Appeal No. 2005-1636
Application No. 09/726,272
We will sustain the examiner’s rejection of claims 37,
47, 49, 59, 61 and 71 which appellant has grouped together. At
the outset, we note that we do not agree with the examiner’s
assessment that Pettitt does not teach implementation on a
computer network. The entire background of the invention in
Pettitt relates to the distribution of digital works over a
computer network. Therefore, we are of the view that the person
skilled in the art would clearly understand that the Pettitt
distribution method is intended to use a computer network.
Figure 2 of Pettitt shows providers (authors) sending digital
works to a license clearing house 14, where they are forwarded to
distributor 16 (the third party logging server), which then
forwards the digital works to reseller 17 (the merchant
computer), which finally forwards the work to the user (the
customer). Thus, the distributor 16 clearly obtains a plurality
of digital works from the providers (obtaining step of claim 37).
The distributor stores these digital works for reasons explained
by the examiner in the answer (storing step). This explanation
has not been rebutted by appellant. The distributor 16 receives
a product sale request from reseller 17 (receiving step). Even
though the user in Pettitt already has the software, the user
must send this request back through the distributor in order to
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