Appeal No. 2006-2354 Page 13
Application No. 09/877,157
such a scenario presents no new and unobvious functional relationship between the
descriptive material and the substrate.
We find that the P3P data elements used in the method to generate a privacy
policy do not functionally change the data processing apparatus-implemented
method in that they do not alter how the process steps are to be performed to
achieve the utility of the invention. Rather, these data elements are analogous to
printed matter in that they represent merely underlying data in a database. See In
re Lowry, 32 F.3d 1579, 1583, 32 USPQ2d 1031, 1034 (Fed. Cir. 1994). In
particular, the prior art suggests using the method steps to create a security policy
using, for example, the data elements of users and/or privileges. Mariconi, col. _,
lines __. The present invention uses these same method steps to create a privacy
policy using the data elements from the P3P data base schema. The difference
between the prior art and the claimed invention is simply the starting data elements
that result in generation of privacy policy as opposed to a security policy. These
starting data elements neither enhance nor diminish the functionality of the steps
used to generate the policy.
This case is distinguished from Lowry, because in Lowry the claims were
directed to data structures stored in memory that contained both information used
by application programs and information regarding their physical
interrelationships within a memory. Id. As such, the court found that the claimed
data structures of Lowry’s invention were not analogous to printed matter because
they managed information by imposing a physical organization on the data and
provided increased computing efficiency. Id. By contrast, the present invention is
directed to a method where the only distinction to the prior art is the content of the
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