n case the URL is allowed, firewall 104 sends the contents to computer
102 that requested for the URL” (Balasubrahmaniyan, ¶ 27).
Moreover, even if Balasubrahmaniyan’s firewall cannot be considered
to perform the claimed “determining” step because the firewall forwards
some requests for Internet locations to the URL filtering server, the
Examiner merely relies on Balasubrahmaniyan for disclosing using a router
on a local network, rather than a server on a local network as disclosed in
Cirasole, to perform Internet location filtering (Ans. 22). In other words,
Balasubrahmaniyan discloses at least performing some Internet location
filtering on a local router—filtering locations stored in the IP cache or
exclusive domains list (Balasubrahmaniyan, ¶ 27)—which would have
suggested to one of ordinary skill in the art to modify Cirasole to use a router
as opposed to a server to perform Internet location filtering at the local
network. Thus, we are not persuaded that Balasubrahmaniyan fails to
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disclose “determining, by the router,” whether to grant access to Internet
content, as recited in claim 1.
We are therefore not persuaded the Examiner erred in rejecting claim
1, and claims 3–9, 11, 12, 14, and 24 not specifically argued separately.

Claims 10 and 13
Appellants contend “Andersen does not teach providing different
compilation instructions/preferences for different users or machines.
Andersen’s user preferences apply to the entire log summary, and are not
tied to a particular machine or user at all. Thus, Andersen fails to teach
or suggest the claimed ‘first-machine compilation instructions’ and ‘second-
machine compilation instructions.’” (App. Br. 18). We disagree with
Appellants.
Andersen discloses that a supervisor can request to access log data
from other users (Andersen, col. 8, ll. 7–31). Specifically,
the supervisor can set a user preference with the log server
indicating the format that the summary of log data should be in.
Accordingly to one implementation, one user preference is a
hierarchical setting. The log data retrieval process obtains all
the log data for the specified user since the last time the
supervisor checked the log data and then displays the log data
hierarchically, as illustrated in FIG. 8. . . .
It is to be appreciated that other user preferences can also be
set. For example, a user may request chronological ordering, or
alternatively only those host systems accessed with site
descriptions that contain a particular one or more words
identified by the supervisor.

(Andersen, col. 8, ll. 32–55) (emphasis added). As shown here, Andersen’s
supervisor, i.e. “control user” as recited in claims 10 and 13, can request to
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view the log data for a specified user according to at least several different
formats, i.e. “compilation instructions” as recited in claims 10 and 13.
Moreover, Andersen discloses that “[l]og data is transferred to log server
150 from one or more client systems 110 and stored by log server 150 until
the information is requested by a verified user” (Andersen, col. 3, ll. 52–55)
and that “log data regarding a particular user or client system” can be
retrieved and organized “to conform to the preferences of the requester”
(Andersen, col. 7, ll. 31–36) (emphasis added). This disclosure would have
suggested to one of ordinary skill in the art that Andersen’s supervisor can
view log data about a particular client machine, in addition to a specified
user, in a preferred format. We agree with the Examiner (see Ans. 23) that
given the different formats available for reporting the log data regarding
individual users or client machines, one of ordinary skill in the art would
have set different reporting formats—different “compilations instructions”—
for different client machines.
We are therefore not persuaded that the Examiner erred in rejecting
claims 10 and 13.

CONCLUSION
The Examiner did not err in rejecting claims 1, 3–14, and 24 under 35
U.S.C. § 103(a).

DECISION
For the above reasons, the Examiner’s rejections of claims 1, 3–14,
and 24 are affirmed.

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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).

AFFIRMED

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