Appeal No. 2005-1431
Application 09/442,070
• "Linking is particularly valuable when the linked-to document is shared
on a network file server."
• "OLE's linked objects work with LAN-stored files transparently and
seamlessly. This is because files on network drives are indistinguishable
from files stored on local disk drives to the operating system."
• "In the linked object scenario described above, you created a linked object
in the word processor document using schedule data from a spreadsheet.
This is particularly powerful when the spreadsheet is stored on a file
server and accessible to everyone across the network working on the
project."
Appellants also quote the following passage from page 169 of Chapter 9 of the Windows
Interface document as evidence of the knowledge of persons skilled in the art:
When the user links information from a source document into a container
document, the information appears inside the container as if it had been
physically copied there. . . . Links provide an effective way for
documents on a local drive or documents distributed over machines on a
network to share information.
Brief at 38.
While we agree with appellants that the foregoing evidence "supports the conclusion that
one of ordinary skill in the art appreciated that OLE functioned in both network and stand-alone
environments," id. at 39, that showing, as noted by the examiner, is sufficient to establish only
the obviousness of using the disclosed software in a network environment; it fails to demonstrate
that a person skilled in the art would have understood appellants' patent to be inherently (i.e.,
necessarily) disclosing the use of a network computer to run that software, as required to show
written description support for the "network" limitations. Lockwood, 107 F.3d at 1572,
41 USPQ2d at 1966. This conclusion is not altered by the fact that object linking and embedding
41
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