Appeal No. 2003-0774
Application 09/841,764
the system of Rapeli in order to derive the benefits of this
coding specifically taught by Delargy. Since appellants have
indicated that claims 21-35 stand or fall together as a single
group, we sustain the examiner’s rejection of claims 21-35 based
on the teachings of Rapeli and Delargy.
Although appellants indicate in the brief that all the
appealed claims stand or fall together, the examiner’s
application of the prior art forces us to consider each of the
other rejections separately. As noted above, the rejection of
claims 21-35 cannot be supported by Rapeli taken alone, but the
rejection can be supported using the combined teachings of Rapeli
and Delargy. For reasons known only to the examiner, Delargy is
not cited as an applied reference against any of the other claims
on appeal. Even claims 36 and 37, which depend from claim 34, do
not cite Delargy as an applied reference. Since we have
determined that Delargy is the only reference which teaches an
independence between the speech coding modes and the silence
description coding mode, the failure to apply Delargy against any
of the other claims on appeal results in a failure to establish a
prima facie case of obviousness with respect to these claims. In
other words, since the examiner’s rejection of claims 36-44 and
46-53 fails to apply the teachings of Delargy, the rejection of
-11-
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007