Appeal No. 97-1088
Application 08/518,957
is established only when a single prior art reference discloses,
expressly or under principles of inherency, each and every
element of a claimed invention. RCA Corp. v. Applied Digital
Data Sys., Inc., 730 F.2d 1440, 1444, 221 USPQ 385, 388 (Fed.
Cir. 1984). It is not necessary that the reference teach what
the subject application teaches, but only that the claim read on
something disclosed in the reference, i.e., that all of the
limitations in the claim be found in or fully met by the
reference. Kalman v. Kimberly Clark Corp., 713 F.2d 760, 771,
218 USPQ 781, 789 (Fed. Cir. 1983), cert. denied, 465 U.S. 1026
(1984). In this regard, during patent prosecution claims are
given their broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with
the underlying specification without reading limitations from the
specification into the claims. In re Prater, 415 F.2d 1393,
1404-05, 162 USPQ 541, 550-51 (CCPA 1969).
In light of these principles, the examiner’s determination
that West meets all of the limitations in appealed claim 1 (see
page 3 in the answer) is well founded. More particularly, the
limitations in this claim relating to the container, the panel
member and the plurality of elongated solid beads read on West’s
bottle A, outer body section 5 and self-luminous compound 8,
respectively.
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