Appeal 2007-1047 Application 09/944,892 necessary under our case law nor consistent with it.” KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 127 S. Ct. at 1742-43, 82 USPQ2d at 1397. The Supreme Court further stated: When a work is available in one field of endeavor, design incentives and other market forces can prompt variations of it, either in the same field or a different one. If a person of ordinary skill can implement a predictable variation, § 103 likely bars its patentability. For the same reason, if a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious unless its actual application is beyond his or her skill. KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 127 S. Ct. at 1740, 82 USPQ2d at 1396. In the instant case, we have found supra that Matsuda teaches an active network in a vehicle. We further conclude that the proffered modification of Matsuda’s network with Bertin’s reserved network connections would have been a predictable variation to a person of ordinary skill in the art having common sense at the time of the invention. We acknowledge that Bertin is not directed to active networks in a vehicle. However, Bertin must be read, not in isolation, but for what it fairly teaches in combination with the prior art as a whole. 3 In particular, we agree with the Examiner that the features of reserving communication capacity bandwidth, reconfiguring network bandwidth in response to overcapacity, under-capacity, and failure, are notoriously well known in the data 3 See In re Merck & Co., Inc., 800 F.2d 1091, 1097, 231 USPQ 375, 380 (Fed. Cir. 1986) (One cannot show nonobviousness by attacking references individually where the rejections are based on combinations of references). 8Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013