Appeal No. 2005-2643
Reexamination Control No. 90/005,842
programmer8 having ordinary skill in the art just prior to appellant’s effective filing date
would have been unable to design suitable data processing software for implementing
inflation-adjusted deposit and loan accounts of the type disclosed by Mukherjee.
Comparing claim 1 to the inflation-linked accounts thus implemented, the
examiner correctly reads step a (“providing a plurality of deposit accounts with a
financial institution”) and step b (“adjusting the amount in each deposit account as a
function of a rate of inflation”) on inflation-indexed deposit accounts like Mukherjee’s ‘A’
and ‘B’ bank deposit accounts, discussed at pages 51-56. Final Action at 4, ¶ 8. As
explained above, the claim language is broad enough to read on these accounts even
though the inflation adjustments are step functions of the rates of prior actual inflation.
We note that these two steps alternatively read on the initially proposed accounts that
were not adopted, which are described at page 50, last paragraph (“The initial idea had
been to apply an extra charge to all loans equal to half the rise in the index, and then to
8 Where an invention involves two technologies (here, computer programming
and financial systems), the person having ordinary skill is presumed to have ordinary
skill in both technologies. In re Brown, 477 F.2d 946, 950-51, 177 USPQ 691, 694
(CCPA 1973).
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