Appeal No. 2006-2509
Application No. 10/001,431
known as nonfunctional descriptive material. Appellants are not claiming any type of
computer program (which may be considered as functional descriptive material) or any
type of machine response to the material contained in the files. The claims are drawn to
the generation of mere arrangements of data, which are not, incidentally, limited to be
on any particular physical medium (e.g., computer-readable media). In short, appellants
are claiming “a process that differs from the prior art only with respect to nonfunctional
descriptive material that cannot alter how the process steps are to be performed to
achieve the utility of the invention.” Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) §
2106, page 2100-22 (8th Ed., Rev. 3, Aug. 2005).
We find that claim 1, for example, is anticipated by a description of generating a
file having four items of information, for which Chefalas suffices. The content of the
nonfunctional descriptive material carries no weight in the analysis of patentability over
the prior art. Cf. In re Lowry, 32 F.3d 1579, 1583, 32 USPQ2d 1031, 1034 (Fed. Cir.
1994) (“Lowry does not claim merely the information content of a memory. . . . [N]or
does he seek to patent the content of information resident in a database.”).
Instant claim 17 is drawn to a system comprising a VDL file containing two items,
an interpreter to parse and organize the items, and a data storage to store the parsed
and organized items that is accessible by at least one security application.
The examiner finds that the elements and the claimed details are found in
Chefalas, with particular emphasis on paragraph 48 of the reference, disclosing that the
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