Appeal 2007-1597
Application 10/887,525
distortion caused by hindsight bias and must be cautious of arguments reliant
upon ex post reasoning.” KSR, 127 S. Ct. at 1742, 82 USPQ2d at 1397. See
also Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. at 36, 148 USPQ at 474.
Nevertheless, in KSR the Supreme Court also qualified the issue of hindsight
by stating that “[r]igid preventative rules that deny factfinders recourse to
common sense, however, are neither necessary under our case law nor
consistent with it.” KSR, 127 S. Ct. at 1742-43, 82 USPQ2d at 1397.
In KSR, 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, 127 S. Ct. at 1740, 82 USPQ2d at 1396.
This reasoning is applicable here. We note that Holm teaches a
method of PCI interrupt routing in a logically partitioned guest operating
system (p. 5, ¶ 34). We have found supra that AAPA discloses isolating
interrupt resources at a host bridge that provides functionality for isolating
interrupt resources. Therefore, we conclude it would have been obvious to
a person of ordinary skill in the art that modifying Holm with the teachings
of AAPA would have resulted in a predictable variation of Holm, i.e., a
combined system where interrupt resources are isolated so as to prevent
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