Appeal No. 2006-1874
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,351
identity of the bearer is not registered as an account holder anywhere. The deficiencies of Marks
are not made up by the Gold Certificate.
B. New ground of rejection
Claims 13-16 are herein rejected over the combined teachings of (1) the operation of the
gold vault of the federal reserve system, located in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and
(2) patent owner’s admitted prior art. As evidence of the operation of the Federal reserve’s gold
vault, we rely on the following internet article: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, The
Region: The World’s Goldkeeper (1991), available at http://minneapolisfed.org/pubs/region/91-
12/reg9112b.cfm (last visited Nov. 30, 2006) (“1991 Federal Reserve article”). As for the
admitted prior art, we rely on the representation of patent owner’s counsel during oral argument
that there is nothing novel about implementing a payment from one account to another account
within the same institution or network by way of a proposed debit for one account for the
payment amount, a proposed credit for another account for the same amount, and a subsequent
posting of the proposed debit and credit to effect the payment or transfer of assets as of the date
of the posting. In other words, the debiting, crediting, and posting are all in accordance with
established and conventional practice in financial transactions between account holders in the
same institution or network. According to counsel for the patent owner, it is the stored inventory
of commodity for each account holder, forming the units of that which is debited, credited, and
posted in a payment transaction, which is novel, not that there is debiting, crediting, and posting.
The following numbered findings are based on the 1991 Federal Reserve article: (1) The
federal reserve system operates a gold vault located in Manhattan within the secure facilities of
the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; (2) foreign nations or central banks have gold stored in
the gold vault of the federal reserve and thus have respective gold deposit accounts at the federal
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