Appeal No. 2000-0588 Page 8
Application No. 08/824,110
for a rejection. See In re Fritch, 972 F.2d 1260, 1266, 23 USPQ2d 1780, 1784 (Fed.
Cir. 1992). Accordingly, we shall not sustain the examiner’s rejection of claims 1 and 2
as being unpatentable over Sirota in view of Hughes.
The examiner has rejected claims 3 and 4, which depend from claims 2 and 1,
respectively, and independent claim 5 as being unpatentable over Wingate in view of
Hughes and Rose. Claims 4 and 5 call for the generation of first and second random
signals or numbers, the first being used to generate an attention signal and the second
being used to select one of a plurality of messages.
Wingate discloses a toy telephone which can be programmed by a parent, for
example, to ring at a predetermined time and to cause a predetermined message, such
as “it is time for bed,” to be read out of memory and played for a child. As conceded by
the examiner, Wingate lacks a message timer which generates a random timing signal,
as called for in claims 3 and 4, a first and second random signal, as called for in claim
4, or first and second random numbers, as called for in claim 5. The examiner urges
that it would have been obvious, in view of the teachings of Hughes of a random
number generator, to employ a random number generator in Wingate to initiate ringing
of the toy telephone at random times rather than predetermined times and, further, to
have provided the Wingate toy “with a random choice of messages to be output, as
taught by Rose, in order to make the toy less predictable and heighten the user’s
enjoyment of that unpredictability” (final rejection, page 3).
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007