Appeal No. 96-1741
Application 08/160,111
has failed to point to any teaching or suggestion in the
applied prior art which renders the limitations of these
claims obvious. We agree. The examiner has failed to
establish a prima facie case of obviousness for the invention
as recited in claims 36, 38 and 39. Claims 75, 77 and 78 are
grouped with these claims. Therefore, we do not sustain the
Section 103 rejection of these claims.
We now consider the rejection of claims 79-90 as
unpatentable over the teachings of Chu, Vassiliadis and
Pfeiffer. Although appellants nominally indicated that these
claims were grouped with claim 40, this rejection includes the
additionally applied Pfeiffer reference so that the nominal
grouping is technically not applicable. The only argument
offered by appellants for the patentability of these claims is
that they incorporate the limitations of claim 40 by
dependence. Since we have previously determined that the
rejection of claim 40 would be sustained, and since appellants
have offered no compelling reason for the patentability of
claims 79-90, we also sustain the Section 103 rejection of
these claims.
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