Appeal No. 2006-2513
Application No. 10/060,782
choice to one skilled in the pertinent art. We are unpersuaded that the subject matter
as a whole would not have been prima facie obvious to one skilled in the art at the time
of invention.
Moreover, the portion of Sheldon referenced by the rejection of claim 1 also
provides evidence that the programming choice, per se, of the particular characters to
trigger processing in the machine does not relate to machine function beyond the
programmer=s selection of the character or characters to initiate a particular process.
In other words, at the machine level it does not matter whether the characters for
input are to consist of commas or of plus symbols. The selection of a particular symbol
for input does not change the underlying function of the machine; any symbol or group
of symbols that are recognizable by the machine could be chosen to invoke the
machine functions. As appellant notes at page 30 of the specification, the particular
symbols have been chosen for convenience of the (human) electronic mail user. The
difference in meaning between a A,@ and a A+@ is intelligible only to the human mind. As
far as the electronic mail software and system is concerned, any symbol or group of
symbols within its prior art character set would do.
Appellant does not claim different machine function with respect to the prior art,
but argues that the characters for initiating the functions are different from those in the
prior art. The particular data symbols that are to be input to the electronic mail software
and system to initiate prior art machine functions consist of what has come to be known
as nonfunctional descriptive material, as defined in Manual of Patent Examining
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