Appeal No. 2003-0427
Application No. 09/808,950
which a plurality of shops are collected in a mall” is equally
without merit in view of the use of the terms “online mall” or
“mall” in each of the press releases. In the absence of any
evidence in the record that would serve to distinguish the eShop
mall from the disclosed and claimed mall, we are of the opinion
that the skilled artisan would know the characteristics of an
“online mall” or a “mall” in the Internet world. In re Fox, 471
F.2d 1405, 1406-07, 176 USPQ 340, 341 (CCPA 1973).
With respect to appellants’ argument (brief, pages 18 and
19) that eShop neither teaches nor would have suggested the first
two steps of claim 21, we agree with the examiner (answer, pages
9 and 10) that:
eShop provides a central cyber mall server, known as
the eShop Plaza, which provides a shopping mall to
Internet shoppers. This shopping mall incorporates the
cyber stores of multiple merchants (i.e., cyber shop
clients) who have signed up to take advantage of the
eShop software (see at least pages 4-6 of “Recent Press
Releases - eShop in the News”). In order to create
such a cyber mall, eShop must inherently be “receiving”
and “correlating” cyber shop information at the server
side in order for eShop to maintain its “3D rendering
of a shopping mall” (page 4 of “Recent Press Releases -
eShop in the News”). Further, the recited claim
language does not preclude the cyber mall server from
receiving an entirely prepared cyber shop web site from
the cyber shop clients. Therefore, art teaching a
cyber mall server that merely serves as a web portal
for links to various cyber shops would still meet the
respective claim language.
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