Appeal No. 1999-2294
Application No. 08/807,430
the examiner has not addressed the language of claims 1, 12, and 21. Therefore, the
examiner has not provided a prima facie case of obviousness with respect to claims 1,
12, 19, and 21.
“To reject claims in an application under section 103, an examiner must show an
unrebutted prima facie case of obviousness. See In re Deuel, 51 F.3d 1552, 1557, 34
USPQ2d 1210, 1214 (Fed. Cir. 1995). In the absence of a proper prima facie case of
obviousness, an applicant who complies with the other statutory requirements is entitled to
a patent. See In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1445, 24 USPQ2d 1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir.
1992). On appeal to the Board, an applicant can overcome a rejection by showing
insufficient evidence of prima facie obviousness or by rebutting the prima facie case with
evidence of secondary indicia of nonobviousness.” In re Rouffet, 149 F.3d 1350, 1355,
47 USPQ2d 1453 (CAFC 1998). Here, we find that appellants have overcome the prima
facie case of obviousness by the examiner by showing sufficient evidence of
nonobviousness. Therefore, we will not sustain the rejection of independent claims 1, 12,
19, and 21.
We note that the language of all the independent claims, especially claims 19 and
21 are quite broad. In our view, claim 19 reads on all speech recognition software where a
single user inputs a speech training sample and that nonparametric training sample is
stored for comparison against spoken utterances by that same user in speech recognition.
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