Appeal No. 2004-0373
Application No. 08/939,064
1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992).
With respect to independent claim 1, Appellants’ response to
the obviousness rejection asserts a failure by the Examiner to
establish a prima facie case of obviousness since proper
motivation for the Examiner’s proposed combination of references
has not been set forth. After reviewing the arguments of record
from Appellants and the Examiner, we are in general agreement
with Appellants’ position as stated in the Briefs.
Our review of the Elliot and Santos-Gomez references reveals
that, in our view, they offer fundamentally different approaches
to the problems associated with rearranging windows on a display.
In the system described by Elliott, windows which have opened in
an overlapping configuration are automatically moved away from
each other if room exists on the display to display them
separately in a non-overlapping manner. In Santos-Gomez, on the
other hand, a user manually moves windows on a display until they
are within a predetermined distance from each other at which
point they are automatically “snapped” in place adjacent to each
other.
We recognize that the Examiner’s supposed rationale (Answer,
page 9) for the proposed combination of Elliott and Santos-Gomez
is to provide user control of the windows display in Elliott. We
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