Appeal No. 97-1265
Application 07/981,274
presenting a prima facie case of obviousness. Note In re
Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1445, 24 USPQ2d 1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir.
1992).
With respect to independent claim 1, which is the
broadest claim on appeal before us, the examiner cites Perlman
for its teaching of a network in which a multicast message is
sent from a transmitter node to one or more receiver nodes.
The examiner indicates that Perlman does not teach the step of
selecting a multicast address that is not being used by any
node (computer) on the network as recited in claim 1 [answer,
page 3]. The examiner cites Cree as teaching the step of
selecting an address that is not being used by any node on the
network. The examiner observes that it would have been
obvious to the artisan to incorporate Cree’s selecting step
into the Perlman network [id.].
Appellant initially makes several arguments based on
the position that there is no motivation for combining the
teachings of Cree with those of Perlman except in an attempt
to improperly reconstruct the invention in hindsight. We
agree with each of appellant’s arguments in support of this
7
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