Appeal No. 1998-1903
Application No. 08/353,258
The examiner, however, has applied an erroneous standard
for obviousness. The test is not whether the claimed code is
better than the prior art, but rather whether it would have
been obvious to modify the prior art to obtain the claimed
code. In other words, it is improper to ignore a limitation
whether or not the examiner believes it to provide an
improvement over the prior art. Thus, whether or not the "the
invention would perform equally well with the Gray code" is
irrelevant in determining the obviousness of the claimed
invention. Since the examiner has admitted that the Gray code
is not redundant, the Gray code alone fails to satisfy the
claimed code. The issue then becomes whether or not it would
have been obvious to modify the Gray code to have redundancy.
The examiner argues (Final Rejection and Answer, page 5)
that Aleksander suggests that there is a tradeoff between data
redundancy and Hamming-distance problems. As evidence, the
examiner refers to Aleksander's statement (page 36, column 2)
that the bar code "overcomes all the Hamming-distance problems
... [but] is, however, very inefficient and can require a
large amount of input space." However, although the bar code
is known to be redundant, Aleksander does not relate the
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