Appeal No. 1997-3181
Application No. 08/304,345
In response to Appellants' arguments, the Examiner points
out on page 5 of the answer that Kohler in Fig. 1 teaches that
incoming calls according to the number dialed and the need of
callers are routed to one of the two groups of agents. The
Examiner recognizes on page 10 that Appellants' invention
requires only available agents in the group whereas Kohler's
agent groups contain available and unavailable agents, but
adds that Kohler could be modified to remove unavailable ones
from the group. The Examiner further refers to various
portions of Kohler to show that unavailable agents are tagged
such that they may not be included in the search for the
matching skill.
As pointed out by our reviewing court, we must first
determine the scope of the claim. “[T]he name of the game is
the claim.” In re Hiniker Co., 150 F.3d 1362, 1369, 47 USPQ2d
1523, 1529 (Fed. Cir. 1998). Claims will be given their
broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the
specification, and limitations appearing in the specification
are not to be read into the claims. In re Etter, 756 F.2d
852, 858, 225 USPQ 1, 5 (Fed. Cir. 1985).
We note that Appellants' claim 1 recites
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