Appeal No. 2001-0343
Application 08/911,526
parsing the longer variable length codes using a table look-up
procedure. This table look-up procedure in part begins to be
detailed at column 7 of Liu and the examiner's corresponding
discussion begins at the bottom of page 7 of the answer.
However, this reference too fails to teach or suggest the hybrid
codeword table arrangement of the type set forth in independent
claims 1 and 6 on appeal regarding the claimed first and second
respective sets of fixed length codewords, the second set of
which has a length shorter than the first length. Therefore,
even considering the teachings and suggestions of both references
together most favorably to the examiner, the subject matter of
these independent claims would not be met anyway.
Appellants' arguments in the brief and reply brief that this
secondary reference to Liu is inappropriate to rely upon is in
part well-taken. The focus of this reference involves the
decoding of variable length code data and not any encoding or
compressing operations to the extent recited in the claims on
appeal. As a general matter, we agree with the examiner's views
that there is a certain converse thinking process known in the
art that such a decoding process would have engendered in the
mind of the artisan a corresponding encoding operation. Liu
itself fails to teach explicitly any corresponding coding
7
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007