Appeal No. 2004-0007 Page 5
Application No. 09/844,105
value information is authentic) found by the examiner to be lacking. Moreover,
inasmuch as the Yamaguchi system is directed to registering and checking fingerprints
and granting access only to persons having fingerprints which are registered in the
system and not to determining whether a person presenting a card is the legal owner of
that card, the examiner’s stated rationale for the modification does not appear to have
any relevance to the Yamaguchi system. Furthermore, in any event, the read unit
addressed by the examiner is recited in claims 26 and 351 but is not recited in claim 1.
Rather, claim 1 recites a plurality of read/write units each being adapted to store and
retrieve data from the solid-state media and to read and write authentication information
in the form of an actual and an expected reference fingerprint from and to the solid-state
media. The examiner’s rejection does not address this feature.
It should be apparent from the above that we cannot sustain the examiner’s
rejection of independent claims 1, 26, 35 and 41, or claims 2-4, 27-34, 36-40, 42 and 43
depending therefrom, on the basis of the rationale offered by the examiner. The
examiner’s rejection is reversed.
REMAND TO THE EXAMINER
This application is remanded to the examiner, pursuant to our authority under 37
CFR § 41.50(a)(1), to review the scope of the claims and determine the differences, if
any, between the claimed subject matter and the disclosure of Yamaguchi, in light of our
1 Method steps of reading the value information from the transportable solid state media and
reading the reference fingerprint and determining if the value information is authentic using the reference
fingerprint are recited in claim 41.
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