Appeal No. 1998-1357
Application No. 08/348,744
substantially from one another and thereby in any manner
obscure appellants’ scope of protection, or, to use the
language of the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals in In re
Chandler, 319 F.2d 211, 225, 138 USPQ 138, 148 (1963), that
appellants’ claims provide a "degree of repetition and
multiplicity which beclouds definition in a maze of
confusion," we are constrained to reverse the examiner's
rejection of claims 89 through 156 as being unduly multiplied.
While it may be true that examination of 68 claims in
this application would have been tedious work for the
examiner, this fact alone provides no reason for saying that
the subject matter claimed by appellants' is obscured by the
large number of claims. In light of our determination above,
it is now incumbent upon the examiner to examine those claims
which he previously refused to consider.
We now turn to the first of the examiner's rejections
based on prior art, wherein claims 93, 107, 108, 111, 112,
119, 127, 133 and 134 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) as
being clearly anticipated by Lindquist. The patent to
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