Appeal No. 2000-1900
Application No. 08/669,937
language which would distinguish over the “hard” decision
operation disclosed by Wei and Saleh. In our view, to whatever
extent Appellant’s disclosed “soft” decision decoding
distinguishes over the “hard” decision decoding of the prior art,
such distinctions do not appear in the claims. As such,
Appellant’s arguments improperly attempt to narrow the scope of
the claim by implicitly adding disclosed limitations which have
no basis in the claim. See In re Morris, 127 F.3d 1048, 1054-55,
44 USPQ2d 1023, 1027-28 (Fed. Cir. 1997).
In view of the above discussion and the totality of the
evidence on the record, it is our opinion that the Examiner has
established a prima facie case of obviousness which has not been
rebutted by any convincing arguments from Appellant.
Accordingly, the Examiner’s 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) rejection of
representative independent claims 1, as well as dependent claims
3 and 4 which fall with claim 1, is sustained.
Turning to a consideration of the Examiner’s obviousness
rejection of independent claim 12, the representative claim for
Appellant’s suggested grouping (including claims 12 and 14-16),
we sustain this rejection as well. Representative claim 12 is a
system counterpart to previously discussed method claim 1. In
asserting the patentability of claim 12, Appellant reiterates the
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