Appeal No. 2001-0280
Application No. 08/890,398
invention. The purchasing system described by Cohen involves the
direction to an entity such as an insurance company of a portion
of a payment made by a customer to a merchant to purchase an
aggregate annuity policy which in turn is individualized to a
particular customer-subscriber. (Cohen, column 4, lines 17-35).
Appellant’s claimed invention, on the other hand, is directed to
a purchasing system in which a loan repayment feature is
individualized to a particular merchant who is the recipient of a
payment from a customer as part of a purchasing transaction. In
our opinion, the approach taken by Cohen is so fundamentally
different from that of Appellant that any suggestion to modify
Cohen to arrive at the invention set forth in the appealed claims
could only come from Appellant’s own disclosure.
In view of the above discussion, since we are of the opinion
that the Examiner has not established a prima facie case of
obviousness, we do not sustain the rejection of independent
claims 1 and 10, nor of claims 2-6, 8, 9, 11-15, and 17-19
dependent thereon.
Turning to a consideration of the Examiner’s 35 U.S.C.
§ 103(a) rejection of dependent claims 7 and 16 based on the
combination of Cohen and Hilt, we do not sustain this rejection
as well. It is apparent from the line of reasoning expressed at
7
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007