Appeal No. 1997-0896
Application 08/141,610
group III.
In rejecting claims 1 through 11, 13 through 27, 29
through 37 and 45 under 35 U.S.C. § 112, second paragraph, the
Examiner states that these claims are incomplete because
claims 1 and 17 are missing the essential details about how
the data words are arrayed with the least significant bits
(LSBs) in the same bit position, which is essential to the
operation of the claimed invention. (Answer-page 3.)
All data is arrayed is some fashion, otherwise it would
be unintelligible. Although Appellant has presented his
invention and recited prior art that arrays LSBs in the same
bit position, we do not believe that all data
compression/decompression systems must be configured in this
manner. Run length encoding concepts are well known in the
art, as repeatedly noted by the Examiner, and are transparent
to any bit position alignment. Such encoding counts
consecutive 0s or 1s independent of bit alignment. Thus, we
do not find claims 1 and 17 to be incomplete as indicated by
the Examiner, and we will not sustain the 35 U.S.C. § 112,
second paragraph, rejection of these claims. For the same
reason, we do not find claims 2 through 11, 13 through 16, 18
6
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007