Appeal No. 2000-1520
Application No. 08/768,715 Page 9
present invention utilizes a special service called Automatic
Number Identification, in which a caller's telephone number is
transmitted by the telephone company to the customer in the
silent period between rings. From these teachings in the prior
art, we find ample teaching that the telephone number of a caller
is transmitted between rings. In the reply brief, appellant now
argues that the language "when said caller ID does not correspond
to any existing caller IDs registered in said memory" of claim 8,
is not taught or suggested by Hirai. We find that in figure 3 of
Hirai (col. 11, lines 56-62), after the telephone number is
decoded by control circuit 35, the telephone number is stored in
memory circuit 18 in step 103. Thus, we find that in Hirai,
incoming telephone numbers are stored in memory, irrespective of
whether the caller has called before and their telephone number
is already stored in memory, or the call is from a first-time
caller. To the extent that the claim could be construed to
broadly require that a determination be made that the caller ID
does not correspond to any existing caller ID in the memory
before the caller ID is stored, we note that in Figa (col. 3,
line 67 through col. 4, line 7), the detected incoming caller ID
is compared with telephone numbers stored in directory 16 by
comparator 18. If the caller ID matches a number in the
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