Appeal No. 95-1292
Application 07/911,471
C. Obviousness
D Obviousness cannot be rebutted by attacking references
individually where the rejection is based upon the teachings
of a combination of references. A reference must be read,
not in isolation, but for what it fairly teaches in
combination with the prior art as a whole. In re Merck &
Co., 800 F.2d 1091, 1097, 231 USPQ 375, 380 (Fed. Cir.
1986). On the other hand, the examiner may not use the
claimed invention as a template to piece together the
teachings of the prior art to render the claimed invention
obvious. In re Fritch, 972 F.2d 1260, 1266, 23 USPQ2d 1780,
1784 (Fed. Cir. 1992).
E Takabayashi and Ueno, viewed as a whole, would have rendered
the subject matter of claims 1, 2, 8, 9, and 15-21 obvious
at the time of the invention. Both references display
caller information on a television screen. In the case of
Takabayashi, the caller information is the caller's name;
for Ueno, the information is the caller's image. To display
the caller information, both references must detect an
incoming telecommunication, and must decode and transfer
that information to the television display. Ueno provides
the means for establishing a communication path between two
callers with the capacity to detect a third caller and pass
- 8 -
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007