Appeal 2007-0224
Application 09/754,785
(ii)
Appellant’s Claims Do Not Produce a
Useful, Concrete, and Tangible Result
Even if we accept as a given, that Appellant has established the
“utility” of the invention, “utility” does not automatically establish that the
result is also tangible and concrete.
The receiving and reordering steps of claim 1 are performed on
components that are software and/or data structures per se which are merely
abstractions represented as data. Therefore, even if the results of the
receiving and reordering steps were relevant to establishing a tangible result
for the claim as a whole, these steps operate on abstractions and simply can
not produce a tangible result.
As discussed supra, our review of the claims finds they produce a
mere rearrangement of software and/or data structures per se. To reiterate,
Appellant’s Specification states: “The specification and drawings are … to
be regarded in an illustrative rather than [a] restrictive sense” (Specification
32, ll. 6-8). Therefore, we find Appellant’s intent is to cover all alternatives,
modifications, and equivalents included within the spirit and scope of the
invention as defined by the claims. Since the language of claim 1 does not
preclude humans from performing the steps of the method, then based on
Appellant’s statements, we must conclude that claim 1 is intended to include
all possible ways of performing the reordering step of the method, as the
result of the claimed process.
We see the question before us to be, whether reordering program data
produces a useful, tangible, and concrete result? As discussed supra, the
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