Ex Parte Day et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardJun 14, 201311120023 (P.T.A.B. Jun. 14, 2013) Copy Citation 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. 11/120,023 05/02/2005 Christopher Day 7339-004U 9698 29973 7590 06/17/2013 CAREY, RODRIGUEZ, GREENBERG & O''''KEEFE LLP ATTN: STEVEN M. GREENBERG, ESQ. 7900 Glades Road SUITE 520 BOCA RATON, FL 33434 EXAMINER LEMMA, SAMSON B ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2432 MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE 06/17/2013 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 CHRISTOPHER DAY and CEM GURKOK ____________________ Appeal 2010-011689 Application 11/120,023 Technology Center 2400 ____________________ Before ALLEN R. MacDONALD, JASON V. MORGAN, and PATRICK M. BOUCHER, Administrative Patent Judges. MacDONALD, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL Appeal 2010-011689 Application 11/120,023 2 STATEMENT OF CASE Introduction Appellants appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from a Final Rejection of claims 1-9, 11-14, and 16-18. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). Exemplary Claim Exemplary claim 1 under appeal reads as follows (emphasis added): 1. An information security auditing and incident investigation system comprising: a plurality of distributed audit and response tools, each of said tools having a coupling to a corresponding audit target in a computer communications network; a distributed audit and response tool manager communicatively linked to each of said distributed audit and response tools over said computer communications network; data extraction logic coupled to said distributed audit and response tool manager and configured to acquire information security audit data for corresponding audit targets via their respective audit and response tools; and, at least one correlation template programmed to group and define query sets for said information security audit data for a unified query across interrelated sets of said information security audit data. Rejections on Appeal 1. The Examiner rejected claims 1-4, 6-9, 12-14, 17, and 18 as being unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) over the combination of Depaolantonio (US 7,103,149 Bl; Sep. 5, 2006) and Zobel (US 7,340,776 B2; Mar. 4, 2008). Appeal 2010-011689 Application 11/120,023 3 2. The Examiner rejected claims 5, 11, and 16 as being unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) over the combination of Depaolantonio, Zobel, and Ter Horst (US 2005/0120027 Al; Jun. 2, 2005). Appellants’ Contention Appellants contend that the Examiner erred in rejecting claims 1-7 and 10-25 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) because: [T]he critical claim term "correlation template" cannot be found within Depaolantonio as argued by Examiner. In this regard, column 5, lines 36 through 47 provide verbatim: In one exemplary implementation of the present invention, automated network communication device audit tool method 200 automatically constructs the queries by issuing protocol commands formatted in the appropriate syntax for the communication devices included in the network. FIG. 11D is a table of network audit commands utilized in one embodiment of the present invention to retrieve information from an optical concentrator. The information is gathered at predetermined intervals in accordance with a polling frequency or upon a triggering event (e.g., return from a network shutdown, operator command, etc.) Thus, it is clear that the foregoing portion of Depaolantonio relied exclusively upon by Examiner for the teaching of "correlation template" discloses only a table of network commands" utilized by an audit tool method to construct "queries by issuing protocol commands formatted in" an "appropriate syntax for the communications devices included in the network". This teaching is not comparable to grouped and defined query sets as expressly claimed by Appellants in each of claims 1, 9 and 14. (App. Br. 11-12). Appeal 2010-011689 Application 11/120,023 4 Issue on Appeal Did the Examiner err in rejecting claims 1-9, 11-14, and 16-18 as being obvious? ANALYSIS We agree with the Appellants’ above contention. CONCLUSIONS (1) Appellants have established that the Examiner erred in rejecting claims 1-9, 11-14, and 16-18 as being unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a). (2) On this record, claims 1-9, 11-14, and 16-18 have not been shown to be unpatentable. DECISION The Examiner’s rejections of claims 1-9, 11-14, and 16-18 are reversed. REVERSED ke Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation