DETAILED ACTION
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 .
Novel/Non-Obvious Subject Matter
Examiner has determined that all of Applicant’s claims have overcome having prior art rejections. The reason for this is that Examiner does not believe that, at the time of Applicant’s priority date, it would have been obvious for a person of ordinary skill in the art to combine prior art disclosures to result in the particular combinations of elements/limitations in the claims, including the particular configurations of the elements/limitations with respect to each other in the particular combinations, without the use of impermissible hindsight.
Claim Objections
Claim 12 is objected to because of the following informalities: In the first line of claim 12, please replace the word “method” with --system-- to correct an apparent typographical error. Appropriate correction is required.
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.
Claims 10 and 12-18 are 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 claim 10 is directed to a system, the components of which are listed as various platforms in the first two paragraphs of claim 10. A platform may be software by itself, and Examiner could not find any indication in Applicant’s specification that any of the listed platforms must include physical hardware. Therefore, claim 10 includes software by itself. Software by itself is neither a machine, a manufacture, a composition of matter, nor a process. Therefore, claim 10 is not directed to a statutory class under 35 U.S.C. 101. The claims depending from claim 10 do not necessarily add any physical hardware elements to the system of claim 10. Therefore, claims 10 and 12-18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1, 3-4, and 6-9 are allowed.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure:
a. Shao, US 20240133731 A1 (methods and systems for energy measuring based on natural gas data of smart gas meter);
b. Okulov, US 20210318191 A1 (universal autonomous structural health monitor employing multi sensing inputs and on-board processing);
c. Fu, CN 119378924 B (with accompanying English machine translation) (distributed energy pipeline natural gas demand management method, system and medium);
d. Huang, CN 106019988 A (with accompanying English machine translation) (a station energy-saving and energy-saving agent is added to the gas of the internet of things system);
e. Tu, CN 102095083 A (with accompanying English machine translation) (detection system for gas valve leakage);
f. Shao, CN 117537879 A (with accompanying English machine translation) (power-saving management method of intelligent gas meter based on intelligent gas and internet of things system).
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to NATHAN ERB whose telephone number is (571)272-7606. The examiner can normally be reached M - F, 11:30 AM - 8 PM.
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/NATHAN ERB/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3628
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