Appeal 2007-2370
Application 09/373,141
1 the commitment system communicating with the auction system to
2 generate a discount record for at least a portion of the buyers
3 identified in the data storage, each discount record including the
4 identity of the buyer and seller, the pre-defined category on which the
5 buyer negotiated and data indicative of the commitment amount and
6 the discount offered by the selected seller. (Emphasis added.)
7
8 The Examiner found that claim 63 recited limitations similar to those in claims
9 1-62, which are described by the combination of Shkedy and the admitted prior art
10 as applied to claims 1-62, and also recited the limitation of discount negotiation
11 with multiple sellers, which the Examiner found described by eCommerce. The
12 Examiner concluded that one of ordinary skill would have negotiated discount
13 rates, as in eCommerce, in Shkedy as well to improve the achieved discount
14 (Answer 23-25).
15 The Appellant contends that it does not claim "pre-negotiation" with multiple
16 sellers in the sense suggested by Examiner (Br. 17:Second to bottom ¶). Instead
17 the negotiated discount is the result of active bidding (Br. 18:Top ¶). The
18 Appellant further contends that eCommerce does not describe soliciting bids from
19 multiple sellers (Br. 18:Second ¶).
20 The Examiner responds that the company described in eCommerce could not
21 realistically operate without negotiating with multiple sellers (Answer 29:Last
22 full ¶).
23 We find that settling upon a discount by active bidding by which the system
24 finds the seller offering the greatest discount is described by Shkedy as we found,
25 supra. Thus, the issue is whether the combination of Shkedy and eCommerce
26 suggests performing a negotiation with multiple sellers to achieve this. The
27 Specification provides no special meaning of “negotiate,” but the usual meaning is
15
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