Appeal No. 95-4806
Application No. 08/155,730
Benoit is not to dispense bags from a center opening of a
coil. The first step in the Benoit process is to coil the
bags (Figure 1). However, the coil, as such, then is
discarded. As illustrated in Figures 6-8, Benoit compresses
the coil to eliminate the center opening (Figure 7), after
which it is folded into the “horseshoe” shown in Figure 8.
Benoit teaches dispensing the bags from the inside of the
package, as shown in Figure 12, at which point the center
opening has ceased to exist, for what was the inner surface 63
of the center opening of Figure 6 now has become, by virtue of
the compression and folding, a slit 123 through which the bags
124 protrude and are pulled out to be dispensed (Figure 12).
This being the case, while the examiner focuses on Benoit’s
statement that ”the larger the inner roll diameter for a given
bag size, the less twist is encountered when removing a large
bag from the roll by center unwinding” (column 3, lines 64-
66), it is our view that Benoit actually is not referring to
the diameter of an opening, but to the effective length of the
folded slit in the compressed and folded packages of Figure 12
et al. Thus, while at one point in the process of forming a
dispensing package there exists a coil having a center
9
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007