Appeal No. 95-4356
Application 08/133,821
examiner’s position, the examiner has, therefore, at least
satisfied the burden of presenting a prima facie case of
obviousness. That is, the rejection would be sustained if
appellants chose not to respond to the rejection on the
merits. The burden is, therefore, upon appellants to come
forward with evidence or arguments which persuasively rebut
the examiner's prima facie case of obviousness. Appellants
have presented several arguments in response to the examiner’s
rejection. Therefore, we consider obviousness based upon the
totality of the evidence and the relative persuasiveness of
the arguments.
With respect to independent claim 16, the examiner’s
initial rejection seemed to suggest that the various action
titles of Fleming, such as File, View and Help, could be
replaced by an icon bar such as taught by IBM. Appellants
responded that the substitution of icons for the action titles
in Fleming does not result in the present invention because
the "claimed invention includes icons for a 'plurality of
objects' not as a replacement for textual labels as taught by
[IBM]" [brief, page 12]. The examiner’s response to this
8
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007