Appeal No. 95-3185
Application 08/129,029
The applicants make a second argument that in the context
of the rejected claims, the "another source" is the
reproducing-only system itself, whereas the Board’s decision
relies on an external system as the "another source." The
argument is misplaced because claims 7 and 10 refer to
receiving digital audio signals "from a source" and that
source need not be the reproducing-only means recited in those
claims. The applicants’ argument is not commensurate in scope
with what has been claimed. The "from a source" language is
in the recited function portion of a means-plus-function
clause and thus is not subject to narrowing in scope by way of
a "means" interpretation under 35 U.S.C. § 112, sixth
paragraph. The applicants also have not argued that it is.
The applicants further argue that the order of operations
is not suggested by the prior art, i.e., first recording from
"a source," and then recording the compressed information
reproduced from a disk. We disagree. Once it is recognized
that information can be recorded from two separate sources for
later selective reproduction, it would have been obvious to
one with ordinary skill in the art that the information from
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