Appeal No. 2006-2184
Application No. 09/819,427
We will sustain the examiner’s obviousness rejection of the independent
claims. At the outset, we note that the broadest reasonable interpretation of the
term “customer support information” as claimed does not preclude
advertisements such as those provided by Dedrick. Certainly, advertisements
can inform customers about how products are used and provide useful
information regarding details of the product and its operation. Merely because an
advertisement’s goal is to ultimately sell a product to a customer does not
foreclose an advertisement’s ability to also provide useful customer support
information. Nevertheless, Dedrick expressly states that electronic information
provided to end users is not limited to advertisements, but can comprise other
types of electronic information including newspaper or magazine articles or
encyclopedia entries [Dedrick, col. 9, lines 15-24].
Dedrick dynamically customizes electronic information provided to end
users based on a comparison between electronic information received by the
client system and specific user profile data contained in a personal profile
database [Dedrick, abstract; col. 6, lines 34-52]. The personal profile database
contains numerous types of personal information regarding individual users
including their age, gender, income, marital status, mailing address, preferred
shipping methods, etc. [Dedrick, col. 5, lines 50-59]. Notably, such user profile
data also includes the user’s favorite sizes and shapes, employer, job title,
personal and business areas of interest, and “various lifestyle information”
[Dedrick, col. 3, lines 36-58].
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