Appeal No. 2002-1865
Application 09/452,678
claims 20, 47 on appeal. Obviously, within 35 U.S.C. § 103, it
would have been highly desirable to provide both types of
benefits to the customer in the common system environment.
Although indicated earlier that we affirm the rejection for
the reasons set forth by the examiner as embellished upon here,
it is thus apparent that upon a careful analysis of the claims,
the admitted prior art, and further teachings of the applied
prior art, there is no need for the examiner to have asserted at
the bottom of page 4 of the answer that Schultz does not teach
that the combination purchase requirement includes a first item
with the first sponsor and a second item with the second sponsor.
This presumes that the sponsors are different according to the
examiner's implicit interpretation of the claims, with which we
do not agree because the claims do not require that the sponsors
be different. Moreover, as we indicated earlier, and as we shall
presently show in Schultz, there is an indication that the prior
art knew that the same or different sponsors may provide benefits
for the same or plural purchases of the same item or different
items.
Column 1 of Schultz begins a discussion of the prior art
which clearly indicates that it was known in the art to provide a
multiple purchase discount for a customer buying plural products
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