Appeal No. 2006-1148
Application No. 10/382,492
basic lighting control and monitoring system. It is this system that the skilled artisan would
have applied to an airfield lighting system, not some system that would take Schwarzbach’s
teachings and somehow try to adapt it to Tann’s low power communication lines. We find
no “teaching away” with regard to the applied combination of references. A reference may
be said to “teach away” when a person of ordinary skill, upon [examining] the reference,
would be discouraged from following the path set out in the reference or would be led in a
direction divergent from the path that was taken by the applicant. In re Gurley, 27 F.3d 551,
553, 31 USPQ2d 1130, 1131 (Fed. Cir. 1994). However, there is nothing in Schwarzbach
and/or Tann which would have discouraged the artisan from applying the lighting control
and monitoring system of Schwarzbach to an airfield lighting system as shown in Tann.
Accordingly, we will sustain the rejection of claims 1-14 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 since
appellants do not argue claims 2-14 separately from claim 1 (see Group A at page 5 of the
principal brief [appellants apparently erroneously placed claim 15 in this group because
appellants group this claim with Group B at page 6 of the principal brief]).
With regard to claims 15-26 (Group B), appellants argue the combination of
Schwarzbach and Knapp, asserting that these references teach away from combining them.
Specifically, appellants argue that Schwarzbach describes a slave unit for each lamp that
monitors whether the lamp switch is turned on or off, transmitting that information to the
central computer, and that Knapp is cited for teaching the monitoring of whether a light bulb
at each remote location is burned out. Appellants contend that if a light switch is turned off,
the slave unit cannot determine whether the light bulb is burned out, making the combination
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