Appeal No. 2004-2110
Application No. 09/910,654
In summary, we have not sustained either of the
rejections as formulated by the examiner. Therefore, the
decision of the examiner rejecting claims 1-15, 17 and 18 is
reversed. We make the following new ground of rejection using
our authority under 37 CFR § 41.50(b).
We reject claims 1-15, 17 and 18 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a)
as being unpatentable over the prior art submitted by appellant
which has collectively been labeled ARC. We incorporate the
findings made by the examiner in rejecting these claims under
35 U.S.C. § 102(f) except for the finding that ARC discloses the
electronic storage of coupon data. Even though we found above
that ARC does not disclose the electronic storage of coupon data
as asserted by the examiner, we agree with the examiner’s
position that the storage of coupon data electronically would
have been obvious to the artisan in view of the teachings in ARC
that coupon data should be stored in optical form. At the time
this application was filed, it was well known in the art to store
image data in electronic form so that it could be transmitted
over a communications channel such as a facsimile transmission or
a multimedia network transmission. Thus, although ARC in its
entirety seems to suggest an optical storage of image data, the
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