Appeal 2007-1712
Application 10/696,395
[0092] disclose that a user may select one television to be the “master,” on
which a user may control settings (such as parental controls) for all other
devices in the household. The user interface assigns locations to the various
televisions in the house such that one television may conveniently be
designated as the master (FF 10, 11). The Examiner states that Ellis
associates one television with an adult or parent, and associates another with
a child (Answer 5:10-11), but Ellis discloses only that the television in the
“parents’ room” may be designated as the master location, and another
television in the “children’s room” may designated as a ‘slave’ location (FF
11). We find that Ellis does not teach an association between a particular
user and a particular television, because nothing in Ellis precludes a child
from watching the television in the parents’ room, nor a parent in the child’s
room.
We further agree with Appellants that the Examiner’s interpretation of
the term “associated,” when read in light of Appellants’ Specification, is not
reasonable. One of the purposes of Appellants’ invention is to provide the
ability to view multiple different television programs on the different
televisions in a house, while eliminating the need for a set-top box for every
television, by providing a system in which the frequency band corresponding
to a standard over-the-air channel is assigned to a particular person, e.g.
“Dad’s channel” is channel 7, “Mom’s” is channel 8, etc. (FF 2, 3).
Appellants’ system may send messages addressed to a particular user, and
also provides the ability to authenticate a user desiring to watch, e.g., Dad’s
channel, so that unauthorized users are not provided access to the
programming being modulated to that channel (for example, to implement
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