Appeal No. 2000-0753
Application 08/909,545
similar to claim 1 except that claim 15 recites that the
executable code is "adapted to verify correctness of data
following said mark contained on said optical medium." This
limitation is not taught or suggested in Oshima '301, nor has the
examiner sought to address this limitation. For this reason and
for the reasons stated in the analysis of claim 1, the rejection
of claim 15 and its dependent claims 16 and 17, is reversed.
The examiner's final rejection contains no details of how
Oshima '551 is applied to claim 1. The examiner's answer only
refers to figures 41a and 46 of Oshima '551. Figure 41 is
similar to figure 2 of Oshima '301. Since Oshima '551 is a long
and complicated patent, having some fourteen embodiments, we will
not hunt through it looking for something that might support the
examiner's rejection. It appears that the copy protection of
Oshima '551 (the second embodiment, cols. 22-30) is a variation
of Oshima '301, which uses the location of physical marks on the
disks, and has the same deficiencies as Oshima '301. The
examiner has failed to set forth a prima facie case of
obviousness. Accordingly, the rejection of claims 1-17 over
Oshima '551 is reversed.
We note that the examiner never addressed the patentability
of the dependent claims during prosecution. In response to
appellant's argument in the brief that the examiner had failed to
set forth separate grounds for rejection of these claims with
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