Appeal 2007-0635
Application 10/176,598
D. ANALYSIS
The question is whether claim 17 encompasses obvious subject matter. We
find that it does.
There is no dispute that Appellant is seeking to apply a metric to the ranking
of media files on a media playback device which would involve the consideration
of how long a media file has been played. The Examiner correctly conceded that
Ward does not explicitly teach such a method.
However, the Examiner was on the right track in implying that Ward could
accomplish the same result. We find the inclusion of the term “related” in the claim
to be the dispositive reason for concluding that claim 17 encompasses obvious
subject matter given the teaching in Ward.
Giving claim 17 the broadest reasonable construction in light of the
specification as it would be interpreted by one of ordinary skill in the art, the claim
calls for using a metric that is related to “a total duration of time the media file is
played back.” The claim only limits the ranking to one that is related to a total
amount of playback time. That means the claim encompasses instances of ranking
media files which, though “a total duration of time the media file is played back”
may not in fact have been made determined or used to rank the media files, the
result is nevertheless the same. That is, claim 17 encompasses ranking the media
files as though they had been based on the total time they were played. Ward
broadly covers just such instances.
There is no dispute that Ward ranks files by the number of times a media has
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