Appeal No. 97-1566
Application 29/033,924
also concede to the examiner that the Hornung handbook
establishes that shield shapes are generally known to the
ordinarily skilled designer. However, contrary to that which the
examiner would apparently have us believe, these circumstances
alone do not establish that it would have been obvious to combine
Spiegel and a particular one of Hornung’s shield shapes as
proposed by the examiner to arrive at the presently claimed
design.
Regarding combining references in design cases, we note, as
the court did in In re Glavas, 230 F.2d 447, 450, 109 USPQ 50, 52
(CCPA 1956), that
[o]bviously, almost every new design is made up of
elements which, individually, are old somewhere in the
prior art, but the fact that the individual elements of
a design are old, does not prove want of invention in
assembling them.
This is so because, generally speaking, when the proposed
combination of references in a design case involves material
modification of the basic form of one article in view of another,
the references applied must be so related that the appearance of
certain ornamental features in one would suggest the application
the design characteristics of which are basically the same as the
claimed design in order to support a holding of obviousness.” In
re Rosen, 673 F.2d 388, 391, 213 USPQ 347, 350 (CCPA 1982).
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