Appeal No. 2002-1400
Application No. 09/131,279
stated rejection. Therefore, we find no evidence of record to support the rejection and
find that the examiner has not set forth a prima facie case of obviousness.
From the portions of Payne cited by the examiner, it appears that the examiner
may have misplaced the reliance on the image processing and data transmission as
also teaching the processing a transmission of voice data. We cannot agree with the
examiner’s correspondence of the teachings of Payne to the instant claimed invention.
Our reviewing Court has made it clear in In re Lee, 277 F.3d 1338, 1344-1345,
61 USPQ2d 1430, 1434-1435 (Fed. Cir, 2002) and In re Zurko, 258 F.3d 1379, 1386,
59 USPQ2d. 1693, 1697 (Fed. Cir. 2001) that rejections must be supported by the
administrative record and that where the record is lacking in evidence, this Board
cannot and should not resort to unsupported speculation. (See also In re Warner, 379
F.2d 1011, 1017, 154 USPQ 173, 177 (CCPA 1967)). Therefore, we limit our decision
to the limited facts relied upon by the examiner in the rejection and the limited teachings
of the sole reference. We make no findings concerning the obviousness or
combinability of Payne with any other facsimile machine which may teach the well-
known incorporation within a non-portable facsimile machine of multiple functions within
a single unitary device such as facsimile, telephone and digital answering machine
functionalities since the examiner has not applied such a combination. As discussed
above, we find that the examiner has not set forth a prima facie case of obviousness
based solely upon the teachings of Payne, and we cannot sustain the rejection of
6
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007