Appeal No. 2001-2454 Page 3
Application No. 09/267,355
reasoning in support of the rejections, and to the Brief (Paper No. 12) for the appellants’
arguments thereagainst.
OPINION
In reaching our decision in this appeal, we have given careful consideration to
the appellants’ specification and claims, to the applied prior art references, and to the
respective positions articulated by the appellants and the examiner. As a consequence
of our review, we make the determinations which follow.
The Examiner’s Rejection Under Section 112
On pages 3 and 4 of the final rejection, the examiner has rejected claims 1-20 as
being indefinite under the second paragraph of Section 112 on three grounds. The first
of these is that the phrase “subjectable to a comparison” in claim 1 is vague. However,
these words do not appear in the version of claim 1 that is before us, and thus can form
no basis for this rejection. The second indefiniteness issue raised by the examiner is
that in claim 6 “comparison element . . . compare for comparing” is “poorly worded.”
This language is not present in claim 6 and therefore, again, there is no basis for this
portion of the rejection. The final issue raised by the examiner here is that “there
appears to be no substantial difference between the second and third paragraphs” in
claim 18. We do not agree. The second paragraph states that a manual braking signal
is supplied in lieu of the automatic braking controller, and the third paragraph that a
selective change-over between the automatic braking controller and the manual signal
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