Appeal No. 2004-0499
Application No. 09/251,789
failure to establish a prima facie case of obviousness since all
of the claimed limitations are not taught or suggested by the
applied prior art references.
Initially, Appellants contend (Brief, page 8; Reply Brief,
page 7) that, unlike the present claimed invention, Korel
provides no indication as to how network addresses are maintained
by a peer computer. From the evidence of record, however, we
find no error in the Examiner’s line of reasoning that in peer-
to-peer networks such as disclosed by Appellants and by Korel, it
is inherent that client computers know the addresses of other
client computers on the network. It is noteworthy that
Appellants have admitted as such in their arguments stating
(Brief, page 7) that “[i]t should be noted that it is widely
known in the art that a typical client or peer in a peer-to-peer
network is in possession of the IP addresses of other clients or
peers in the network.”
We also find to be unpersuasive Appellants’ arguments
(Brief, pages 11 and 12; Reply Brief, pages 6 and 7) that attempt
to distinguish over Korel by asserting that Korel requires the
manual searching by users for software versions over a network.
It is apparent from our review of Korel that the manual searching
described therein is a problem existing in the prior art. It is
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