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 therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claim 16 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The claim(s) does/do not fall within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter because the claim is directed to a computer program product (an abstract idea). While the claim states “when implemented in a computing system”, the limitation does not require the hardware since the computer program product can still exist outside of a computing system; therefore the claim fails to fall within the definition of a process, a machine, manufacture, or composition of matter.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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.
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.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claim(s) 1-3, 7-16 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over WhistleBlower: Towards A Decentralized and Open Platform for Spotting Fake News by Ramachandran et al. hereafter Ramachandran in view of Gould et al. (US 12,513,001) hereafter Gould and Ghulati (US 11,526,675) hereafter Ghulati.
1. Ramachandran discloses a method for verifying false or misleading information, which comprises:
one or more information records to be verified (page 155, column 2, a news article);
distributing, by a processor, said one or more information records to be verified to a plurality of computing nodes that implement a decentralised blockchain (page 155, column 2, each client submits a news article when sending a verification request to smart contract; page 157, column 2, whenever a news item is received from a WhistleBlower client, the smart contract selects two random nodes from the pool of solver nodes. It dispatches the news item along with pointers to the software for execution);
establishing, for a set of computing nodes of the plurality of computing nodes of a first type, a first verdict of whether said one or more information records to be verified include false or misleading information by means of checking different parameters of the information record(s) (page 156, solver nodes … receive a computation software package from a contract, execute it, and submit the results back to the contract. At the time of execution, each solver node uses the news article provided by the client as an input to the fake news assessment algorithm), providing as a result of said first check a series of metadata per information record (page 156, each solver node collects the run-time and stack traces as a proof for executing the computation, which is included in the verification software packages);
establishing, for a set of computing nodes of the plurality of computing nodes of a second type, a second verdict of whether the information record(s) include(s) false or misleading information by means of checking said series of metadata (pages 156, a set of verifier nodes whose role is to verify the correctness of the computation performed by the solver nodes. The smart contract … dispatches the verification software package … the verifier node validates the correctness by comparing the outputs, run-time, and stack traces);
wherein each computing node of the first type and of the second type has equal voting power in establishing said first verdict and second verdict (page 157, column 2, each verifier has equal voting power and each node has equal voting power to the other node), and wherein the first verdict and second verdict are encoded in the decentralised blockchain in the form of a Smart-contract (page 156, the verifier node notifies the smart contract that the results are correct and the smart contract notifies the results back to the client); and
adding, by a processor, the first verdict and the second verdict, wherein: if the result of the second verdict confirms the result of the first verdict, a final verdict of whether the information record(s) to be verified include(s) false or misleading information is set and published (page 156, when the stack trace matches, the verifier notifies the smart contract that the results are correct, at which point, the smart contract notifies the result back to the client); and
if the result of the second verdict does not confirm the result of the first verdict (page 157, in the instance of non-verified result, the processes is restarted), one or more computing devices that are external to the decentralised blockchain are notified of a conflict between the first verdict and the second verdict (page 156, figure 1, the nodes and verifiers, while part of the architecture, are external to the blockchain),
wherein at least one computing device of said one or more computing devices performs, a final certification of the first and second verdicts by adding supplementary information to same (page 157, column 1, WhistleBlower Client).
Ramachandran does not explicitly disclose creating, by a processor, a Non-Fungible Token (NFT). However, in an analogous art, Gould discloses creating, by a processor, a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) (col 2, 64-col 3, 28, NFTs are created and hosted by the blockchain and distributed to the user). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to modify the implementation of Ramachandran with the implementation of Gould in order to identify and verify the accuracy of content attribution (col 2, 64-col 3, 28).
Ramachandran and Gould do not explicitly disclose through a plugin installed in a browser of said computing device. However, in an analogous art, Ghulati discloses fact checking including a plugin installed in a browser of said computing device (figure 2, 216 and corresponding text). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to modify the implementation of Ramachandran and Gould with the implementation of Ghulati in order to automate and better scale content verification (col 1, 49-60).
2. Ramachandran, Gould, and Ghulati disclose the method according to claim 1, wherein the information record(s) to be verified is/are stored in an information repository (Ramachandran, page 157, contents are stored in a decentralized blockchain).
3. Ramachandran, Gould, and Ghulati disclose the method according to claim 1, wherein the information record(s) to be verified is/are received through a web page (Ghulati, col 9, 6-14).
7. Ramachandran, Gould, and Ghulati disclose the method according to claim 1, wherein the information record(s) to be verified comprise(s) a document accompanied by meta-information, wherein said document includes text, images, audio and/or video, and wherein the meta-information comprises various types of information including geographic coordinates, references and/or context of the information (Ramachandran, page 157 first column, client allows the community members to post a news item, including its contents, source, and other metadata).
8. Ramachandran, Gould, and Ghulati disclose the method according to claim 7, wherein the computing nodes of the first type are selected taking into consideration said meta-information of the information record(s) to be verified (Ramachandran, page 156, figure 1 and corresponding text).
9. Ramachandran, Gould, and Ghulati disclose the method according to claim 2, further comprising updating the information repository by means of adding said series of metadata to each information record (Ramachandran, para 157, decentralized storage).
10. Ramachandran, Gould, and Ghulati disclose the method according to claim 2, comprising a plurality of information records stored in the information repository in an ordered manner, wherein the ordering of the information records is performed taking into consideration different characteristics of the information including a potential of the information going viral and/or the importance of the information (Ghulati, col 5, 63-col 6, 20; col 10, 14-34, clickbaitedness).
11. Ramachandran, Gould, and Ghulati disclose the method according to claim 1, wherein checking the different parameters of the information record(s) comprises checking the origin of the information source(s) from which the information record(s) has/have been obtained, checking information against public sources and/or verifying whether a multimedia content of the information record(s) has been modified or is out of context (Ramachandran, page 154, introduction).
12. Ramachandran, Gould, and Ghulati disclose the method according to claim 2, which comprises using a pairwise search process to assign entries of the information repository to the set of computing nodes of the first type and the second type (Ramachandran, page 156, column 1, verifiable computation selects m nodes).
Claims 13-16 are similar in scope to claims 1-3 and are rejected under similar rationale.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 4-6 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JAMES R TURCHEN whose telephone number is (571)270-1378. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday: 7-3.
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Luu Pham can be reached at 571-270-5002. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
Information regarding the status of published or unpublished applications may be obtained from Patent Center. Unpublished application information in Patent Center is available to registered users. To file and manage patent submissions in Patent Center, visit: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov. Visit https://www.uspto.gov/patents/apply/patent-center for more information about Patent Center and https://www.uspto.gov/patents/docx for information about filing in DOCX format. For additional questions, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000.
/JAMES R TURCHEN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2439
Prosecution Insights