Appeal 2006-2936
Application 10/013,714
Claim 5
Appellant contends that neither Britton nor Dan teaches the limitation
of verifying the safety of a program by checking a certification issued by a
third party certification organization. (Br. 27.) Appellant therefore contends
that the combination of Britton and Dan does not render claim 5
unpatentable. We find that the combination of Britton and Dan reasonably
teaches that limitation. Particularly, we found that Dan teaches an
authentication system wherein a trusted third party certification agency signs
a certificate to identify the author of a program and to secure its integrity.
The program is associated with the certificate and an ACL. (Finding 2.) One
of ordinary skill in the art of the time of the invention would have readily
recognized that Dan’s disclosure of securing the integrity of a program by
using a third party certification to identify the author of said program teaches
the claimed limitation. Further, the ordinarily skilled artisan would have
readily recognized that modifying Britton to incorporate therein Dan’s
teaching would predictably result in reinforcing Britton’s ACL by ensuring
that only properly authorized users can access the database via a safe
program. It has been held that “[t]he combination of familiar elements
according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more
than yield predictable results.” KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 127 S. Ct.
1727, 1739, 82 USPQ2d 1385, 1395 (2007) (citing Graham v. John Deere
Co., 383 U.S. 1, 12 (1966). It follows that the Examiner did not err in
finding that the combination of Britton and Dan renders claim 5
unpatentable. We affirm this rejection.
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