Appeal No. 2002-1894
Application No. 09/195,870
According to the examiner (final rejection, page 2):
Bsaibes substantially discloses the invention including a data processing system
for managing arbitrary subsets of access control lists (ACL) in a computer
network (col. 1, lines 1-4 et seq). In particular, Bsaibes discloses a system using
hierarchical directories (48), wherein for each directory object a table is
maintained for identifying the access rights of different users in the different
nodes (see fig. 6). Further, Bsaibes discloses individual entries associating ACL
of users with their corresponding rights (col. 6, lines 26-42 et seq).
The examiner acknowledges (final rejection, page 2) that “Bsaibes does not particularly
detail a plurality of directory object owner’s entries in the tables to thereby identify ACL and
owner information for a particular object entry.” For such a teaching, the examiner relies on
Fabbio which “discloses an analogous system having an ACL, wherein the entries therein are
stored in a table (100) to associate the entries with corresponding owning users to thereby
identify a particular object entry and a corresponding owner (col. 7, lines 40-46 et seq)” (final
rejection, pages 2 and 3). The examiner concludes (final rejection, page 3) that it would have
been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the data processing art to combine the teachings of the
references because “Fabbio’s teachings would allow users of Bsaibes’ system to readily identify
owners access data from the access control list.”
Appellants argue (brief, page 9) that:
[T]he teaching in Fabbio is directed to an access control list (ACL) that includes a
user I.D. and owning group I.D. for each object. (Fabbio, column 7, lines 41-43).
(The access control list is maintained as a part of each object. (Fabbio, column 7,
line 39.)) Additionally, the access control list includes access control attributes
which consist of eight 32-bit entries. (Fabbio, column 7, lines 51-63.) The
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