Appeal No. 2001-2578
Application No. 08/977,547
application” provide the delivery of documents without mentioning
the TCP/IP transport layer communication (col. 10, lines 14-18),
constitutes sufficient support for shifting the burden back to
the Examiner.
Regarding the combination of Smith and Klotzbach, Appellants
assert that the negotiations described by Smith are related to
different kinds of protocols which, although all operate on top
of the TCP/IP protocols, are different at the negotiation stage
(brief, page 14). Furthermore, Appellants state that the
combination of Smith and Klotzbach is improper since Klotzbach
describes a communication protocol in the data link and the
physical layers of the OSI model which cannot be combined with
the application layer communication of Smith (brief, page 21).
Appellants argue that since two different layers using different
protocols do not talk to each other, they may not be properly
combined to arrive at the instant claims (id.).
The Examiner acknowledges the absence of the step of
establishing agreement for negotiating device protocol options at
the application layer in Smith and adds the teaching from
Klotzbach (col. 8, lines 30-45 and col. 10, lines 10-25) which
relates to negotiating protocol options (answer, page 20).
Additionally, the Examiner relies on Klotzbach (col. 20, lines
8
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