Appeal No. 2002-0279
Application No. 09/164,795
the selected region of interest. Thus, the claim language itself
does not require the steps of independent claim 1 to be
specifically followed in the sequence recited. If the specific
sequence of one step after another was intended by appellants,
they could easily have made this clear in the claim.
At page 8 of the brief, appellants argue that the process
taught by IBM “cannot select any region of the document and send
it to an arbitrary application program after selecting the
region...Because the process of IBM determines in advance which
software application will receive the type of data, it thereby
limits the type of data that can be selected. In stark contrast,
Appellants’ invention allows a user to select the area of
interest of the document (thereby identifying the type of data
contained therein), and then select which software application
can process the selected type of data.”
Again, appellants’ argument does not appear to be
commensurate in scope with the claim language. We find nothing
in the claim language regarding “arbitrary application programs”
or sending documents to such programs “after” selecting a region
of interest. It may very well be, as appellants state, at page 9
of the brief, that “[b]ecause the user may not know the data
formats that can be retrieved from a particular region of a
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