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Enron Mail |
Steve:
As we discussed, I have attached a substantial redraft of the description of the invention for the EOL business method patent. The attached is a clean version; while you can run a redline, I am not sure how much use it will be, since such large portions of the text have been moved around. This only covers that portion of the patent up to the illustrative example of Clickpaper.com. The attached description is the result of comments by several reviewers; there is general agreement that your drafts were technically correct, and that they incorporated all of the significant elements of the invention. However, there was some sentiment that the description was not very "readable." I have reviewed your drafts and my changes again just before sending this out, and I am pretty confident that none of my changes are substantive; however, there are some organizational changes and a lot of changes that try to explain the reasoning behind some of the elements of the invention. In the interest of time, I am circulating this to the commercial team at the same time that I am sending it to you. After you and they have had a chance to review it, we can convene a meeting with the inventors to wrap the application up. As Peter Mims may have mentioned to you, we are in a bit of a time crunch because Louise Kitchen, one of the inventors, will be out on maternity leave in early May. What is worse, I am on vacation until early May, leaving tomorrow morning. However, I am available by phone and e-mail, and we can speak if we need to in order to move this along. I suggest that we exchange e-mails or voicemails about next steps after you have had a chance to take a look at this. With respect to the claims, in the ENR100/4-15 document, we have the following comments. I suspect that our comments come from a basic misunderstanding or lack of knowledge about how claims are actually drafted, and how they actually are supposed to work, and there is probably a very good reason that you constructed them the way you did; therefore, I have included our comments for what they are worth. Claim 1, line 17: We don't think we use computer software to evaluate credit risk; our credit department determines credit headroom through procedures completely independent of the website. However, this system does monitor headroom. Claim 1, line 24: Does someone get around this claim simply by charging a commission? Claim 10: Why should we limit claim 7 to specific products? With respect to the claims in the ENR100/4-17 document, we have the following comments: Our biggest concern here is that these claims potentially describe a system that was in operation before EnronOnline was launched -- something called NGX, according to Dave Forster. It provided a dedicated connectino (not internet based) -- but companies could put in bids and offers on a variet of products. The transactions were alwasy with NGX, which more or less cleared deals for a fee. According to Dave: Claim 2 could describe NGX. In Claim 3, the use of the terms "stack maanger software" is the only way we can differentiate claim 3 from NGX However, claim 4 is unique to EOL Claim 6, we would say "completion of a hedging transaction" Claim 13 -- looks like NGX Claims 14, 15 and 16 -- lots of other sites have credit limits Claim 17 -- really says nothing , but claims 17, 18 and 19 together describe the contracting process Claim 20 to 24 really describe collectively the engine for creating a new product Claim 25 and 26 -- nothing novel in these two Claim 28 -- nothing novel claim 29 -- nothing novel claim 34 -- could do that on NGX claim 44 -- first line is NGX claim 45 -- not sure what the second paragraph accomplishes claim 49 -- can someone avoid this patent by charging a commission? claim 50 -- I don't think Clickpaper is actually using hubs -- not sure if this is valuable claim 51 -- this is just a description of a contract claim 55 -- everyone does this claim 56 through 58 -- lots of people have been doing this for years Again, these comments to the claims are included here only for what they are worth; I suspect our comments come from a lack of understanding about how they should be constructed for maximum effect. Enron North America Corp. 1400 Smith Street EB 3893 Houston Texas 77002 Phone: (713) 853-1575 Fax: (713) 646-3490
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