Appeal No. 1998-1397 Page 6
Application No. 08/482,905
We begin by noting the following principles from In re
Rijckaert, 9 F.3d 1531, 1532, 28 USPQ2d 1955, 1956 (Fed. Cir.
1993).
In rejecting claims under 35 U.S.C. Section 103, the
examiner bears the initial burden of presenting a
prima facie case of obviousness. In re Oetiker, 977
F.2d 1443, 1445, 24 USPQ2d 1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir.
1992).... "A prima facie case of obviousness is
established when the teachings from the prior art
itself would appear to have suggested the claimed
subject matter to a person of ordinary skill in the
art." In re Bell, 991 F.2d 781, 782, 26 USPQ2d
1529, 1531 (Fed. Cir. 1993) (quoting In re Rinehart,
531 F.2d 1048, 1051, 189 USPQ 143, 147 (CCPA 1976)).
If the examiner fails to establish a prima facie
case, the rejection is improper and will be
overturned. In re Fine, 837 F.2d 1071, 1074, 5
USPQ2d 1596, 1598 (Fed. Cir. 1988).
With these principles in mind, we consider the appellants’
argument and the examiner’s reply.
The appellants’ argument follows.
[A]lthough Westland does disclose providing a
“snapshot” (still picture) of one or two frames of
each video scene, and also recognizes that a fast
access storage devices e.g. [sic] the disk drive,
could not store the entire scene economically, he
did not recognize or suggest that storage and
display of e.g. [sic] several seconds of video for
each scene was useful. (Appeal Br. at 6.)
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007