Appeal 2007-0645
Application 10/242,898
1 PRINCIPLES OF LAW
2 Office personnel must rely on Appellants’ disclosure to properly determine
3 the meaning of the terms used in the claims. Markman v. Westview Instruments,
4 Inc., 52 F.3d 967, 980, 34 USPQ2d 1321, 1330 (Fed. Cir. 1995). “[I]nterpreting
5 what is meant by a word in a claim ‘is not to be confused with adding an
6 extraneous limitation appearing in the specification, which is improper.’” In re
7 Cruciferous Sprout Litigation, 301 F.3d 1343, 1348, 64 USPQ2d 1202, 1205, (Fed.
8 Cir. 2002) (emphasis in original) (citing Intervet Am., Inc. v. Kee-Vet Labs., Inc.,
9 887 F.2d 1050, 1053, 12 USPQ2d 1474, 1476 (Fed.Cir.1989)).
10 ANALYSIS
11 Claim 1 recites “the document vault database storing information regarding
12 whether a user is authorized to access a document file.” Appellants’ specification
13 provides no special meaning to the term “document vault database” other than
14 identifying that it stores information regarding whether a user is authorized to
15 access the document file. Accordingly, we construe the term to include any
16 database which stores information regarding user authorization to a document file.
17 As discussed supra, we find that Sitka teaches that the GroupMember and
18 StoreAnalysis tables contain information regarding user authorization to access
19 files and that these tables are a database. Thus, contrary to Appellants’ arguments,
20 we find ample evidence to support the Examiner’s finding that Sitka teaches the
21 claimed document vault database.
22 We note that independent claims 6, 12, and 18 (which we do not consider to
23 be argued separately) recite “a security database and algorithm portion.”
5
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013