Appeal No. 2006-3093 Page 12
Application No. 10/754,306
of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has determined that the motivation to combine
under §103 must come from a teaching or suggestion within the prior art, within
the nature of the problem to be solved, or within the general knowledge of a person
of ordinary skill in the field of the invention, to look to particular sources, to select
particular elements, and to combine them as combined by the inventor. Ruiz v.
A.B. Chance Co., 234 F.3d 654, 665, 57 USPQ2d 1161, 1167 (Fed. Cir. 2000)
[emphasis added]. In the instant case, we agree with the examiner that it would
have been obvious to an artisan to modify Shintani to receive Kitao’s control code
table from a remote control interface of an electronic device to eliminate the
memory space required to store numerous device code and associated control code
tables onboard the remote control.
In particular, we note that appellants have admitted in the reply brief:
“Shintani does state that data needed to control the remote devices are stored in the
NVRAM 74 of the remote controller” [reply brief, page 4, ¶1]. We further note
Kitao explicitly discloses that downloading control tables to the built-in memory of
remote controller 100 “eliminates the necessity of storing control code tables of
many electronic devices in a memory of the remote controller 100 in advance”
[and therefore] “remote controller 100 does not require a large memory in order to
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