Appeal No. 95-2910
Application 08/084,337
processing time [FIG. 8A, elements 56, 58 and 60, and page 13,
lines 9-12]. Appellants subsequently amended the drawing and
the specification to change the “less than” relationship to
read “equal to or greater than” which is the exact opposite of
the original recitation. The claims were also amended to
recite this relationship. The examiner made a new matter
objection to this change and also asserted that there was no
support for what to do when the compared values were equal.
To eliminate this latter point of contention, appellants
amended the phrase “equal to or greater than” to simply read
“greater than.” The examiner still objected to this phrase as
not being supported by the original application, and
therefore, directed to new matter. This appeal followed.
A rejection under the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. §
112 based on the insertion of “new matter” into the
application is a rejection based on the written description
requirement of Section 112. The purpose of the written
description requirement is to ensure that the applicants
convey with reasonable clarity to those skilled in the art
that they were in possession of the invention as of the filing
date of the application. For the purposes of the written
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