Appeal No. 2006-2083
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,352
electronic coins to less than or equal to the amount of the inventory of valuable commodity. As
discussed above, the patentee has not rebutted the prima facie case made out by the examiner
that the Treasury had sufficient silver in its inventory to cover the silver certificates.
Moreover, claims terms before the United States Patent and Trademark Office are
properly construed according to their broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the
specification. In re Yamamoto, 740 F.2d 1569, 1571, 222 USPQ 934, 936 (Fed. Cir. 1984); In re
Sneed, 710 F.2d 1544, 1548, 218 USPQ 385, 388 (Fed. Cir. 1983). In this case, “payment risk”
in the context of the patentee’s specification is not so broad as to cover potential government
policy that prohibits redemption of gold and silver certificates or the private ownership of gold
and silver. Even the patentee’s disclosed invention does not eliminate that kind of payment risk.
The examiner regarded the silver certificate as commodity-based paper cash freely
transferable from person to person. We agree. The differences between it and the invention of
patentee’s claim 1 are, as the examiner put it (Answer at 4, lines 13-14), the paper certificate as
cash does not have the electronic elements of electronic cash. We agree. Insofar as the
examiner did not expressly so state, official notice is taken that in 1923 some non-electronic
means of maintaining records of the amount of silver held by the U.S Treasury existed. The
examiner relied on Ohta for its disclosure of an electronic cash payment system, albeit the
electronic cash of Ohta is not commodity-based, i.e., backed by an inventory of valuable
commodity. We find nothing inappropriate in that reliance for applying Ohta’s teachings about
electronic processing and communication to the silver certificate which is commodity-based
cash, because whether cash is commodity-based and linked to an inventory of valuable
commodity at a secure facility has little, if anything, to do with the electronic processing and
communication aspects of a system working with an electronic representation of that cash.
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