Appeal No. 97-1931
Application 08/364,826
two differences between Dworkin and the claimed invention which,
in our view, would have been obvious based upon the knowledge of
the skilled artisan. First, the broad recitations of obtaining
price information, evaluating items for price data, selecting
items to be ordered, and creating order files are suggested by
the ordering system of Dworkin. Although Dworkin suggests some
manual user interaction with the computer system, we find that
the skilled artisan would have recognized that any of the steps
in Dworkin could broadly be performed automatically to replace
any manual selection of the user. Thus, all arguments by
appellants which rely on the manual selection of an item by the
user in Dworkin as distinguishing their invention are considered
unpersuasive because they fail to account for what would be
suggested to the skilled artisan. While a mere difference
between a reference and a claimed invention is sufficient to
eliminate a rejection on anticipation, merely pointing out this
same difference does not necessarily serve to overcome a
rejection on obviousness. Thus, Dworkin would have suggested
automatic operation to the artisan even if the preferred
embodiment relies on user selection.
5
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007