Appeal No. 96-1472
Application No. 08/287,070
or suggest any method of using diverging light; in
fact it expressly teaches away from the use of
diverging light, repeatedly calling for a thin
coherent beam. Nor does the Cooreman device use a
shutter. Second, the shutter of Okisu, et al. is
used in a non-analogous application (image reading)
and it is not used for scanning in Okisu, et al.; it
is only used for framing the field to be scanned.
There is no teaching or suggestion to scan the
shutter elements in Okisu, et al. Thus, an element
of the invention as claimed, a shutter that provides
"a scanning light beam as an output of said
shutter," is absent from the references. And,
modifying the shutter in Okisu, et al. to make his
shutter into a scanning shutter would render the
Okisu, et al. invention impractical or inoperable.
There must be some suggestion in the cited art for
making the modifications each requires and then for
combining them. Appellants find them devoid of any
such suggestions. In fact, they each teach away
from the modification, and harm is either expressly
taught or is a logical result of the combination.
We agree with appellants’ arguments. Even if we assume
for the sake of argument that it would have been obvious to
one of ordinary skill in the art to use "any means for
scanning" in Cooreman (Answer, page 3), the skilled artisan
certainly would not have looked to Okisu for such a "means for
scanning" teaching because the liquid crystal shutters 17, 62,
206 and 530 in Figures 2, 6, 10 and 14, respectively, of Okisu
are all used as a light beam frame for positioning a document
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