Appeal No. 2006-0944
Application No. 09/895,584
by Goldstein, there must have been something in the prior art which would have suggested the
combination of Erekson and Goldstein.
We have reviewed the Goldstein reference and find nothing therein “enabling different
actuations of said operators to be interpreted selectively as either the selection of a device for
communication or the programming of the operator to communicate upon actuation with a
particular device.” Rather, a user of Goldstein’s device touches various icons on a touch screen
and a linked menu screen appears (note Column 9, lines 4-14), but we find nothing therein
indicative of actuating these icons in one way to be interpreted selectively as a selection of a
device for communication and, in another way, for the programming of the operator to
communicate upon actuation with a particular device.
When appellants argued that the claims require enabling different actuations of said
operators to be interpreted selectively, the examiner responded by asserting that the claims do not
require actuation in “different” ways to produce “different” results.
We disagree. While the claims may not explicitly recite different “ways” and different
“results,” that is clearly what is being described. In claim 1, for example, there is an enabling of
“different actuations” of operators. Clearly, this refers to different ways to actuate so that the
actuations can be distinguished from each other. The claim also requires that these different
actuations are to be “interpreted selectively.” That means that each different type or way of
actuation will result in some different action, because each is interpreted in a selective manner.
In particular, the selective interpretation will entail either the selection of a device for
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