Appeal No. 96-2854
Application No. 08/119,980
dialing would be expected to be quicker than in Okanda, which
uses a public (external) communication system to transmit
fault information.
As to Appellant’s remarks that there is no teaching
or suggestion to combine Okurano and Okanda, we agree with the
Examiner that there is no requirement that a motivation to
make the modification be expressly articulated. As the Court
has stated, “It should be too well settled now to require
citation or discussion that the test for combining references
in not what the individual references themselves suggest but
rather what the combination of disclosures taken as a whole
would suggest to one of ordinary skill in the art.” In re
McLaughlin, 443 F.2d 1392, 170 USPQ 209 (CCPA 1971).
Appellant has not contested the combination of
Butler as teaching the use of DTMF for reporting fault
information over communication lines. Appellant only protests
that Butler does not supply the perceived deficiencies of the
Okurano/Okanda combination. For the above reasons, we will
sustain the Examiner’s rejection of claim 1.
With regard to dependent claims 2 and 3, it is the
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