Appeal No. 1999-0439
Application 08/652,908
We simply cannot accept the examiner’s position that
it would have been obvious for two pieces that are intended to
be separable to be made into a single piece. The examiner is
effectively applying a per se rule of obviousness. While
there are, no doubt, many circumstances where integrating two
pieces into a single piece might be obvious under 35 U.S.C. §
103, the facts of this case teach away from such modification.
There would be no motivation for the artisan to modify
Thompson so that latching portion 21 is integral with body
portion 20,36 because that would make it impossible to get
access to the electrical wiring in Thompson. The only
motivation to make such a modification to Thompson would be to
improperly create the claimed invention in hindsight. Since
there is no proper motivation to make the modification of
Thompson proposed by the examiner, we do not sustain the
examiner’s rejection of claims
2-7, 12 and 13.
We now consider the rejection of remaining claims 8,
11 and 33. Claims 8 and 11 depend from claim 2 so that the
discussion above applies equally to these dependent claims.
Since neither Robbins nor Despard overcomes the basic
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