Appeal No. 2000-1410
Application No. 09/021,667
Reference is made to the Examiner's Answer (Paper No. 15,
mailed March 2, 2000) for the examiner's complete reasoning in
support of the rejection, and to appellants' Brief (Paper No. 14,
filed January 31, 2000) for appellants' arguments thereagainst.
OPINION
We have carefully considered the claims, the applied prior
art references, and the respective positions articulated by
appellants and the examiner. As a consequence of our review, we
will reverse the obviousness rejection of claims 1, 3, 4, and 8.
Appellants (Brief, pages 4-5) set forth two primary
arguments against the examiner's proposed combination of
Tomotoshi and Suwa -- that Suwa is non-analogous art and that
neither Tomotoshi nor Suwa teaches or suggests a motivation for
combining the two references. We agree with both of appellants'
arguments.
As explained by appellants (Brief, page 4), Suwa is directed
to a calculator, and thus from a different field of endeavor than
appellants' invention, and is not reasonably pertinent to the
particular problem with which appellants were concerned.
Specifically, Suwa discloses projections for indicating switch
positions and is not at all concerned with the problem of
vibration isolation addressed by appellants' invention. The
examiner states (Answer, page 4) that Suwa, Tomotoshi and
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