Detailed Action
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
The Office Action is in response to claims filed on 7/8/2026 where claims 1-20 are pending and ready for examination.
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
Applicant's arguments filed 7/8/2026 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive.
The Examiner has reviewed the Applicant’s arguments in their entirety (Pages 8 -10).
Applicant’s argument is not cogent and is circular, Hui expressly creates an “executable conversation instance entity object to represent specific meetings or collaboration events” ([00111]), including a “virtual meeting of live persons” ([0012]), and associates interactions occurring during the meeting with that executable instance. Applicant’s argument improperly assumes that a virtual meeting participant must actively speak, present, or otherwise communicate. The claims recite no such requirement. In ordinary meetings and collaborations, a participant need not speak or present; a participant may merely listen, observe, take notes, or otherwise participate in the meeting. Therefore, Hui’s executable conversation instance entity object reasonably constitutes a virtual meeting participant instance under the broadest reasonable interpretation.
Accordingly, Applicant’s argument is not persuasive. The claims place no metes and bounds on the level of participation required of the recited “virtual meeting participant” (see MPEP 2171). Hui creates an executable conversation instance entity object for a specific meeting or collaboration event and associates the communications occurring during that meeting with the executable instance ([0011]-[0012]). This is consistent with the function expressly attributed to the virtual meeting participant instance in independent claim 1 – capturing communication data associated with the regulated user account. Participation does not require speaking, presenting, or otherwise actively communication; a meeting participant may merely listen, observe, take notes, or capture information. Thus, Applicant’s attempt to distinguish Hui merely because Hui describes the executable instance as representing the meeting imposes a limitation on “virtual meeting participant” that is not recited in the claim.
For purposes of the record, and any subsequent appeal, Brown (US 10,742,695) demonstrates that a hot may instantiated throughout a conference and participate therein while its presence is known to the other participants, or alternatively may participate while remaining invisible to the other participants. Brown states:
Abstract
Methods and systems for recording information related to an electronic conference system meeting. A virtual participant bot can be enabled to join an electronic conference system meeting in order to record electronic information streams related to the meeting. A comment tag related to the electronic conference system meeting can be defined. A pre-defined comment tag category for a pre-defined comment tag to assign to a recorded portion of the meeting can be designated, wherein a user of the electronic conference system meeting configures the pre-defined meaning.
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See e.g. Column 2, Lines 45 – 52:
FIG. 3 illustrates a screen shot showing an add bot screen 300, according to an embodiment. When a bot is added, this means that a virtual participant (e.g., that is recording the call) is present. For example, FIG. 5 illustrates how to indicate that a bot is “attending” and recording the meeting. In the top right corner of FIG. 5, an icon appears showing NOTENINJA to be a participant. This indicates that the meeting is being recorded by the bot.
For purposes of the record and any subsequent appeal, Ananthanarayanan (US 20100223389) demonstrates that a bot-based trusted conferencing service may join a conference using its own identity or the identity of a user and may optionally hide itself from the conference roster so as to remain invisible to all participants. Thus, participation in a virtual meeting does not require that the participating bot be visible to the other meeting participants. More importantly, this demonstrates that one of ordinary skill in the art would have readily understood that the particular manner in which bot participation is implemented including whether the bot is visible or invisible – is a design choice based on the participation desired or required for the conferencing service.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 1-5, 8-12, and 15-19 are rejected under 35 USC 103 as being unpatentable over Levy (US 2020/0057866) in view of Hui (US 2013/0090973)
Regarding claim 1. Levy discloses a method comprising:
detecting a regulated user account joining a virtual meeting (Levy; Levy teaches storage policies influencing and/or effecting user accounts (i.e., regulated user accounts) are detected and/or analyzed with respect to enacting the storage policies for virtual meetings;
see e.g. [0013] “Note that a “conference” or “meeting’ between users can be telephone based; Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) based, video conferenced based, Virtual Reality (VR) based, Augmented Reality (AR) based, or based on any online meeting, collaborations, or interactions ...”
see e.g. [0020] “The conference management system 105 can store the various data compliance policies in a data storage system 110 ... store a mapping of the policies applicable to a user, e.g., in the user profile ...”
see e.g. [0023] “The conference management system 105 can determine the data compliance policies ... when the participants join the meeting ...”);
capturing, via the virtual meeting participant instance, communication data associated with the regulated user account (Levy; Levy teaches the recording of the virtual meeting (i.e. communication data) may occur;
see e.g. Abstract “ ... A conference management system (“system”) facilitates data compliance in recording conversations between users ...”);
Levy does not expressly disclose:
in response to detecting the regulated user account joining a virtual meeting, instantiating a virtual meeting participant instance by executing a bot program as a virtual meeting participant to join the virtual meeting;
generating an archival file corresponding to the regulated user account by applying a compliance policy associated with the regulated user account to the communication data.
However in analogous art Hui discloses:
in response to detecting the regulated user account joining a virtual meeting, instantiating a virtual meeting participant instance by executing a bot program as a virtual meeting participant to join the virtual meeting (Hui; Hui teaches instantiating an executable conversation instance entity object (bot program) that participates in a live virtual meeting by capturing meeting communications, including messages, voice interactions, video interactions, presentations, documents, and notes, thereby teaching a virtual meeting participant that actively captures communication data associated with the virtual meeting;);
see e.g. [0011] “.... creating an executable conversation instance entity object ...”
see e.g. [0012] “... virtual meeting of live persons detected by virtual presence ...”);
generating an archival file corresponding to the regulated user account (Hui; Hui teaches archives may be generated based on the captured instances
see e.g. [0015] “ ... archiving the interaction records and results thereof as searchable interaction records tied to the conversation instance entity”
see e.g. [0016] “... the interactions include messages and message chains, voice interactions, video interactions, presentations ... live persons or a virtual meeting of live persons ...”
see e.g. [0005] “ ... communication channels ...”
Hui further teaches that the executable conversation instance entity object participates in an ongoing live communication session by being associated with real-time communications between project participants;
See e.g. [0039] “... phone session held between two project participants, where one is located externally from the enterprise and the other located within the enterprise, might be identified by title, subject matter, or other descriptors, including participant names and titles, to a particular instance entity attributed to an ongoing interaction event represented by an event entity object”)
Levy in view of Hui discloses:
generating an archival file corresponding to the regulated user account by applying a compliance policy associated with the regulated user account to the communication data (The combined solution provides for generating archival files per Lui and where the information archived is directly impacted by the recording compliance policies explicitly taught by Levy;
see e.g. Levy [0023] “... a metadata indicator associated with a user for determining a data compliance policy applicable to the recording ...” );
Therefore it would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate Hui’s instances entities. The motivation being the combined solution provides for implementing a known technique resulting in increased efficiencies in capturing data associated with virtual meetings.
Regarding claim 2, Levy in view of Hui disclose the method of claim 1, further comprising:
instantiating the virtual meeting participant instance comprising detecting an initial regulated user account requesting access or joining the virtual meeting (The combined invention per Hui as Hui teaches the monitoring and/or detection of events associated with start times of the virtual meeting providing one of ordinary skill in the art to instantiate the instance at an appropriate time;
see e.g., Hui [0053] “The capture services may actively monitor for event during the expected start time for those events ...”
see e.g., Hui [0011] “.... creating an executable conversation instance entity object ...”
see e.g., Hui [0012] “... virtual meeting of live persons detected by virtual presence ...”)); and
capturing the communication data starting from an entry time point when the initial regulated user account joining the virtual meeting (The combined solution provides for an entry point time per Hui’s time and event-based monitoring;
see e.g., Hui [0053] “The capture services may actively monitor for event during the expected start time for those events ...”
see e.g., Hui [012] “... virtual meeting of live persons detected by virtual presence ...”).
Therefore it would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate Hui’s instances entities. The motivation being the combined solution provides for implementing a known technique resulting in increased efficiencies in capturing data associated with virtual meetings.
Regarding claim 3, Levy in view of Hui disclose The method of claim 1, further comprising:
identifying that the regulated user account is associated with a geographic region (Levy;
see e.g. [0017] “... A metadata indicator associated with a user can include one or more of a geographical location of the user ...” The examiner notes one of ordinary skill in the art is readily able to extrapolate geographical locations to regions/zone and/or locales)
executing the bot program to instantiate a regional virtual meeting participant instance associated with the geographical region(Levy; As Levy teaches geographical metadata the bot program may be associated with the geographical region;
see e.g. [0017] “... A metadata indicator associated with a user can include one or more of a geographical location of the user ...”) and
generating the archival file corresponding to the regulated user account comprising applying a regional compliance policy associated with the regulated user account to the communication data (Levy; Levy teaches the compliance polices are impacted by geographical regions;
see e.g. [0017] “For example, if the first user 160 is located in Europe, the conference management system 105 can determine that a data compliance policy such as GDPR is applicable to the recording of the meeting. Examples of data compliance policies include policies, laws, or regulations of various countries, such as Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) of Canada, California Law, Illinois law, 2-party US states laws, Switzerland, United Kingdom and European Union (EU) laws ...”)
Therefore it would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate Hui’s instances entities. The motivation being the combined solution provides for implementing a known technique resulting in increased efficiencies in capturing data associated with virtual meetings.
Regarding claim 4, Levy in view of Hui disclose the method of claim 1, further comprising:
detecting multiple regulated user accounts joining the virtual meeting (Levy; Per Independent claim 1 there are multiple meeting participants having regulated user accounts and are detected such that their policies are enacted;
see e.g. [0020] “The conference management system 105 can store the various data compliance policies in a data storage system 110 ... store a mapping of the policies applicable to a user, e.g., in the user profile ...”
);
determining that the multiple regulated user accounts are associated with different geographical regions, comprising a first geographical region and a second geographical region (Levy;
see e.g. [0017] “For example, if the first user 160 is located in Europe, the conference management system 105 can determine that a data compliance policy such as GDPR is applicable to the recording of the meeting. Examples of data compliance policies include policies, laws, or regulations of various countries, such as Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) of Canada, California Law, Illinois law, 2-party US states laws, Switzerland, United Kingdom and European Union (EU) laws ...”);
executing the bot program to instantiate a first virtual meeting participant instance associated with the first geographical region and a second virtual meeting participant instance associated with the second geographical region (As the combined solution provides for a bot participant that captures meeting communication (Hui) and multiple regulated users associated with different regions (Levy) it would have been obvious to instantiate multiple bot instances, each corresponding to the respective users or regions, to capture their communication data; see also MPEP 2144.04 Duplication of Parts);
capturing, via the first virtual meeting participant instance and the second virtual meeting participant instance, corresponding communication data associated with the multiple regulated user accounts (Levy; Per independent claim 1 communication data is captured); and
generating multiple archival files corresponding to the multiple regulated user accounts comprising applying corresponding compliance policies associated with the multiple regulated user accounts to the communication data (The combined solution per Hui provides for the archival of archival of files corresponding to the multiple regulated user accounts associated with their compliance polices (Levy;
see e.g. [0017] “For example, if the first user 160 is located in Europe, the conference management system 105 can determine that a data compliance policy such as GDPR is applicable to the recording of the meeting. Examples of data compliance policies include policies, laws, or regulations of various countries, such as Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) of Canada, California Law, Illinois law, 2-party US states laws, Switzerland, United Kingdom and European Union (EU) laws ...”);
Therefore it would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate Hui’s instances entities. The motivation being the combined solution provides for implementing a known technique resulting in increased efficiencies in capturing data associated with virtual meetings.
Regarding claim 5, Levy in view of Hui disclose the method of claim 1, further comprising: generating the archival file corresponding to the regulated user account based on a range of time during which the regulated user account was participating in the virtual meeting (The combined solution per independent claim 1 as Levy and Hui explicitly teaches the monitoring of temporal properties of the meeting which directly impact the archiving taught by Hui;
See e.g. Levy [0023] The conference management system 105 can determine the data compliance policies applicable to the recording at one or more times, e.g., when the host user 150 adds the participants to the meeting invite 125, when the meeting invite 125 is sent to the participants, when the participants accept or reject the meeting invite 125, or when the participants join the meeting.
See e.g. Hui [0061] Timestamps may also be used to help correlate interaction records to match against a conversation instance entity sharing the same or similar time and date ... ).
Therefore it would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate Hui’s instances entities. The motivation being the combined solution provides for implementing a known technique resulting in increased efficiencies in capturing data associated with virtual meetings.
Regarding claim 8, claim 8 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 1 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Regarding claim 9, claim 9 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 2 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Regarding claim 10, claim 10 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 3 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Regarding claim 11, claim 11 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 4 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Regarding claim 12, claim 12 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 5 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Regarding claim 15, claim 15 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 1 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Regarding claim 16, claim 16 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 2 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Regarding claim 17, claim 17 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 3 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Regarding claim 18, claim 18 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 4 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Regarding claim 19, claim 19 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 5 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Claims 6, 13, and 20 are rejected under 35 USC 103 as being unpatentable over Levy in view of Hui and in further view of Jenkins (US 6,904,435)
Regarding claim 6, Levy in Hui disclose the method of claim 1 further comprising:
storing the archival file at a storage location (The combined solution per Hui’s archiving feature and a physical location is necessarily present or the archived could not be stored);
Levy in view of Hui does not explicitly store:
generating a link for accessing the archival file at the storage location.
However in analogous art Jenkins discloses:
generating a link for accessing the archival file at the storage location (Jenkins;.
See e.g. Column 7, Lines 14 – 18 “ An archive link 270 may provide access to the archive 232, through an appropriate recipient web site such as the web site 230. Other links to other information and web sites may be listed in the information bulletin 260. For example, a link to a provider's web site may be made available”)
Therefore it would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate Jenkin’s archive link. The motivation being the combined solution provides for incorporating a known technique resulting in increased efficiencies of accessing data.
Therefore it would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate Hui’s instances entities. The motivation being the combined solution provides for implementing a known technique resulting in increased efficiencies in capturing data associated with virtual meetings.
Regarding claim 13, claim 13 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 6 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Regarding claim 20, claim 20 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 6 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Claims 7 and 14 are rejected under 35 USC 103 as being unpatentable over Levy in view of Hui and in further view of Natarajan (US 2017/0034571)
Regarding claim 7, Levy in view of Hui disclose the method of claim 1, Levy does not expressly disclose further comprising:
permanently deleting the communication data after a predetermined period of time.
However in analogous art Natarajan discloses:
permanently deleting the communication data after a predetermined period of time (Natarajan;
[0035] In an embodiment, the policy data 117 is associated with each of the one or more video recording devices. The user managing the video recording device configures one or more policies for each video recording device. As an example, the user may be a user/subscriber using the video recording device or a service provider. The policies are defined by the user for managing the storage space in the video recording device. As an example, the policy set by the user may be to delete the events in the video recording device when the disk space or the storage space exceeds the predefined threshold storage space value. The other policies may include but not limited to, to delete the events which are not viewed by the user for more than three months, delete the events whose size is large, delete the events after a predetermined time period and archive the events if the storage space is full.)
Therefore it would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate Natarajan’s delete policy. The motivation being the combined solution provides for incorporating a known technique resulting in increased efficiencies of managing storage space.
Therefore it would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate Hui’s instances entities. The motivation being the combined solution provides for implementing a known technique resulting in increased efficiencies in capturing data associated with virtual meetings.
Regarding claim 14, claim 14 comprises the same and/or similar subject matter as claim 7 and is considered an obvious variation; therefore it is rejected based on the same rationale.
Conclusion
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the Examiner should be directed to TODD L. BARKER whose telephone number is (571) 270 0257. The Examiner can normally be reached on Monday through Friday, 7:30am to 5:00pm.
If attempts to reach the Examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the Examiner's supervisor Vivek Srivastava can be reached on (571) 272 7304
/TODD L BARKER/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2449
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