Appeal No. 1998-0631
Application 07/957,990
Eighth issue - claims 14-16, 45-47, 114-116, and 138-
140
The Examiner concludes (OA11-12):
[W]here the general conditions of the claims are
disclosed in the prior art (i.e., monitoring excessive
force by a user in striking the keys of a keyboard), it
is not inventive to discover the optimum or workable
ranges by routine experimentation (see In re Aller,
[220 F.2d 454,] 105 USPQ 233 (CCPA 1955)); as such,
given the "general conditions" disclosed by the "Human
Factor" publication, it would have been obvious to one
of ordinary skill in the art to select a particular
value of "three minutes" for the predetermined interval
and a particular range of values of "180 to 300 grams"
for the predetermined threshold.
Appellant argues that had the claims been twice
rejected, Appellant could have had the opportunity to ask,
in view of Ahlert, for a statement by the Examiner of the
basis the reasoning (Br22). Appellant argues that since the
claims are on appeal, it can only be argued that the
obviousness rejection must fail due to absence of any
statement of the basis for the views expressed in providing
the elements that are missing in the "Human Factor"
reference (Br22). It is argued (Br22): "Nothing in the
reference offers any numerical values at all, nothing in the
reference suggests or even hints at how one would even know
what value is 'optimum', let alone 'workable.'"
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