Ex Parte Lu et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardApr 30, 201311082202 (P.T.A.B. Apr. 30, 2013) Copy Citation UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www.uspto.gov APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 11/082,202 03/15/2005 Qi Lu 600189-359 2917 45969 7590 05/01/2013 DENTONS US LLP - Yahoo!, Inc P. O. BOX 061080 CHICAGO, IL 60606-1080 EXAMINER DAYE, CHELCIE L ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2161 MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE 05/01/2013 PAPER Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE ____________ BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD ____________ Ex parte QI LU, ECKART WALTHER, DAVID KU, CHUNG-MAN TAM, KEVIN LEE, ZHICHEN XU, ALI DIAB, KENNETH NORTON, and JIANCHANG MAO1 ____________ Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 Technology Center 2100 ____________ Before JOSIAH C. COCKS, JAMES B. ARPIN, and MIRIAM L. QUINN, Administrative Patent Judges. ARPIN, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL STATEMENT OF THE CASE Appellants appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner’s rejection of claims 1, 4-15, 17-22, 25-39, 42-46, 48, and 50-55. Claims 2, 3, 1 Yahoo! Inc. is the real party-in-interest. Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 2 16, 23, 24, 40, 41, 47, and 49 are cancelled. App. Br. 2.2 We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We affirm. INVENTION Appellants’ invention relates to methods and computer systems, which incorporate user annotations (e.g., metadata) regarding various pages or sites, including annotations by a querying user and by members of a trust network defined for the querying user, in searching and browsing a corpus of documents, such as the World Wide Web. See generally Abstract. “A trust network is defined for each user, and annotations by any member of a first user’s trust network are made visible to the [querying] user during search and/or browsing of the corpus.” Id. “Users also may limit searches to content annotated by members of their trust networks or by members of a community selected by the user.” Id. Claim 1 is illustrative and is reproduced below with disputed limitations emphasized: 1. A method for responding to a user query, the method comprising: receiving a query submitted by a querying one of a plurality of users; searching a corpus comprising a plurality of documents to identify one or more hits, wherein each hit is a document in the corpus that is determined to be relevant to the query; building a trust network for the querying user, the trust network having as members a subset of the plurality of users including at least one user other than the querying user explicitly identified by the 2 Throughout this opinion, we refer to (1) the Appeal Brief (App. Br.) filed September 28, 2010; (2) the Examiner’s Answer (Ans.) mailed December 9, 2010; and (3) the Reply Brief (Reply Br.) filed February 9, 2011. Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 3 querying user as a friend, wherein the members of the trust network are members of a selected community of users, the selected community being selected by the querying user; providing a trust network interface operable by the plurality of users to identify others of the plurality of users as friends; receiving identifications of friends from a plurality of inputting users, including the querying user, via the trust network interface; storing a list of identified friends for each inputting user; accessing a store of annotations created by the plurality of users, each annotation being associated with a subject one of the documents in the corpus and with a creating one of the plurality of users, each annotation including user-specific metadata related to the subject document, wherein the user-specific metadata included in each annotation includes a rating of the subject document; identifying, as an annotated hit, each of the hits that is the subject document of at least one matching annotation, wherein the creating user of each matching annotation is one of the members of the trust network; obtaining an annotation rating from each matching annotation, the annotation rating being a rating of the annotation and computing an average annotation rating; generating a search report including a listing of the hits, wherein for each annotated hit, the search report includes information about at least one of the matching annotations, wherein an order for the listing of the hits is determined based at least in part on the average annotation ratings of the annotated hits; providing in the search report, for a given annotated hit, a control element operable by the querying user to request a display of the user-specific metadata of at least one of the matching annotations; and Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 4 transmitting the search report and the user-specific metadata of at least one matching annotation to the querying user. The Examiner relies on the following as evidence of unpatentability: Glance Johnson Badros Dhillon Sipusic Yeager US 2002/0147895 A1 US 2005/0027664 A1 US 2005/0131866 A1 US 2005/0182745 A1 US 2005/0234958 A1 US 7,203,753 B2 Oct. 10, 2002 Feb. 3, 2005 (filed July 31, 2003) June 16, 2005 (filed Dec. 3, 2003) Aug. 18, 2005 (filed July 30, 2004) Oct. 20, 2005 (filed Dec. 7, 2001) Apr. 10, 2007 (filed June 7, 2002) THE REJECTIONS The Examiner rejected claims 1, 4-15, 17-22, 25-39, 42-46, 48, and 50-55 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as unpatentable over Badros, Yeager, Glance, Dhillon, and Sipusic.3 Ans. 4-19. SUMMARY Regarding representative claim 1, the Examiner finds that Badros discloses a method for responding to a user query and discloses many of the limitations recited in claim 1, including “identifying, as an annotated hit, each of the hits that is the subject document of at least one matching annotation.” Ans. 5 (citing Badros, ¶ [0085]). Badros, however, does not adequately disclose other recited limitations of claim 1, such as those 3 The Examiner has withdrawn the rejections to claims 1, 4-15, 17-22, 25- 39, 42-46, 48, and 50-55 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as unpatentable over Badros, Yeager, Glance, Dhillon, and Johnson. Ans. 3. Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 5 relating to the building of a trust network of the querying user, including “wherein the creating user of each matching annotation is one of the members of the trust network.” Ans. 5-6. Nevertheless, the Examiner finds that Yeager discloses the building of a trust network and, in particular, that Yeager discloses “wherein the creating user of each matching annotation is one of the members of the trust network.” Id. at 6 (citing Yeager, col.14, ll. 58-62). In addition, the Examiner notes that Badros does not teach or suggest “computing an average rating and wherein an order for the listing of the hits is determined based at least in part on the average ratings of the annotated hits,” and that, although Yeager discloses building a trust network, Yeager does not specifically describe the members of the trust network, as “friends.” Ans. 6-7. The Examiner finds, however, that Glance discloses these recited limitations of claim 1 relating to the computation and use of average ratings (Ans. 6-7 (citing Glance, ¶¶ [0031]-[0032])) and that Dhillon identifies a plurality of inputting users to a trust network, as “friends” (id. at 7-8 (citing Dhillon, ¶¶ [0060], [0066])). The Examiner concludes that it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the relevant art to combine the teachings of Badros, Yeager, Glance, and Dhillon to satisfy the recited limitations of claim 1. Id. at 5-8. Finally, the Examiner determines that the combination of Badros, Yeager, Glance, and Dhillon may not provide a sufficiently detailed description of “the obtained rating being a rating of the annotation and the computing of an average rating, being an average annotation rating.” Ans. 8 (emphasis added). The Examiner finds, however, that Sipusic discloses obtaining an annotation rating (Sipusic, ¶ [0037]) and “computing an Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 6 average annotation rating” (id. at ¶ [0068]). Id. Further, the Examiner concludes that it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the relevant art to combine the teachings of Sipusic with those of the other combined references to satisfy the recited limitations of claim 1. Id. Appellants argue (1) that the combination of references proposed by the Examiner fails to teach or suggest at least “identifying, as an annotated hit, each of the hits that is the subject document of at least one matching annotation, wherein the creating user of each matching annotation is one of the members of the trust network,” as recited in claim 1 (App. Br. 10-12; Reply Br. 3-4), and (2) that the Examiner has failed to demonstrate that a person of ordinary skill in the relevant art would have reason to combine the teachings of Badros, Yeager, Glance, Dhillon, and Sipusic to satisfy the recited limitations of claim 1 (App. Br. 12-19; Reply Br. 4-6). In particular, Appellants argue that the applied references represent non-analogous art; such that their combination is improper, and teach away from the combination proposed by the Examiner or that the proposed combination of these references is based on impermissible hindsight, or both. App. Br. 12- 15, 18-19; Reply Br. 4-6. ISSUES 1. Under § 103, has the Examiner erred in rejecting claim 1 by finding that Badros and Yeager, collectively, teach or suggest “identifying, as an annotated hit, each of the hits that is the subject document of at least one matching annotation, wherein the creating user of each matching annotation is one of the members of the trust network?” Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 7 2. Are the Examiner’s reasons to combine the teachings of these references supported by articulated reasoning with some rational underpinning to justify the Examiner’s obviousness conclusion? ANALYSIS 1. Claim Construction. We begin by construing the disputed limitations of claim 1 which calls for, in pertinent part, “identifying, as an annotated hit, each of the hits that is the subject document of at least one matching annotation, wherein the creating user of each matching annotation is one of the members of the trust network.” In construing this limitation, we apply the broadest reasonable meaning of the words in their ordinary usage, as those words would be understood by one of ordinary skill in the art, taking into account any definitions supplied by Appellants’ Specification. In re Morris, 127 F.3d 1048, 1054 (Fed. Cir. 1997). Initially, we note that, in the Specification, Appellants broadly define several of the terms included in this limitation. Appellants define the terms “hits” as “pages or sites (or references to pages or sites) that are determined to have at least some relevance to the query.” Spec. 16:23-24 (emphasis added). Further, Appellants define the term “page” as referring “to a unit of content that is identifiable by a unique locator (e.g., a URL) and displayable by a suitably configured browser program” and the term “site” as referring “to a group of one or more pages related to a common subject matter and located on the same server.” Id. at 20:18-21. Thus, we construe the term “hits,” as used in the disputed limitation, to broadly describe units of content that are identifiable by a unique locator and displayable by a browser Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 8 program or a group of units of such content that are located on the same server and have at least some relevance to the query. Similarly, Appellants define the term “trust network” as “set of users whose annotations are to be viewed by a first user [e.g., the querying user] . . . and in preferred embodiments, each user may exercise at least some degree of control over the membership of her trust network.” Spec. 25:22- 25; see also Spec. 3:27-4:3. Appellants also broadly define the term “annotations” “to refer generally to any descriptive and/or evaluative metadata related to a page or site (or other content item in a corpus) that is collected from a user and thereafter stored in association with an identifier of that user and an identifier of the page or site.” Id. at 20:9-12 (emphases added). Appellants describe both ratings and keywords as examples of annotations within this definition. Id. at 20:12-15; see also Spec. 22:5-9 (defining “keywords”), 22:17-28 (defining “ratings”). Thus, we construe the term “annotation,” as used in the disputed limitation, to broadly describe any descriptive metadata, such as keywords, and/or any evaluative metadata, such as ratings, related in any way to any content item, such as a page or site, in a corpus of documents, that is added to a unit of content by a querying user and/or a member of a trust network. Moreover, we construe an “annotated hit” to describe a hit with which an annotation has been associated. Turning to the disputed limitations, claim 1 recites the step of “identifying, as an annotated hit, each of the hits that is the subject document of at least one matching annotation.” Within the scope of the interpretations of “annotated hits” and “annotations” described above, we construe this portion of the disputed limitation to include, but not to be limited to, the Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 9 identification of a hit, such as a page or site, related to a document located by a search that includes an annotation, previously associated with that hit by the querying user, that matches an annotation included in the user’s query. App. Br. 4 (designating the subject matter of this limitation with reference to Spec. 25:16-20). Further, claim 1 recites that “the creating user of each matching annotation is one of the members of the trust network.” Appellants describe that the annotation associated with the hit, e.g., the “annotated hit,” may be created by the querying user or other users, who are members of the same “trust network.” Id. (designating the subject matter of this portion of the limitation with reference to Spec. 25:21-26). Thus, we construe the disputed limitation to describe the step of identifying a hit on a document, located as the result of a query, as an annotated hit when an annotation, such as a rating or keyword, previously associated with the hit by a querying user or another member of the querying user’s trust network, matches an annotation included in the querying user’s query. 2. Teaching or Suggesting the “Identifying” Step. Referring to Badros’s Paragraph [0085], Appellants argue that Badros merely describes “providing means for searching an annotation and returning URLs or [document identifiers (Docids)] that match the query.” App. Br. 11. Nevertheless, Appellants maintain that “the hits returned by Badros are not ‘annotated hits’, i.e., hits that have been annotated my [sic] members of the trusted network.” Id. Appellants, therefore, conclude that “Badros is only concerned with the querying user’s annotations and not anyone else’s annotations.” Id. (emphasis in original). Finally, Appellants argue that Badros fails to teach or suggest a trusted network. Id. Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 10 Initially, we note that Badros teaches or suggests identifying a hit, such as a URL (see Spec. 16:23-24; Spec. 20:18-19), based on matching annotations in a query with annotations associated by the querying user with the hit. Ans. 5. Further, as construed above, we note that the scope of the “identifying” step of claim 1 encompasses the condition in which each of the annotations associated with the hit, e.g., the annotated hit, and those contained in the query originate with the querying user. The Examiner, however, does not rely on Badros alone to teach or suggest the “identifying” step recited in claim 1. Instead, the Examiner relies upon Badros and Yeager to teach or suggest the disputed limitations. Ans. 5-6, 19-20. In particular, while noting that Badros teaches that searching with annotations may be done in a “community environment,” the Examiner relies upon Yeager to teach or suggest that “the annotations for the hits are by members of a trusted network.” Id. at 20. Thus, we are not persuaded by Appellants’ arguments based on the alleged deficiencies of Badros, taken alone, with respect to the disputed limitations. Appellants acknowledge that Yeager teaches providing community applications to member peers in a peer group as a peer group application. Reply Br. 3-4 (citing Yeager, col. 30, ll. 28-32). Nevertheless, Appellants argue that Yeager fails to teach either that members of a trust network create annotations or that query annotations are matched with annotations created by members of a trust network. Id. at 4. We disagree. As the Examiner notes, Yeager states that “[t]he originating peer may make a query to all members of all peer group tables that have keyword- relevant content to find peer keyword matches. These matches may be for Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 11 peer groups to which the originating peer does not belong or for which the originating peer has no prior knowledge.” Ans. 6 (citing Yeager, col. 14, ll. 58-62 (emphasis added)). As noted above, Appellants’ annotations include keywords (Spec. 20:12-15); and, given the breadth of Appellants’ definition of a “trust network,” the Examiner adequately demonstrates that Yeager’s peer groups teach or suggest the recited trust network. Moreover, we agree with the Examiner that Yeager teaches or suggests that members of a peer group may create annotations and that such peer-group created annotations may be matched to annotations in a user’s query. Therefore, the Examiner did not err by finding that Badros and Yeager, collectively, teach or suggest “identifying, as an annotated hit, each of the hits that is the subject document of at least one matching annotation, wherein the creating user of each matching annotation is one of the members of the trust network,” as recited in claim 1. 3. Reason to Combine. Appellants argue that the Examiner has failed to identify a reason to combine the teachings of these references supported by articulated reasoning with some rational underpinning to justify the Examiner’s obviousness conclusion. App. Br. 16-17; Reply Br. 6. In particular, Appellants argue that the Examiner provides mere conclusory statements in support of the combination of the teachings of these references, and that such statements are insufficient to support an obviousness rejection. App. Br. 16-17. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (the “Federal Circuit”) has explained, “rejections on obviousness grounds cannot be sustained by mere conclusory statements; instead, there must be some articulated reasoning with some rational underpinning to support the legal Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 12 conclusion of obviousness.” In re Kahn, 441 F.3d 977, 988 (Fed. Cir. 2006) (citations omitted). Nevertheless, “the analysis need not seek out precise teachings directed to the specific subject matter of the challenged claim, for a court can take account of the inferences and creative steps that a person of ordinary skill in the art would employ.” KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex, Inc., 550 U.S. 398, 418 (2007). Here, the Examiner has provided more than mere conclusory statements in support of the combination of the applied references. Ans. 6 (citing Yeager, col. 2, ll. 43-49 in support of the combination of Badros and Yeager); 7 (citing Badros, ¶¶ [0035], [0041], [0057], [0059] in support of combination of Badros, Yeager, and Glance), 7- 8 (citing Dhillon, ¶ [0004] in support of combination of Badros, Yeager, Glance, and Dhillon). With regard to the combination of the teachings of Sipusic with Badros, Yeager, Glance, and Dhillon, although the Examiner does not provide a specific citation in support of this combination, the Examiner explains that the reliance of Sipusic is merely to provide a more detailed description of the rating of annotations and the computing of an average rating, as already taught by Glance. Id. at 6-7 (citing Glance, ¶¶ [0031]-[0032]). Therefore, we are persuaded that the Examiner has provided more than mere conclusory statements in support of the combination of the teachings of these references. a. Non-Analogous Art and Teaching Away Arguments. Appellants further argue that Glance, Dhillon, and Sipusic are non- analogous art with respect to Appellants’ recited invention and that, consequently, these references “teach away” from their combination. The Federal Circuit has set forth a two-prong test for determining whether a prior art reference is analogous: (1) whether the reference is from the same field Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 13 of endeavor as the claimed invention, and (2) if the reference is not within the same field of endeavor, whether the reference is reasonably pertinent to the particular problem with which the inventor is involved. In re Klein, 647 F.3d 1343, 1348 (Fed. Cir. 2011). With respect to Glance, Appellants argue that Glance is limited to ratings for URLs. App. Br. 13. Because of Glance’s apparent focus on URLs, Appellants argue that Glance is directed to non-analogous art and teaches away from Appellants’ recited invention. Id. Appellants’ argument is misplaced. As noted above, the claimed “hits” include “pages,” such as URLs (Spec. 20:18-19), and an annotation may include a “rating” of a page (id. at 22:17-18). Thus, the claims encompass within their scope rating of URLs. See Ans. 20. Glance generally describes prioritizing documents in a cache based on values assigned to their content (Glance, Abstract). In particular, Glance describes predicting a value for a URL based on the computation of a weighted sum of the user’s ratings for a URL (Glance, ¶ [0032]), and, “[i]n the simplest case, this prediction will simply be the average of all the ratings received for a URL” (id.). See Ans. 6-7 (citing Glance, ¶ [0032]). Thus, we are not persuaded that Glance is not in the same field of endeavor as the claimed invention and that Glance is non-analogous art. With respect to Dhillon, Appellants argue that Dhillon is directed to a contact sharing system rather than to a system for searching a corpus comprising a plurality of documents. App. Br. 13-14; Reply Br. 4-5. Because of Dhillon’s focus on contact paths between senior executives at a target company, Appellants argue that Dhillon is directed to non-analogous art. Id. Nevertheless, Dhillon generally describes sharing information over Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 14 a network (Dhillon, Abstract), and the Examiner is not relying upon Dhillon for its teachings regarding contact paths. Instead, the Examiner relies on Dhillon for its more specific teaching regarding “the plurality of users being friends,” “receiving identifications of friends from a plurality of inputting users,” and the storing of a list of identified friends for each inputting user. Ans. 7 (citing Dhillon, ¶¶ [0017], [0060], [0066]). In view of the application of Badros’s teachings regarding a community environment (Ans. 19 (citing Badros, ¶ [0061])) and Yeager’s teachings regarding peer groups (id. at 6 (citing Yeager, col.14, ll. 58-62)) to teach or suggest Appellants’ trust network, we are not persuaded that Dhillon’s teachings regarding “friends” are not in the same field of endeavor as the claimed invention and that Dhillon is non-analogous art. See Ans. 20. Finally, with respect to Sipusic, Appellants argue that Sipusic is directed to annotating time-based media (e.g., video) and, in particular, to annotations as viewers react to something observed in a video. App. Br. 14- 15. Further, Appellants argues that, while the recited invention is directed to the searching and annotating of a corpus of documents, “Sipusic solely teaches or suggest video annotations used for commenting on a video and rating the annotation content.” Id. at 15. Nevertheless, Sipusic generally describes an iterative and collaborative system for receiving and storing annotations with time-based media. Sipusic, Abstract. Moreover, Appellants recited invention does not exclude video content. Spec. 10:22-23 (describing “documents (or other content items)”); Spec. 44:18-19 (“other documents (e.g., pages or sites)”). Therefore, in view of the relatively broad scope of the term “documents” in Appellants’ claim 1, we are not persuaded that Sipusic’s teachings regarding annotating video and rating such video Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 15 annotations are not in the same field of endeavor as the claimed invention and that Sipusic is non-analogous art. See Sipusic, ¶¶ [0037], [0068]; see Ans. 20. A reference does not teach away if it does not “criticize, discredit or otherwise discourage” investigation into the applicant’s claimed invention. E.g., DePuy Spine Inc. v. Medtronic Sofamor Danek, 567 F.3d 1314, 1327 (Fed. Cir. 2009). With respect to Glance and Dhillon, Appellants present no argument that either of those references would lead a person of ordinary skill in the art in a direction divergent from the path that was taken by Appellants. App. Br. 12-14. Instead, Appellants premise their teachings away arguments on their contentions of non-analogous art. That premise is misplaced. Whether a reference teaches away is a separate inquiry from whether the reference is non-analogous art. On this record, we are not persuaded that either Glance or Dhillon teach away from Appellant’s invention. With respect to Sipusic, Appellants argue that “Sipusic explicitly teaches away from using annotations for ranking or categorization (Sipusic, ¶30, lines 1-6) and instead, discusses video annotations solely used for knowledge sharing in the form of dialogue and discussion (Sipusic, ¶ 36, lines 7-27).” App. Br. 15. Nevertheless, as the Federal Circuit has explained, “[t]he fact that the motivating benefit comes at the expense of another benefit, however, should not nullify its use as a basis to modify the disclosure of one reference with the teachings of another. Instead, the benefits, both lost and gained, should be weighed against one another.” Winner Int'l Royalty Corp. v. Wang, 202 F.3d 1340, 1349 n. 8 (Fed. Cir. 2000). Therefore, we are not persuaded that Sipusic teaches away from the Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 16 rating of annotations (Sipusic, ¶ [0037]) or the computation of average annotation ratings (id. at ¶ [0068]). See Ans. 8. b. Reliance Upon Impermissible Hindsight. As acknowledged by Appellants, citing a large number of references does not negate the obviousness of their combination when the prior art uses the various elements for the same purposes as they are used by Appellants, making the claimed invention as a whole obvious in terms of § 103(a). App. Br. 18; see In re Gorman, 933 F.2d 982, 987 (Fed. Cir. 1991). Nevertheless, in view of the number of references combined in the rejection involved here, Appellants argue that the Examiner has made an impermissible hindsight reconstruction of Appellants’ claimed invention. We disagree. Initially, we note that: Any judgment on obviousness is in a sense necessarily a reconstruction based on hindsight reasoning, but so long as it takes into account only knowledge which was within the level of ordinary skill in the art at the time the claimed invention was made and does not include knowledge gleaned only from applicant’s disclosure, such a reconstruction is proper. In re McLaughlin, 443 F.2d 1392, 1395, (CCPA 1971). Although Appellants argue that some of the combined references are from different fields of endeavor (App. Br. 18), this argument alone does not demonstrate that their combination is based solely on hindsight. Given the specific citations to the disclosures of the combined references and the reasons for their combination, as set forth above, we conclude that the Examiner has taken into account knowledge which is within the level of ordinary skill in the art at the time the claimed invention was made, and that Appellants fail Appeal 2011-006210 Application 11/082,202 17 to demonstrate persuasively where the Examiner relied solely on knowledge gleaned from Appellant’s disclosure. In light of the record before us, we conclude that the Examiner’s reasons to combine the teachings of these references are supported by articulated reasoning with some rational underpinning to justify the Examiner’s obviousness conclusion. For the foregoing reasons, Appellants have not persuaded us of error in the rejection of: (1) independent claim 1; (2) independent claims 39, 54, and 55, which include commensurate limitations to those of independent claim 1 (App. Br. 10-12); and (3) dependent claims 4-15, 17-22, 25-38, 42- 46, 48, and 50-53, which are not separately argued with particularity (id. at 20). Therefore, we sustain the obviousness rejection of these claims. CONCLUSION The Examiner did not err in rejecting claims 1, 4-15, 17-22, 25-39, 42-46, 48, and 50-55 under § 103(a). DECISION The Examiner’s decision rejecting claims 1, 4-15, 17-22, 25-39, 42- 46, 48, and 50-55 is affirmed. No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(1)(iv). AFFIRMED llw Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation