Appeal No. 1997-3580
Application 08/400,002
combined. Since Johnson does not overcome the deficiencies of
this improper combination of teachings, we also do not sustain
the rejection of these claims.
Although we have determined that the examiner’s
proposed combination of Walls and Sathi is improper, we also
think the invention of claim 5 is much broader than what the
examiner is trying to find. The essence of claim 5 is that a
portion of a file is copied from a first location to a second
location while enabling the file to be accessed by a user
followed by a deallocation of the first location after the
copying is complete. The copying step is met by a typical
COPY command of an operating system as opposed to a similar
MOVE command. That is, it is understood that a file may be
accessed by a user while it is
being copied from one location to another. Claim 5 places no
limitation on the deallocation step except that it occurs
after the copying is complete. Thus, the deallocation could
take place immediately after copying, a minute after, an hour
after, a week after and so forth. It appears to us that claim
5 presently reads on any system in which a computer user has
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