Appeal No. 96-2992
Application 08/200,049
ordinary skill in the art, the obviousness of the invention as
set forth in claims 1 through 7. Accordingly, we affirm.
We consider now the Section 103 rejections as they
apply to claims 1 through 7 which are grouped together [brief,
pages 9 and 10, and answer, page 2].
As a general proposition in an appeal involving a
rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 103, an examiner is under a burden to
make out a prima facie case of obviousness. If that burden is
met, the burden of going forward then shifts to the applicant to
overcome the prima facie case with argument and/or evidence.
Obviousness is then determined on the basis of the evidence as a
whole and the relative persuasiveness of the arguments. See In
re Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1445, 24 USPQ2d 1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir.
1992); In re Hedges, 783 F.2d 1038, 1039, 228 USPQ 685, 686 (Fed.
Cir. 1986); In re Piasecki, 745 F.2d 1468, 1472, 223 USPQ 785,
788 (Fed. Cir. 1984); and In re Rinehart, 531 F.2d 1048, 1052,
189 USPQ 143, 147 (CCPA 1976).
With respect to claim 1, the Examiner asserts that
Hashimoto teaches everything except for a storage of spoken
translations of sentences [questions and phrases] in multiple
languages. However, Yamamoto teaches the digitized recording of
the spoken foreign language and playing same back upon selection
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