Appeal 2007-1751
Application 09/769,511
1 further disclose that in addition to time related billing rates, the service provider
2 (called party) may have numbers which enable a single item charge. The Examiner
3 concluded that it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill to modify the
4 system of Greene with the teachings of Haralambopoulos in order to store the
5 caller-specified costs and rules in a database associated with the user terminal to
6 provide the user the convenience to modify or change charges and rules (Answer 7:
7 ¶ referring to claim 13 and 14).
8 The Appellant contends that Haralambopoulos describes a system which
9 depends on an action by the called party. Claim 13, on the other hand, describes a
10 system in which any access costs incurred by the caller are dependent on one or
11 more specified conditions associated with an incoming call. The Appellant
12 contends that these conditions are intrinsic to the incoming call and no actions by
13 the caller during a conversation are required to establish a billing rate. (Br. 10:Last
14 full ¶ - 10:Top of page).
15 Thus, the issue under contention is whether claim 13 requires that no action by
16 the caller is required to establish a billing rate. Claim 13 contains the transition
17 phrase “comprises,” which is open ended in that additional elements might be
18 included within an embodiment and still be within the scope of the claim. Thus, so
19 long as the applied art shows one or more access rules specified by the user and
20 indicating a particular access cost for an incoming call under one or more specified
21 conditions, as Greene does (FF 08-10), then there is no requirement that no action
22 by the caller is required to establish a billing rate. Thus, we find the Appellant’s
23 arguments unpersuasive.
24 As to the Appellant’s argument that the combination would change the
25 principle of operation (Br. 11, First full ¶), citing In re Ratti, 270 F.2d 810, 123
16
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Last modified: September 9, 2013