Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Anderson: Firewall reporting encompasses signals

Lewes Bonfire Night 2007 - Wall of FlameEx Parte Anderson et al, No. 2009-013430 (BPAI Jan 24, 2012) involved US Patent Application 10/922,500 assigned to IBM Corporation.  The invention related to a graphical representation of a firewall and a network coupled to a firewall.

Claim 11 for example read as follows:
11. A computer program product for reporting a data flow in a firewall, said computer program product comprising: 
a computer readable medium; 
first program instructions to display a graphical representation of said flrewall and a network coupled to said firewall; 
second program instructions to display a number of an inbound port of said network; and 
third program instructions to display an arrow adjacent to said port number pointing toward said network indicating that a communication is permitted to said port; and 
wherein said first, second and third program instructions are recorded on said medium.

Tangible embodiment

The Examiner had objected that the language of claim 11 did not limit the "computer readable medium" to a tangible embodiment.

The Board agreed. They observed that the term "computer readable medium" recited in claim 11 encompasses transitory propagating signals.

The Examiner's rejection of claims 11-15, 20 and 25-28 as being directed to non-statutory subject matter was affirmed.

Photo courtesy of author Dominic Alves under Creative Commons licence.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...