Appeal No. 2006-2354 Page 18
Application No. 09/877,157
Claims 10 and 21
The appellants argue claims 10 and 21 as a group. As such, we treat claim
10 as the representative claim. The appellants argue that claim 10 is patentable
over the cited references because it claims generating a table of policy elements
that have a correlation to the policy statement. The appellants contend that the
examiner has failed to make a prima facie showing of obviousness because the
cited references do not teach or suggest this step. Brief, p. 17.
We find that Abraham discloses the step of generating a table of policy
elements that have a correlation to a policy statement. For example, when a system
administrator sets a site policy that allows a group to access all sites with the
exception of specified sites, or denies access to the group to all sites with the
exception of specified sites, the policy is displayed to the administrator in a table,
as shown in Figure 8O. Abraham, page 41, lines 17-21. We do not find the fact
that the table of policy elements has a correlation to a policy statement to be a
patentable distinction, in view of the admitted prior art described in the background
of the appellants’ own specification, which recognizes that P3P policies consist of
statements made using the P3P vocabulary for expressing privacy practices.
Specification, page 1, lines 29-31. Since it was known to express P3P policies as
policy statements, it would have been obvious to one having ordinary skill in the
art at the time of the invention, in view of the teaching of Abraham, to have
displayed the policy elements to the user in a table where the policy elements
correlate to P3P policy statements. Accordingly, we sustain the rejection of claims
10 and 21 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a).
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