Appeal No. 2005-1045
Application No. 09/225,574
that, therefore, the student is unable to receive real-time
instructional feedback as the student performs the activity
(brief, pages 6-7; reply brief, page 4).
During patent prosecution, claims are to be given their
broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the
specification, as the claim language would have been read by one
of ordinary skill in the art in view of the specification and
prior art. See In re Zletz, 893 F.2d 319, 321, 13 USPQ2d 1320,
1322 (Fed. Cir. 1989); In re Sneed, 710 F.2d 1544, 1548, 218 USPQ
385, 388 (Fed. Cir. 1983). The appellants are interpreting their
claim 38 as though the activity recited throughout the claim is
limited to a single act. The appellants’ claims do not limit the
activity in that manner, and the appellants’ specification does
not define “activity”. Hence, we use the relevant dictionary
definition of “activity”, which is “[a] specified form of
supervised action or field of action, as in education or
recreation”.3 Thus, the activity in the appellants’ claim 38 is
a field of action, for example, golf.
3 Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary 76
(Riverside 1984). A copy of this dictionary definition is
provided to the appellants with this decision.
4
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