Appeal No. 2006-1874
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,351
Those properties and characteristics are precisely those resulting from a combination of the
patent owner’s admitted prior art and operation of the gold vault of the federal reserve, as
already explained above. Payment risk is eliminated in exactly the same manner the patent
owner describes the risk as being eliminated by the patent owner’s invention. We note only that
the preamble of claim 13 recites that the overall accounting method is implemented by a
computer system. None of the particular steps within the body of claim 13, however, requires a
computer or any electronics. In any event, given the level of ordinary skill in the art as is
reflected by Marks and U.S. Patent No. 5,453,601, one with ordinary skill in the art would have
known that accounting and record keeping steps may be carried out by a computer system.
Claim 14 depends from claim 13 and recites that the commodity is precious metal.
Claim 15 depends on claim 14 and recites that the precious metal comprises gold. Note that the
commodity held on deposit in the gold vault of the federal reserve is gold, a precious metal.
Claim 16 depends from claim 14 and recites that the precious metal comprises silver. One with
ordinary skill in the art would have known that both gold and silver are precious metals that have
historically circulated as currency, and thus silver can be an alternative to gold in the context of a
commodity-based deposit currency such as that in the claimed invention. Note that the patent
owner’s specification in the background portion specifically states that in the historical past,
precious metals circulated as currency.
We have considered the patent owner’s assertion of secondary considerations but find it
insufficient to rebut the prima facie case of obviousness. In that connection, the patentee states
(Brief at 17):
[T]here have been a number of spectacular bank failures giving rise to payment
risks such as the Herstatt risk. There was thus a long felt but unresolved need for
a commercial payment system which was not subject to payment risk. This need
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