In re American Academy of Science Tech Center (Fed. Cir. May 13, 2004)
The Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Board’s rejection of several claims during reexamination.
The patent claims a priority date back to 1982 and describes distributing processing functionality among several computers:
user applications are run on the user stations, while the database resides on a dedicated database computer. Several user stations are networked to the database computer so that a user application running on a user station can store data to and retrieve data from the database residing on the database computer. The patent describes using a “data base simulator” to “enable[ ] an application program . . . at the user station to call for storage or retrieval of data from the data center as though it were calling for data from a data base resident at the user station . . . .”
The Federal Circuit agreed that the broadest reasonable construction of the claim language allows prior art to read on the claims. Thus, the claims were properly held invalid.