Appeal No. 2005-1636
Application No. 09/726,272
unlock the software. The distributor 16 transmits digital works
to the reseller 17 (transmitting step). We agree with the
examiner that claim 37 does not require that the digital work be
transmitted to the merchant only after the product sale request
has been received. Instead, claim 37 only recites that digital
works are transmitted from the server to the merchant. Pettitt
does this. Thus, we agree with the examiner that the first four
steps of claim 37 are fully met by the distribution method taught
by Pettitt. Pettitt does not teach that the distributor records
a sales record of the transaction although the sales data clearly
is transmitted through distributor 16 (column 4, lines 32-51).
The examiner cited Robinson to teach that it would have been
obvious to the artisan to record sales information at the
distributor. We agree with the examiner that it would have been
obvious to the artisan to broadly record sales data at any of the
levels in Pettitt where the data is available.
With respect to claims 38, 39, 50, 51, 62 and 63, which
are argued as a single group, appellant argues that there is no
teaching in Pettitt of registering a merchant including an
agreement with the merchant as claimed. The examiner responds
that the agreement of these claims is non-functional descriptive
material and does not alter how the process steps are performed.
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