Appeal No. 2006-1187
Application No. 10/056,832
determination that it is obvious that the bank in Turkel would have notified the
purchaser of a house that the bank would be providing a gift of a replica of their
new house.
Appellant’s further argument that the examiner’s discussion of the timing
of the offer having no material effect on the end result of the claimed invention,
has not persuaded us of error in the examiner’s rejection. While the examiner’s
comments in the statement of the rejection to this effect may have been
misplaced. As discussed supra, the examiner did nonetheless make a finding
that such timing would be an obvious modification of Turkel.
New Grounds of rejection pursuant to 37 CFR § 41.50(b)
We apply new grounds of rejection against representative independent
claim 33. We leave it to the examiner to consider whether similar rejections
apply to the other claims in the application.
Claim 33 recites a “merchant computing device” and a “replica
manufacturer computing device”, we construe terms “merchant” and “replica
manufacturer” to be titles associated with the computing device and do not find
that the claim recites any functionality to the computing device. The Borton
Volvo Web site teaches a document that is on a computer (equated to the
claimed replica manufacturer computing device) that can be accessed by a
customer’s (the claimed merchant computing device) computer via the network
the Internet. Claim 33 also recites the merchant computing device receiving
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