Appeal No. 2002-2238
Application No. 09/107,768
technical reasoning to reasonably support the determination that
the allegedly inherent characteristic necessarily flows from the
teachings of the applied prior art. Also, the examiner has the
initial burden of providing such evidence or technical reasoning.
See In re Spada, 911 F.2d 705, 708, 15 USPQ2d 1655, 1657 (Fed.
Cir. 1990); In re King, 801 F.2d 1324, 1327, 231 USPQ 136, 138-39
(Fed. Cir. 1986). The specification of Mahalingam notes the
following:
At step 612, the I/O to the card which is to be swapped out
is suspended or frozen. Next, at step 614, power to the slot
holding the card to be swapped out is turned off. Then at
step 616, the user physically removes the card and replaces
it with the replacement card. Next, at step 618, the power
to that slot is turned back on (Column 9, lines 17-23).
We are unable to find any further more detailed description
as to how the power is turned on or off. While we agree with the
examiner that the power is turned on and off to the PCI slot, the
examiner has not established that that is necessarily and
inevitably due to the claimed user intervention via a control
panel on a computer.
Pertinent portions of those claims containing this limitation
are reproduced below:
For claim 1: ...removing power from the failed hardware
device in response to user input received through a control panel
on the computer .... after user replacement of the failed
hardware device with a replacement hardware device, supplying
power to the replacement hardware device in response to user input
received from the control panel....
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