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In re Lowry
''In re Lowry'' was a 1994 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on the patent eligibility of data structures.〔(''In re Lowry'' ), 32 F.3d 1579 (Fed. Cir. 1994).〕 The decision, which reversed a PTO rejection of data structure claims, was followed by a significant change in PTO policy as to granting software related patents, a cessation of PTO appeals to the Supreme Court from reversals of PTO rejections of software patent applications, an increasing lenity at the Federal Circuit toward such patents and patent applications, and a great increase in the number of software patents issued by the PTO.
==Background==
Edward S. Lowry filed a computer software patent application in which he described an application program that managed database information by using software data structures that he called "attribute data objects" (ADOs). An ADO is a single primitive data element "compris() sequences of bits which are stored in the memory as electrical (or magnetic) signals that represent information."〔''Lowry'', 32 F.3d at 1580-81.〕 According to Lowry's patent application, "()n attribute expresses the idea that one thing is attributed to another thing." Thus, the Attributive data model capitalizes on the concept that a database is a collection of attributions, whereby information is represented in terms of its characteristics and relationships to other information. Lowry asserted that using ADOs provided a more efficient method for storing, retrieving, adding, and removing information from a database.
Claim 1 was considered representative. It provided:
1. A memory for storing data for access by an application program being executed on a data processing system, comprising:
a data structure stored in said memory, said data structure including information resident in a database used by said application program and including:
a plurality of attribute data objects stored in said memory, each of said attribute data objects containing different information from said database;
a single holder attribute data object for each of said attribute data objects, each of said holder attribute data objects being one of said plurality of attribute data objects, a being-held relationship existing between each attribute data object and its holder attribute data object, and each of said attribute data objects having a being-held relationship with only a single other attribute data object, thereby establishing a hierarchy of said plurality of attribute data objects;
a referent attribute data object for at least one of said attribute data objects, said referent attribute data object being nonhierarchically related to a holder attribute data object for the same at least one of said attribute data objects and also being one of said plurality of attribute data objects, attribute data objects for which there exist only holder attribute data objects being called element data objects, and attribute data objects for which there also exist referent attribute data objects being called relation data objects; and
an apex data object stored in said memory and having no being-held relationship with any of said attribute data objects, however, at least one of said attribute data objects having a being-held relationship with said apex data object.
The examiner rejected all of Lowry’s claims as so-called printed matter. That is, they were directed to information stored on a medium ("substrate") without any unobvious cooperation between the medium and the information to provide a useful function.〔This test comes from the Federal Circuit’s decision in ''In re Gulack'', 703 F.2d 1381, 1385 (Fed. Cir. 1983).〕 The PTO Board of Appeals sustained the examiner’s rejection of all claims. The claimed data structures were stored into a computer memory, but they did not sufficiently interact with the memory to provide a functional relationship with it. Accordingly, the ADOs were not "patentably distinguished" from the prior art,〔The Kumpati patent was "a CPU using a memory and containing stored data in a data structure," so the Board found that it made the claimed ADOs unpatentable.〕 making them obvious or anticipated, and thus unpatentable.
Lowry then appealed to the Federal Circuit.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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