Appeal No. 2006-2509
Application No. 10/001,431
Answer (mailed Jun. 8, 2006)1 for a statement of the examiner’s position and to the
Brief (filed Dec. 27, 2005) and the Reply Brief (filed Mar. 10, 2006) for appellants’
position with respect to the claims which stand rejected.
OPINION
In accordance with appellants’ arguments in the Brief, we will decide the appeal
on the basis of the Chefalas reference as applied against the independent claims 1, 12,
and 17. See 37 CFR § 41.37(c)(1)(vii).
Chefalas describes a method and system for defining the security condition of a
computer system. Information regarding virus attacks and actions includes data
packets passing from clients to servers and from servers to clients (Figs. 4A, 4B; ¶¶ 44-
45) and security policies (Figs. 5A and 5B; ¶ 46). The examiner finds that Chefalas
describes generating a vulnerability description language (VDL) file within the
requirements of instant claim 1.
Appellants submit that the files depicted in the drawings are not “human-readable
and machine-readable” as recited in the claims. However, the data is clearly machine-
readable, as the computers are responsive to the information in the files (e.g., ¶ 28).
We have considered appellants’ arguments to the contrary, but in our estimation the
reference also supports the examiner’s finding that the files are “human-readable.” The
1 The examiner mailed this corrected version of the Answer after appellants’ filing of the briefs.
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