Appeal No. 97-4241
Application No. 08/183,066
examiner to provide a reason why one of ordinary skill in the
art would have been led to modify a prior art reference or to
combine reference teachings to arrive at the claimed
invention. See Ex parte Clapp, 227 USPQ 972, 973 (Bd. Pat.
App. & Int. 1985). To this end, the requisite motivation must
stem from some teaching, suggestion or inference in the prior
art as a whole or from the knowledge generally available to
one of ordinary skill in the art and not from the appellant's
disclosure. See, for example, Uniroyal, Inc. v. Rudkin-Wiley
Corp., 837 F.2d 1044, 1052, 5 USPQ2d 1434, 1052 (Fed. Cir.),
cert. denied, 488 U.S. 825 (1988).
Independent claims 1 and 23 are directed to a structure
comprising a flexible sheet of material that is elastic in at
least one direction and that will, when deformed into a
stretched state by support poles placed beneath it, exert a
restoring force that applies a compression force to the poles.
They also require a plurality of anchors that grip the edge
margin of the sheet. Independent claim 36 contains like
requirements, expressed in terms of a method. All three of
these claims stand rejected as being unpatentable over the
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