Appeal 2007-1412
Application 09/822,152
found that Goddard teaches setting and adjusting the rating parameters of a
program to block or unblock a viewer’s access to said program. (Finding 8.)
We agree with Appellant that combining Goddard’s disclosed system with
Lapierre’s would not yield a reasonable expectation of success as such a
combination would render Lapierre’s system unsatisfactory for its intended
purpose. Particularly, the ordinarily skilled artisan would have aptly
recognized that integrating into Lapierre’s system Goddard’s teaching of
blocking a program due to a detected objectionable content therein would
deprive the viewer of such system of the entire program including the
captions. Similarly, integrating Goddard’s teaching of unblocking a
previously blocked program into Lapierre’s system, as suggested by the
Examiner, would yield the undesirable result of displaying the objectionable
contents that the Lapierre system seeks to block. This is due to the fact that
Goddard operates to either block or unblock a program in its entirety
depending on whether or not the program contains objectionable material.
Further, we agree with Appellant that Goddard teaches away from the
Lapierre reference. Lapierre specifically discourages the ordinarily skilled
artisan from following the path set forth in the Goddard patent by
recommending to merely block the undesired terms in the captions as
opposed to blocking the entire program. (Finding 7.) Therefore, we
conclude that the Examiner improperly combined Lapierre and Goddard to
yield the claimed invention.
Additionally, we agree with Appellant that combining DeStefano with
Lapierre would not yield a reasonable expectation of success and would
render Lapierre’s system unsuitable for its intended use. We find that the
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