Appeal No. 2004-2043
Application 09/312,919
B) With respect to independent claim 1, Appellants argue at
pages 7-8 of the brief and pages 7-9 of the reply brief that the
combination of references fail to teach a “general purpose
personal digital assistant device.” Particularly, Appellants
argue that “general purpose” and “personal digital assistant”
both require the device be general purpose, i.e. programmable,
and while the references teach multi-functional data processing,
none of the references are programmable. The Examiner responds
that Appellants defined “general purpose” at page 19 of the
substitute specification to be “not dedicated to access control
tasks exclusively” and programmability is not required. We find
Appellants argument persuasive.
To determine whether claim 1 is obvious over the references,
we must first determine the scope of the claim. Appellant argues
that “general purpose” should be defined as programmable. Our
reviewing court states in In re Zletz, 893 F.2d 319, 321, 13
USPQ2d 1320, 1322 (Fed. Cir. 1989) that “claims must be
interpreted as broadly as their terms reasonably allow.” Our
reviewing court further states, “[t]he terms used in the claims
bear a ‘heavy presumption’ that they mean what they say and have
the ordinary meaning that would be attributed to those words by
9
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007