Appeal No. 2002-1755
Application No. 09/173,286
at page 15 of the specification, the system waits a predetermined
amount of time for each contributor to submit a message. Thus,
this description provided by the specification must be read into
the claims in the sense of the meaning to be ascribed to the term
“parallel greeting module.” As such, it is apparent that neither
Microsoft Office nor Nakatsu discloses or suggests such a
parallel greeting module, as claimed.
Accordingly, we will not sustain the rejection of claims 11
and 12 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 over Nakatsu and Microsoft Office.
With regard to claims 14-16, bringing in the limitation of
the data network using a transmission control protocol/Internet
protocol, the examiner employs the combination of Nakatsu and
Hibbeler to reject these claims. In particular, the examiner
recognized that Nakatsu lacked the teaching of a TCP/IP based
network and relied on Hibbeler for its teaching of a telephony
transmission over the Internet, concluding that it would have
been obvious to make the combination “because of Hibbeler’s
taught advantage of Internet transmission (using TCP/IP),
providing a familiar network protocol to the network system of
Nakatsu” (answer-page 18).
Appellants argue that there is insufficient motivation to
combine Hibbeler with Nakatsu because Hibbeler is solely
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