Appeal No. 2006-1802 Page 6
Application No. 09/785,918
fact, improve a client’s response time, as alleged by the examiner. Moreover, if response
time were, indeed, improved, would this not serve as a motivation to the artisan to place
all clients on the server side, rather than the claimed one of the two clients?
The examiner attempts to explain, at page 7 of the answer, that if a source device
and a destination device are located on the same local network, without interconnection
through a router, it is inherent that this would improve response time of the client and this
would have led the artisan to make the combination. However, we agree with appellant,
at page 2 of the reply brief, that there is no evidence that the use of routers is adverse to a
good response time. We also agree that this argument about routers appears to be
irrelevant to where a client is positioned relative to a server. As stated by appellant,
“whether you use a router in internetwork communication or not, that still says nothing
about whether you should put a client on the server side of a client-server relationship
when establishing a browser session between two clients” (reply brief-page 2).
We agree with the examiner’s rationale to the extent that one could place a client
on the server side of the client server communication protocol, but we disagree with the
examiner’s conclusion of obviousness, within the meaning of 35 U.S.C. §103, because
the examiner has offered insufficient evidence of anything that would have led the artisan
to modify the system of Quatrano to provide for a client on the server side of the client
server communication protocol. While such evidence may very well exist and a
convincing argument might be made for so placing a client, the examiner has not
provided such evidence or such argument in this case.
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