Appeal No. 2005-1540
Application No. 09/887,626
No. 12, filed December 12, 2003) and Reply Brief (Paper No. 16,
filed July 9, 2004) for appellants' arguments thereagainst.
OPINION
We have carefully considered the claims, the applied prior
art references, and the respective positions articulated by
appellant and the examiner. As a consequence of our review, we
will reverse the obviousness rejection of claims 1 through 26.
Appellants indicate on page 4 of the Brief that all of
claims 1 through 26 stand or fall together. Since the limitation
at issue, a code that is generated for the user to manually
verify whether a request from an energy provider has been
followed, appears in each of independent claims 1, 11, 16, 20,
and 22, we will treat the claims as a single group, as indicated
by appellants, with claim 1 as representative.
The examiner contends (Answer, pages 3-4) that Glorioso
discloses everything in claim 1 except that it does not specify
manual verification by the user. The examiner turns to Von
Kohorn, asserting (Answer, pages 4-5) that Von Kohorn "discloses
that manual verification has the advantage of reduces capital
investment by the absence of two way communication, but may be
used with two way communication." Further, the examiner states
3
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