Appeal No. 2005-2642
Reexamination Control No. 90/005,841
of facts beyond the record which, while not generally notorious, are capable of such
instant and unquestionable demonstration as to defy dispute). Furthermore, although
the examiner did not explain how the “prior art as a whole” would have suggested
implementing inflation-indexed deposit accounts of the type disclosed by Mukherjee as
CDs, it is evident his position is that in view of Mukherjee’s disclosure of preventing
withdrawals from the inflation-indexed accounts during the first year and the fact that
CDs were known to have fixed terms (typically with a penalty for early withdrawal), it
would have been obvious to implement such inflation-indexed accounts as CDs having
predetermined, fixed terms of one year or more. We agree. The obvious advantage to
the bank of holding deposits in the form of CDs is to reduce the likelihood of withdrawal
before the end of the specified term. Appellant’s discussion of the “term” limitation in
this claim (Brief at 10) fails to address the examiner’s reliance on CDs or explain why it
would have been unobvious to implement inflation-indexed deposit accounts of the type
disclosed by Mukherjee as CDs.
For the foregoing reasons, we are affirming the rejection of claim 24.
Dependent claim 25 specifies that the deposit account term is divided into a
plurality of iteration periods. Claim 26 depends on claim 25 and calls for enhancing the
fixed interest component in accordance with the fixed interest rate for the previous
iteration period. The examiner asserts that the use of plural iteration periods
was notoriously well-known and ubiquitously in use, and further explicitly
demonstrated by MUSAMANNO [sic] et al.: “daily iteration”—col. 6, lines
25
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