Appeal No. 97-1931
Application 08/364,826
based on the lowest price per item because consumers buy items
based on this principle on a regular basis. Automatically making
this selection would have been obvious for reasons discussed
above.
With respect to claim 4, appellants argue that the
“means” of Dworkin merely assists the user in making a selection
and does not perform evaluation criteria per se. The step of
automatically performing the evaluation that the user in Dworkin
manually performs would have been obvious to the artisan for
reasons discussed above.
With respect to claim 5, appellants argue that the
preferential treatment given the primary warehouse with respect
to the secondary warehouses is not taught in Dworkin. Claim 5
merely recites the manner in which prices are compared between
the warehouses. When a lowest price is to be determined, it is
conventional to compare items by starting with a first item,
comparing items one by one, and carrying forward the lowest
price. By the time the last item is compared, the last item is
compared to the aggregate lowest item of all the previous items.
If the last item compared is named the primary warehouse and all
the other items are named secondary warehouses, this conventional
form of comparison would fully meet the recitations of claim 5.
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