Appeal No. 2005-2338
Application No. 09/754,001
contacts the online broker, who authenticates the user. See column 2 lines 5-30.
The authentication may identify if the user has a subscription to the service
providers’ online publications. See column 3, lines 60-64. Thus, we find that
Teper teaches assigning a unique identifier to a user, that the user can be a
subscriber and that the unique identifier is unique to all users of the online
broker. By extension the unique identifier is unique to all the service provider
web sites which make use of the online broker. As such, even though claim 1
does not require that the unique identifier be unique to more then one service
provider, we find that Teper ’s unique identifier is unique to more then one
service provider.
On page 7 of the brief, appellants argue that even if Teper’s unique
identifier were considered to meet the GUID limitation Teper does not teach the
limitation of “ receiving a request from a client … comprising a globally unique
identifier (GUID) of the subscriber.” (Underlining added by appellants). Further
appellants argue, on pages 7 and 8 of the brief:
Teper discloses inclusion of the “unique ID” with the “negotiate”
message (col. 9, lines 50-55). However, the “negotiate” message cannot
be read as “a request to access a subscribed online service at an online
service provider.” The reason being, under Teper, the subscribed online
services of a subscriber are not made known to an online service provider
until a user is authenticated. See col. 11, lines 15-20.
We are not convinced by this argument. While we concur with appellants
that one of the purposes of Teper’s system is to maintain anonymity of the user,
and that the service providers do not know who the users are, rather the service
provider only knows that they are authorized, we find no limitation in claim 1
8
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