Appeal No. 2001-2543
Application No. 09/225,892
the weight member during his or her underwater travels, thereby
guaranteeing that the weight member will provide reliable and
consistent heads up positioning of the diver at the water's
surface in the event of an emergency where the diver is
incapacitated. While one might speculate, as the examiner has,
that a person having a high degree of manual dexterity might be
able to remove or release the weight assembly seen in Figures 28
through 31 or 37 through 39 of the present application, we
nonetheless remain of the view that the claims on appeal set out
and circumscribe a particular area with a reasonable degree of
precision and particularity by requiring the weight member to be
positioned and secured to the cylinder directly opposite the
diver and so that a typical diver wearing the cylinder cannot
remove or release the weight member while underwater.
Accordingly, we will not sustain the examiner's rejection of
appellants' claims 1 through 7 and 21 through 25 under 35 U.S.C.
§ 112, second paragraph.
We next look to the examiner's prior art rejections of the
appealed claims, turning first to the rejection of claims 1 and
21 under § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Finnern. While this
rejection is said to be under 35 U.S.C. § 103 we note that the
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