Appeal No. 2001-2296
Application No. 09/001,138
We refer to the Final Rejection (Paper No. 5) and the Examiner’s Answer (Paper
No. 8) for a statement of the examiner’s position and to the Brief (Paper No. 7) for
appellants’ position with respect to the claims which stand rejected.
OPINION
“Anticipation is established only when a single prior art reference discloses,
expressly or under principles of inherency, each and every element of a claimed
invention.” RCA Corp. v. Applied Digital Data Sys., Inc., 730 F.2d 1440, 1444, 221
USPQ 385, 388 (Fed. Cir. 1984).
In response to the rejection of claims 1-31 as being anticipated by Lewis,
appellants allege that Lewis does not show a data processing system, a number of
users coupled to a number of hosts, a common memory, a concurrent application, one
of the number of users communicating with one of the number of hosts by sending a
number of messages to and receiving a number of messages from, as recited in instant
claim 1. (Brief at 8-9.) Appellants stress that instant claim 1 is drafted in Jepson
format, and requires combination of all the elements in the preamble with the further
elements of the “improvement.”
Instant claims 2 and 17, the other of the independent claims, are not drafted in
Jepson format. However, we interpret the respective preambles of the claims as
limiting the scope of the invention. A claim preamble has the import that the claim as a
whole suggests for it. Bell Communications Research, Inc., v. Vitalink Communications
-3-
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