Appeal No. 2000-1703
Application No. 08/963,545
to the claims is, as has long been established, a matter to be
determined on the facts of each case in view of the claimed
invention as a whole. In re Stencel, 828 F.2d 751, 754, 4 USPQ2d
1071, 1073 (Fed. Cir. 1987).
Claim 20 relates to a building network and calls for a
master node for transmitting information, a first non-master node
for repeating the information and a second non-master node for
receiving the information. We note that Appellants refer to
“within a building” only in the preamble whereas the claimed
master and non-master nodes include no structures that restrict
their communications to nodes within a building. Here, we find
that Appellants in the body of claim 20, completely define the
relative positions of the nodes merely by reciting “a first non-
master node, disposed within a transmission range of the master
node” and “a second non-master node, disposed outside the
transmission range.”
Next, we will determine the meaning of the limitation of
“within the building,” as recited in the body of claim 23 (lines
4 & 6), while we give the claimed feature its broadest reasonable
interpretation. As our reviewing court has stated, although “the
specification itself does not delimit the right to exclude,” it
should be relied upon to properly determine the meaning of terms
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