Appeal No. 1996-3178
Application 08/407,275
and the examiner. As a consequence of our review, we are in agreement with the well reasoned
statements of the examiner (final rejection, pages 3 to 4; Answer, pages 3 to 5) that the
claims on appeal would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention
was made in light of the collective teachings of the applied references. For the reasons which follow,
we will sustain the decisions of the examiner rejecting claims 2 to 5, 7 to 9, 12 and 13 under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103.
Rejection of Claims 4, 5, 12, and 13 Under 35 U.S.C. § 103:
We first turn to appellants’ argument (Brief, page 4) that there is no motivation to combine
Saliga and Thomas. Appellants simply state that Saliga identifies keys after a key is placed into storage
whereas Thomas does not, and that therefore they have different goals and cannot be combined. We
disagree. Both Saliga and Thomas pertain to key coding and tagging using electronic means in order to
prevent loss, theft, access, and to keep track of information related to the owner and key itself. We
find that it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of appellants’ claimed
invention to have employed the electronic memory concept of Thomas to the storage system taught by
Saliga. The motivation would have been as given by the examiner, to store more information in a
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