Appeal No. 2004-1144
Application No. 09/584,765
distinctly claim the subject matter which the appellant regards
as his invention.
Claims 29, 32, 33,2 44, 47, 59 and 62 are rejected under the
first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. § 112 as containing subject matter
which was not described in the specification in such a way as to
reasonably convey to one skilled in the relevant art that the
inventor, at the time the application was filed, had possession
of the claimed invention.
Claims 18-25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33-40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48-55,
57, 58, 60 and 61 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over Suzuki in view of Lambeth, and claims 26, 29,
32, 56, 59 and 62 are correspondingly rejected over these
references and further in view of Shin.
The appealed claims have been separately grouped by the
appellant in the manner indicated on page 6 of the brief. We
will separately consider these separately grouped claims to the
extent that they also have been separately argued. See Ex parte
2
2 We observe that the examiner’s written description
rejection has been applied against independent claim 33 but not
against all of the claims which depend therefrom. In the future,
the examiner should bear in mind that dependent claims typically
are affected by written description issues which are present in
their parent claims. See Ex parte Ohshiro, 14 USPQ2d 1750, 1754
(Bd. Pat. App. & Int. 1990).
4
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