Source: https://www.ptab.us/2014/07/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 10:01:50+00:00

Document:
1377 (Fed. Cir. 2003) (citation omitted) (emphasis added). “Inherency, however, may not be established by probabilities or possibilities. The mere fact that a certain thing may result from a given set of circumstances is not sufficient.” Therasense, 593 F.3d at 1332 (citing Cont'l Can Co. USA, Inc. v. Monsanto Co., 948 F.2d 1264,1269 (Fed. Cir. 1991)).
The prima facie burden has not been met and the rejection does not adhere to the minimal requirements of 35 U.S.C. § 132 “when a rejection is so uninformative that it prevents the applicant from recognizing and seeking to counter the grounds for rejection.” Chester v. Miller, 906 F.2d 1574, 1578 (Fed. Cir. 1990).
In regard to the claims that recite the additional steps of computing, monitoring, signaling, notifying, etc., these steps relate to only ordinary functions of a computer and do not confer patent eligibility to the claims.
See Bancorp Servs., L.L.C. v. Sun Life Assurance Co., 687 F.3d 1266, 1278–79 (Fed. Cir. 2012).
“Of course, the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.” Porter v. Secretary of Health and Human Services, 663 F. 3d 1242, 1264 (Fed. Cir. 2011) (O’Malley, J., concurring-in-part, dissenting-in-part)(internal quotations and citations omitted). The Examiner’s rejections, being unsupported by a preponderance of the evidence, cannot be sustained. In re Caveney, 761 F.2d 671, 674, (Fed.Cir.1985) (A preponderance of the evidence must show nonpatentability before the PTO may reject the claims of a patent application).
This explicit analysis by the Examiner provides “an apparent reason to combine the known elements in the fashion claimed by the patent at issue.” KSR, 550 U.S. at 418. This is also consistent with the recent non-precedential decision in In re Patel, 2014 WL 3454231 *4 (Fed. Cir. 2014) (“a rejection based on ranges approaching each other might well be appropriate where there is a teaching in the prior art that the end points of the prior art range are approximate, or can be flexibly applied”).
“Use of the term ‘means’ in a claim limitation creates a presumption that section 112, paragraph 6 has been invoked, but that presumption may be rebutted if the properly construed claim limitation itself recites sufficiently definite structure to perform the claimed function.” Kemco Sales, 208 F.3d at 1361. In this case, claims 1 and 49 use the term “means” and recite no structures to perform the claimed functions. We therefore conclude that the claims invoke 35 U.S.C. § 112, sixth paragraph.
Section 112, paragraph 6 provides that a patentee [or applicant] may define the structure for performing a particular function generically through the use of a means expression, provided that it discloses specific structure(s) corresponding to that means in the patent specification. . . . As such, [the court has] referred to section 112, paragraph 6 as embodying a statutory quid pro quo. . . . If a patentee [or applicant] fails to satisfy the bargain because of a failure to disclose adequate structure, the claim will be rendered . . . indefinite under section 112, paragraph 2.
Id. at 1360-61. The rules that “structure corresponding to the claimed function must be disclosed in the specification with clear linkage between the structure and the claimed function serve worthy goals. Such rules are intended to produce certainty in result.” Medical Instrumentation and Diagnostics Corp. v. Elekta AB, 344 F.3d 1205, 1220 (Fed. Cir. 2003). “A computer-implemented means-plus-function term is limited to the corresponding structure disclosed in the specification and equivalents thereof, and the corresponding structure is the algorithm.” Harris Corp., 417 F.3d at 1253.
The purpose of the written description requirement is to “ensure that the scope of the right to exclude, as set forth in the claims does not overreach the scope of the inventor’s contribution to the field of art as described in the patent specification.” Reiffin v. Microsoft Corp., 214 F.3d 1342, 1345 (Fed. Cir. 2000). To that end, to satisfy the written description requirement, the inventor “must also convey with reasonable clarity to those skilled in the art that, as of the filing date sought, he or she was in possession of the invention.” Vas-Cath Inc. v. Mahurkar, 935 F.2d 1555, 1563-64 (Fed. Cir. 1991). “One shows that one is ‘in possession’ of the invention by describing the invention, with all its claimed limitations” (emphasis in original). Lockwood v. American Airlines, 107 F.3d 1565, 1572 (Fed. Cir. 1997). It is not necessary for the specification to describe the claimed invention ipsissimis verbis; all that is required is that it reasonably convey to those skilled in the art that, as of the filing date sought, the inventor was in possession of the claimed invention. Union Oil Co. of California v. Atlantic Richfield Co., 208 F.3d 989, 997 (Fed. Cir. 2000); Vas-Cath Inc. v. Mahurkar, 935 F.2d at 1563-64; In re Gosteli, 872 F.2d 1008, 1012 (Fed. Cir. 1989); In re Edwards, 568 F.2d 1349, 1351-52 (CCPA 1978).
When an Applicant claims a class, the Applicant “must describe that class in order to meet the description requirement of the statute.” In re Lukach, 442 F.2d 967, 968 (CCPA 1971). “[W]hile the description requirement does not demand any particular form of disclosure …, or that the specification recite the claimed invention in haec verba, a description that merely renders the invention obvious does not satisfy the requirement.” Ariad Pharms, Inc. v. Eli Lilly and Co., 598 F.3d 1336, 1352 (Fed. Cir. 2010) (citations omitted). “[T]he specification must demonstrate that the applicant has made a generic invention that achieves the claimed result and do so by showing that the applicant has invented species sufficient to support a claim to the functionally-defined genus.” Id. at 1349. “[A]n adequate written description of a claimed genus requires more than a generic statement of an invention's boundaries.” Id.
However, this menu of options does not satisfy the requirements in claims 1 and 13 for both a presentation of a query and a presentation of its predetermined responses. See, e.g., Lantech, Inc. v. Keip Mach. Co., 32 F.3d 542, 547 (Fed. Cir. 1994) (in infringement context, a single conveyor held not to meet claim element requiring at least two conveyors); In re Robertson, 169 F.3d 743, 745 (Fed. Cir. 1999) (claim requiring three separate means not anticipated by structure containing two means where one of the two means was argued to meet two of the three claimed means).

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