Appeal No. 2006-1910
Application No. 09/910,654
We will sustain the examiner’s rejection of claims 1-15,
17, and 18. We first wish to address an apparent
misunderstanding of the rejection by appellant. The rejection is
based on the finding that ARC teaches the claimed invention
except for the storing of agent coupon data in an electronic
form. In other words, the Board found that ARC teaches the
storage of agent coupon data in optical form. When an airline
ticket is printed for a customer, the data associated with that
ticket must have been simultaneously generated in order to print
the airline ticket. ARC allows an agent coupon that is
representative of that transaction to be stored as an optical
image of the transaction. That optical image contains data that
can be used to verify the details of the transaction. It is
similar to a bank checking account statement that includes images
of the checks handled rather than the cancelled checks
themselves. The images of the cancelled checks include data,
such as payee and amount of the check, so that the account holder
can verify the statement. In other words, although the data for
the checks is in the form of optical images of the checks, these
images, nevertheless, convey data about the checks. In the same
manner, the images of the agent coupon, that are taught by ARC,
also convey data about the transaction. Therefore, the point of
the rejection was that it would have been obvious to the artisan
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