Appeal No. 1997-3580
Application 08/400,002
“definition” of a “backup system,” and we do not find any
evidence on this record to support the examiner’s assertions
as to what is apparently implied by a backup system. On the
other hand, we completely agree with appellant that the
deallocation taught by Sathi would destroy the purpose of
Walls which is to retain a backup copy of a file in addition
to the working file. Despite the relative simplicity of the
claimed invention and the separate teachings of the claimed
steps in the collective teachings of the references, we are
compelled to agree with appellant that there is simply no
rational basis for the artisan to modify the backup system of
Walls with the deallocation as recited in claim 5. The only
basis for making the modification proposed by the examiner is
to improperly reconstruct appellant’s invention in hindsight.
Since we find that there is no motivation for
combining the teachings of Walls and Sathi in the manner
proposed by the examiner, we do not sustain the rejection of
claims 5, 7 and 17 as proposed by the examiner.
We now consider the rejection of claims 12, 13, 15 and
16 based on the teachings of Walls, Sathi and Johnson. As
noted above, the teachings of Walls and Sathi are not properly
-8-
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007