Appeal 2007-1307
Application 10/454,274
OTHER ISSUES
In view of Appellant’s disclosure of presumedly commonly known
teachings described supra in connection with findings of fact numbers 2, 4,
and 5, and recent case law concerned with obviousness, the Examiner should
consider instituting a new obviousness rejection of at least claims 1, 5, and 9
if, in fact, it was well known to artisans to use either 8-bit registers, 16-bit
registers, and 32-bit registers in connection with database bitmap index
format processing. If the processing speed increases with the size of the
register, then it is expected that a 128-bit register will process the bits at an
even greater speed than the 8-bit register, the 16-bit register or the 32-bit
register. “If a person of ordinary skill can implement a predictable variation,
§ 103 likely bars its patentability.” KSR Int’l v. Teleflex, Inc., 127 S. Ct.
1727, 1740, 82 USPQ2d 1385, 1396 (2007). If 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit
registers were indeed known and used by the skilled artisan for bitmap index
processing, then it follows that it would have been “obvious to try” even
larger bit-size registers for bitmap index processing. KSR, 127 S. Ct. at
1742, 82 USPQ2d at 1397.
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