Appeal No. 95-2237
Application 08/067,308
first stage contains the starting medium.
Appealed claim 1 stands rejected under 35 USC § 103 as
being unpatentable over Weldes in view of Leutner.
Upon careful consideration of the opposing arguments pre-
sented on appeal, we agree with appellants that the prior art
applied by the examiner fails to establish a prima facia case
of obviousness for the claimed subject matter. Accordingly,
we will not sustain the examiner's rejection.
Appellants submit on page 3 of the brief that although
Weldes refers to the disclosed process as a "continuous" one,
the reference does not actually describe a true continuous
process, i.e. one that achieves steady-state conditions.
According to appellants, the examples and claim 4 of Weldes
illustrate that the reference employs a batch process rather
than a continuous process. The examiner, on the other hand,
rather than offer a critical refutation of appellants'
analysis of the Weldes process, simply adheres to Weldes' use
of the term "continuous". Accordingly, at issue left for our
resolution is whether the combined teachings of Weldes and
Leutner establish the obviousness of a continuous process of
4
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007