Court Opinion

ID: 9389302
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-04-25 15:01:04.575488+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:18:26.519848
License: Public Domain

Case: 22-1297    Document: 41     Page: 1   Filed: 04/25/2023

        NOTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.

   United States Court of Appeals
       for the Federal Circuit
                  ______________________

                  IN RE: NICIRA, INC.,
                         Appellant
                  ______________________

                        2022-1297
                  ______________________

     Appeal from the United States Patent and Trademark
 Office, Patent Trial and Appeal Board in No. 14/815,950.
                   ______________________

                  Decided: April 25, 2023
                  ______________________

     MANI ADELI, Adeli LLP, Pacific Palisades, CA, for ap-
 pellant. Also represented by NATHANIEL F.N. ROSS.

    BRIAN RACILLA, Office of the Solicitor, United States
 Patent and Trademark Office, Alexandria, VA, for appellee
 Katherine K. Vidal. Also represented by MICHAEL S.
 FORMAN, THOMAS W. KRAUSE, AMY J. NELSON, FARHEENA
 YASMEEN RASHEED.
                 ______________________

       Before DYK, LINN, and CHEN, Circuit Judges.
 PER CURIAM.
     Nicira, Inc. appeals from the final decision of the Pa-
 tent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”), affirming the Ex-
 aminer’s rejection of claims 1-20 of Nicira’s U.S. Patent
Case: 22-1297     Document: 41     Page: 2    Filed: 04/25/2023

 2                                           IN RE: NICIRA, INC.

 Application No. 2015/0381362 (“Application”). Nicira ar-
 gues that the Board’s obviousness rejection of representa-
 tive claim 1 based on Allen in view of Lin and Harjula is
 not supported by substantial evidence under a proper con-
 struction of claim 1. For the reasons that follow, we affirm.
                        DISCUSSION
     Nicira first argues that the claims require that a single
 program on a single device must receive the command from
 the controller and send the request for the new key to the
 key generator. It also argues that such single device must
 be the same entity that processes data messages using en-
 cryption keys. We agree with the Board that the broadest
 reasonable interpretation of the claims does not require
 such a limitation. The preamble of representative claim 1
 opens with the term “A non-transitory machine readable
 medium” and uses the open-ended “comprising” transition.
 J.A. 71 (emphasis added). It is well-settled that the use of
 “a” or “an” in a claim generally means “one or more.” See
 01 Communique Lab., Inc. v. LogMeIn, Inc., 687 F.3d 1292,
 1297 (Fed. Cir. 2012). It is likewise well-settled that the
 term “comprising” is an open-ended transitional term.
 Invitrogen Corp. v. Biocrest Mfg., L.P., 327 F.3d 1364, 1368
 (Fed. Cir. 2003).
      Moreover, claim 1 expressly recites that “program”
 comprises plural “sets of instructions” for performing the
 claimed tasks and contemplates that separate entities will
 perform those tasks. Claim 1 (“the program for execution
 by at least one processing unit, the program comprising sets
 of instructions for…”) (emphasis added). The claims do not
 limit the location of the instructions or restrict the program
 to a single discrete entity. As the Board recognized, under
 the broadest reasonable interpretation of claim 1, the actor
 that receives the command to fetch a new key need not be
 the same actor that sends a request for a new key to the
 key generator.
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 IN RE: NICIRA, INC.                                        3

     Nicira argues that the claims, specification, and Fig-
 ures 3 and 22 of the Application, require the “controller”
 that sends the command to the program to start the key-
 request process to be distinct from the device that pro-
 cesses messages, such as client device 202 in U.S. Pat. No.
 8,584,216 (“Allen”). As the Board correctly explained, how-
 ever, nothing in the claims limits the term “controller” in
 this way. The controller, as claimed, is simply the entity
 that sends the command to fetch a new key and remove a
 particular key. While the specification at ¶¶ 17, 30, 55, 140
 and Figures 3 and 22 provide a written description of “some
 embodiments,” there is nothing in the specification that ex-
 pressly limits the scope of the claims to those embodiments.
 See Liebel-Flarsheim Co. v. Medrad, Inc., 358 F.3d 898, 906
 (Fed. Cir. 2004).
     Nicira next contends that Allen does not meet the claim
 limitation of a “machine readable medium,” because Allen
 does not recite a single entity on a single machine readable
 medium that performs the recited steps. As the Board cor-
 rectly held, however, the claims read on a single program
 with instructions acting across different entities. Nicira is
 thus incorrect that the claimed program cannot read on Al-
 len’s system-management module 110 merely because the
 system-management module itself generates the keys ra-
 ther than sends a request to a key generator; the Board
 correctly held that the subscription-management module
 106 in Allen sends the request to the system-management
 module 110, which satisfies the “key generator” limitation.
 First Board Op. 6.
     Nicira also argues that Allen’s “server-side” modules
 are incompatible with the client-side components of U.S.
 Pat. No. 8,340,300 (“Lin”) because Allen’s client-side com-
 ponents already handle encryption and message pro-
 cessing, and it would make no sense to modify Allen’s
 processing systems with Lin’s client-side components. We
 disagree. Allen expressly notes that the modules may “run
 on one or more computer devices, such as the devices
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 4                                           IN RE: NICIRA, INC.

 illustrated in FIG. 2 (e.g. computing devices 202(1)-(N)
 [(client devices)] and/or server 202.” Allen at 5:10-15 (em-
 phasis added). See also id. at 6:13–19 (noting that “[e]xam-
 ples of server 206 include, without limitation, application
 servers and database servers”). The Board fully considered
 Nicira’s argument and was not persuaded; nor are we. The
 interchangeability of the location of the entities performing
 the claimed tasks is also confirmed by Harjula, which dis-
 closes that the client and the server “may execute on the
 same physical or virtual machine,” and the systems “may
 operate as a server, as a client, or as both a server and a
 client at different times.” U.S. Pat. App. No. 2015/0242594
 (“Harjula”) at ¶ 62. Nicira incorrectly reads the references
 in isolation and attempts to require a wholesale incorpora-
 tion of components from one reference into another to reach
 a determination of obviousness. The legal question is
 whether the references in combination and as a whole ren-
 der the claims obvious—not whether one reference may be
 wholly incorporated into the other. See In re Etter, 756
 F.2d 852, 859 (Fed. Cir. 1985) (en banc) (citing Orthopedic
 Equip. Co. v. United States, 702 F.2d 1005, 1013 (Fed. Cir.
 1983)).
      Nicira finally argues that the combination of Allen,
 Lin, and Harjula fails to provide substantial evidentiary
 support for the Board’s conclusion. Nicira specifically
 points to Lin as disclosing only a single key and failing to
 disclose or teach the claimed limitation of “a second plural-
 ity of keys in the keyring.” We disagree. As the Board ex-
 plained, obviousness was based on the combination of Lin
 with Allen and Harjula, and both Allen and Harjula dis-
 close the use of multiple keys in a keyring. First Board Op.
 at 7; Final Rejection at 6–7, J.A. 81–82; Allen at 6:46–47;
 Harjula at ¶¶ 216, 255 (“Plural instances may be provided
 for components, operations, or structures described herein
 as a single instance.”). It is the combination of the refer-
 ences that renders the limitation and the claim obvious, not
 each reference read in isolation. See In re Merck & Co., 800
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 IN RE: NICIRA, INC.                                        5

 F.2d 1091, 1097 (Fed. Cir. 1986). The Board adequately
 explained its reasoning, and we see no violation of Alac-
 ritech, Inc. v. Intel Corp.¸ 966 F.3d 1367, 1379 (Fed. Cir.
 2020).
     The Board also did not equate “a first plurality of keys”
 and “a second plurality of keys,” as Nicira argues. See
 Nicira Br. at 5. The Board explained that one plurality of
 keys included the particular key (i.e., the old key being re-
 moved) and one plurality did not, First Board Op. at 7, a
 proposition that Nicira appears to agree with. Nicira Br.
 at 15 (describing the sending and receiving of packets dur-
 ing the first and second time periods in Allen).
      Nicira cursorily challenges the reason to combine Allen
 with Lin and Harjula but does not provide any reason for
 its challenge.
     Nicira did not contest the Board’s consideration of
 Claim 1 as representative and does not do so here. The
 obviousness of Claim 12 and the rest of the claims thus
 rests upon the same bases as the obviousness of Claim 1.
                       CONCLUSION
     The Board correctly interpreted representative claim
 1 and properly affirmed Examiner’s rejections of claims 1-
 20.
                        AFFIRMED