Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefore, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
1. Claims 1 – 18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter.
The independent claim recites a “system comprising…”; however, Applicant’s claimed system is not limited to statutory embodiments and as a result is construed to be entirely software. Even though a trust center, a request submission module, a trust center interface, an automated workflow engine, a user verification module, an AI-driven fulfillment module, a metrics dashboard and a compliance platform are claimed none of those are restricted to hardware embodiments. As a result, Applicant’s claimed language is directed toward software and software is not a statutory category.
The Examiner suggests Applicant to review the memorandum entitled “Subject matter Eligibility of Computer readable media” issued on January 26, 2010 from the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office , David J. Kappos (http://www.uspto.gov/patents/law/notices/101_crm_20100127.pdf) and consider amending the claim to clearly limit the application to be embodied on a memory/disk.
Any amendment to the claim should be commensurate with its corresponding disclosure.
Contact
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Brian Shaw whose telephone number is ((571)270-5191. The examiner can normally be reached on Mon-Thurs from 6:00 AM-3:30 PM.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Jeff Nickerson can be reached on (469) 295-9235. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 703-872-9306.
Information regarding the status of an application may be obtained from the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system. Status information for published applications may be obtained from either Private PAIR or Public PAIR. Status information for unpublished applications is available through Private PAIR only. For more information about the PAIR system, see http://pair-direct.uspto.gov. Should you have questions on access to the Private PAIR system, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative or access to the automated information system, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000.
/BRIAN F SHAW/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2432