Appeal No. 97-4241
Application No. 08/183,066
of ordinary skill would not have been motivated to replace the
inelastic canvas used in the British reference by the elastic
sheet disclosed by Cannon, because to do so would eliminate
the rigidity expressly required in order for the British
invention to function in the desired manner.
An additional basis also exists for arriving at this
conclusion. All three of the appellant’s independent claims
require that there be supporting poles so positioned as to
stretch the sheet, and that the restoring force of the
stretched sheet apply a compression force on each of these
poles. In the British reference, the absence of elasticity
means that there is no such restoring force to be applied by
the sheet. In the Cannon system, it does not appear that any
of the poles deform the sheet so as to create a restoring
force which applies a compression load to them, since all are
located at the edges of the sheets and appear to engage the
inelastic edge bindings. Thus, the combined teachings of
these two references would not, in our view, have rendered
this feature of the claims obvious to one of ordinary skill in
the art.
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