Appeal No. 2006-1874
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,351
reserve; (3) each foreign nation’s inventory of gold deposit is stored in a separate compartment
within the gold vault of the federal reserve; and (4) from time to time, payment transactions are
made from one foreign country to another, in gold, by instructing the federal reserve to move an
appropriate amount of gold from the payer nation’s compartment to the payee nation’s
compartment within the gold vault. According to the 1991 Federal reserve article, page 1:
Having gold deposited in the trade and financial capital of the world’s largest
economy enables international payments to be made easily, quickly and
inexpensively. The ability to make gold transfers between nations within the
confines of the vault merely by moving bars from the compartment of one
country to another was a major attraction.
Claim 13 recites a step of creating a deposit account data file for each of a plurality of
persons. Each file identifies a person and there is a deposit site at which is stored a number of
units of a commodity for that person. In the context of the patent owner’s specification, the term
“person” is sufficiently broad to cover non-natural persons. Not once does the specification
mention any “natural person.” It appears that “persons” in the context of the patent owner’s
specification can be individuals, corporations, or other entities that are clients of the clearing
house illustrated in Figure 1 (Column 4, lines 1-6). Consequently, foreign countries which have
respective inventories of gold at the federal reserve bank are “persons” satisfying the claim
recitation. We take official notice that at the federal reserve bank there exists a deposit account
data file for each foreign country that has a gold deposit in the federal reserve’s gold vault,
which identifies the foreign country and the amount of gold held on deposit for that country.
Claim 13 recites a step of entering transaction records denominated in units of the stored
commodity, where the records identify the person receiving a debit, a person receiving a credit,
the amount of such debit and credit, and the identity of the deposit site. Given that it is admitted
prior art that in a payment transaction from one account to another within the same institution or
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