Appeal No. 96-2099
Application 08/128,976
Claim 26 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as being
unpatentable over Teegarden in view of Anschutz and Bush. It is
the examiner's position that:
Teegarden discloses a method for automatically
sorting flattened cartons having indicia thereon (note
that the articles or materials to be separated fail to
patentably distinguish the claimed method. Even if 3
one was to give weight to the claimed materials, one of
ordinary skill would recognize that the sorter of
Teegarden would be able to separate a wide range of
materials, including sheets of material) comprising the
steps of removing PNP-12 and/or PNP-2 sheets one at a
time from a storage magazine 16, a conveyor belt 360,
reading BCR-1 or BCR-2, identifying information on each
sheet, a receiving bin 1R, tracking position of each
sheet (column 14, lines 36-57). However, Teegarden
does not have the belt divided into pockets by members
extending outwardly form the belt and does not use an
air blower to remove the sheets.
Bush shows a conveyor belt 22 diving [sic] into
pockets by members 24 extending outwardly from the
conveyor belt (column 2, lines 31-34) for tracking the
position of article a on the belt (column 3, line 39 to
column 4, line 4).
Anschutz shows an air blower 98 (Fig. 18).
It would have been obvious to one skilled in the
art to modify the belt of Teegarden to have extending
3We must point out, however, that our reviewing court in In
re Ochiai, 71 F.3d 1565, 1571-72, 37 USPQ2d 1127, 1133 (Fed. Cir.
1995) made it clear that the use of per se rules in determining
the obviousness of process claims under § 103 is improper.
Instead, the claimed invention as a whole must be analyzed and
thus all claim limitations, including the particular articles
being sorted, must be considered.
3
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007