Appeal No. 2006-0355
Application No. 09/905,574
Nevertheless, Appellants’ description of ‘GL4/66’ appears to have
been sufficient for the examiner to compare ‘GL4/66’ to prior art peach
trees, including the parent peach tree, ‘Yumyeong,’ and to determine that the
‘GL4/66’ is distinguishable therefrom.
35 U.S.C. § 162 requires the description of a plant in a plant patent
application to be as complete as “reasonably possible.” 37 CFR § 1.163 is
seemingly more restrictive than the statute in requiring “as full and complete
a disclosure as possible of the plant and the characteristics thereof that
distinguish the same over related known varieties, and its antecedents,” but it
is plain that the purpose of the rule is to require that the description of the
claimed plant must be sufficient to distinguish it from other varieties in the
prior art. The Examiner has cited no authority, and we know of none, that
supports the proposition that the description of a plant in a plant patent
application must be sufficient to aid in examining purely hypothetical future
plant patent applications.
The rejections of claim 1 under the first and second paragraphs of
35 U.S.C. § 112 are reversed.
5
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013