Appeal No. 2004-1808
Application No. 09/633,916
OPINION
We reverse the aforementioned rejection.
The appellant’s independent claims require providing as
digital postage (claims 1 and 6) or digital coins (claims 11
and 16) a random sequence of bits and an initial pointer value.1
The examiner argues that Briscoe discloses at column 5,
lines 40-48, providing as digital postage or digital coins a
random sequence of bits and an initial pointer value (answer,
pages 3-6). Briscoe discloses that “[t]he broker stores a
pointer which records the position m in the hash chain of the
value issued to the client 1" (col. 5, lines 34-36). The
following portion of Briscoe relied upon by the examiner,
however, does not disclose providing the pointer value as part of
the digital postage or digital coins. The examiner does not rely
upon Leon for any disclosure which remedies that deficiency in
Briscoe, and the examiner does not explain how the applied prior
art would have fairly suggested, to one of ordinary skill in the
1 The appellant states that “[t]he initial pointer value
associated with a new bitstream, which is provided to the
customer with the new bitstream, has a value corresponding to the
combined length of all previous bitstreams (if any) purchased by
the same customer” (specification, page 6, lines 6-8).
3
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