Appeal No. 2000-0084 Page 8
Application No. 08/619,672
The rivet head is not defined with particularity in the claim. We therefore look to the
specification for clarification, for deciding whether the claims set out and circumscribe a
particular area with a reasonable degree of precision and particularity requires that the
language employed in the claims be analyzed, not in a vacuum, but in light of the teachings
of the prior art and of the particular application disclosure as it would be interpreted by one
possessing the ordinary level of skill in the pertinent art. See In re Johnson, 558 F.2d
1008, 1015, 194 USPQ 187, 193 (CCPA 1977). In the present case, the specification
states in line 7 at page 4 that the bottom of the rivet head is denoted by the numeral 11, the
lead line of which appears to point to the intersection between radius R1 and radius R2.
However, in the next sentence the specification informs the artisan that the “rivet head” has
a height “H” (see Figure 1), which is “determined from the beginning of the transition from
rivet shank 6 to outwardly directed radius R1" (lines 9 and 10). From this it would appear
that the “transition region” recited in claim 9 actually is part of the rivet head, for it falls
within height “H.” This flies in the face of the language of the claim, which states that the
transition region extends from the shank to “a bottom of the head,” thus indicating that the
transition region is not part of the head. The situation is further complicated by relating the
transition region in the claim to “a bottom of said head” (emphasis added) rather than the
bottom of the head, for the former implies that there is more than one bottom of the head.
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