Appeal No. 2000-2245
Application No. 08/661,686
Reference is made to the briefs and answer for the respective positions of
appellant and the examiner.
OPINION
It is the examiner’s position, with respect to independent claim 1, that Gross
discloses the claimed subject matter but for a censoring of e-mail by trusted recipients.
The examiner relies on Connections for the teaching of censoring junk e-mail, or the
prevention of presenting e-mail to others when such is classified by the censoring agent as
junk. The examiner concludes that it would have been obvious to apply censoring to Gross
“because of the taught risk of sex harassment charges against the censoring agency.”
Again, the examiner stresses that censoring is “exactly the process of having a member
review contents to prevent presentation to other members and therefore is exactly what is
claimed” [answer-page 4].
Gross discloses an event-driven rule-based messaging system and specifically
mentions the application of the disclosed invention to an electronic messaging system
[see, for example, column 1, lines 36-37 and column 2, lines 42-43]. Gross does disclose
that e-mail is “screened” [column 1, line 37], a decision is made and an action
is taken. Gross also discloses in the background section that the rules include conditions
which describe values associated with attributes of a mail message, such as what the
message is about [column 1, line 45]. A typical action may be to delete such e-mail
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