Appeal No. 1997-0200
Application No. 08/202,860
35 U.S.C. § 103 rejection of independent claim 28 is
sustained.
We further find the Examiner’s reasoning (Answer, page 6)
with respect to dependent claim 37 to be persuasive and
sustain the obviousness rejection of this claim as well. As
pointed out by the Examiner, Elischer provides a clear
teaching of combining the weights from the individual digit
characteristics in a numeric field and ordering the suspect
items beginning with the most likely to be the cause of the
error (Elischer, column 5, lines 42-44).
We now turn to a discussion of apparatus claims 33 and 38
which are means-plus-function counterparts of method claims 28
and 37 discussed supra. We find that the Examiner’s rationale
for rejecting these claims is identical to that utilized in
rejecting method claims 28 and 37 and, in our view, equally
persuasive. We do note that, at pages 16-18 of the Brief,
Appellants argue that In re Donaldson Co., 16 F.3d 1189, 1193,
29 USPQ2d 1845, 1848 (Fed. Cir. 1994) requires that the “means
for” language occurring in the claims, in accordance with 35
U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, must be interpreted as covering
the structure, material or acts set forth in the specification
10
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007