Appeal No. 2005-2643
Reexamination Control No. 90/005,842
loans 25 per cent to the cost-of-living index.”). Final Action at 5. Both of these
techniques satisfy steps d and step f even if the claim is construed to require that the
loan amount be a continuous (i.e., nonstepped) function of the inflation rate. Appellant’s
contention (Reply brief at 6) that the 25 per cent relationship employed by the Post
Office Bank is not a one-to-one relationship appears to be an unsupported attempt to
define “directly responsive” even more narrowly to mean “responsive in the same
degree.” Claim 1, if narrowly construed to require that the loan amount be a continuous
function of the inflation rate, also reads on the indexing technique employed by the
banks other than the Post Office Bank:
All other banks operated on the principle of calculating
an index surcharge on all loans at
rates just sufficient to cover
indexed payments to depositors.
This meant, for example, that in a
year when the index rose by 10
per cent, a bank with one fifth of
its deposits in fully index-linked
accounts would place an index
surcharge of 2 per cent on all its
outstanding loans. This
surcharge became payable
immediately by borrowers as
additional interest; the
outstanding debt was not,
however, written up.
Mukherjee at 68, 2d para. The fact that the size of the index surcharge on each loan
account is determined in part by the percentage of deposits held in indexed accounts
does not alter the fact that the index surcharge is a function (more particularly, a
continuous function) of the inflation rate.
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