Appeal No. 2003-0901
Application 09/303,368
We will sustain the examiner’s rejection of independent
claim 1 based on the teachings of Blinn. The thrust of
appellants’ arguments is that the “pre-processing” of the claimed
invention refers to pre-processing of completed purchase orders
which is different than the pre-processing of Blinn identified by
the examiner. We do not agree with appellants’ arguments.
During prosecution before the examiner, claims are given their
broadest reasonable interpretation. This is done because an
applicant has an opportunity at this time to amend the claims so
that they accurately reflect what the applicant is trying to
protect. The examiner has read the pre-processing of claim 1 on
the processing in Blinn which takes place before the final
processing of the order is confirmed. We agree with the examiner
that these operations of Blinn, such as item availability, can be
considered to fall within the broad term of pre-processing in
claim 1. We also agree with the examiner that it would have been
obvious to the artisan to separate the pre-processing operations
and the processing operations of Blinn into separate processing
devices as explained by the examiner. We note, however, that we
do not agree with the examiner’s position that the claimed pre-
processing and processing must be interpreted to include separate
devices for performing the pre-processing and the processing. We
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