Appeal No. 2000-1999
Application 08/748,314
The examiner identifies bits and pieces of the claim, i.e., that public and private
digital keys and key-signed signatures, per se, were known but does not, or cannot,
identify, where in the prior art, the claimed combinations of various private, public and
key-signed signatures are suggested. Appellants have pointed out that the claimed
central authority private key-signed signature is concatenated in the distributed protocol
so that the commercial transaction between the customer and the merchant can be
carried out independent of any certification, or central, authority, a significant advantage
if the central authority becomes unavailable (see reply brief-page 3). In the absence of
any contrary evidence from the examiner, such an argued advantage shows even more
strongly the nonobviousness of the claimed subject matter and that the examiner
cannot reasonably conclude that merely because private, public, and key-signed
signatures were well known, it would have been obvious to provide for the specifically
claimed combination and to modify Sirbu with such a combination in order to arrive at
appellants’ claimed invention.
Since the examiner has not convinced us that the specific combinations of
elements set forth in the instant claims have been taught or would have been
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