Appeal No. 96-3395 Page 6
Application No. 08/347,900
The appellant states that claims 8-11 stand or fall
together, claims 12-17 stand or fall together, and claims 18-
22 stand or fall together. (Reply Br. at 1-2.) He also
opines that claims 1-7 are separately patentable. (Id. at 1.)
The appellant fails to explain, however, why dependent claims
4-6 are believed to be separately patentable. His merely
pointing out the differences in what the claims cover,
(Appeal Br. at 13), is not an argument that the claims are
separately patentable. Therefore, we find that claims 1 and
4-6 stand or fall together, with independent claim 1 as
representative of the group. With this in mind, we turn to
the obviousness of the claims.
Obviousness of the Claims
We begin our consideration of the obviousness of the
claims by finding that the references represent the level of
ordinary skill in the art. See In re GPAC Inc., 57 F.3d 1573,
1579, 35 USPQ2d 1116, 1121 (Fed. Cir. 1995) (finding that the
Board of Patent Appeals and Interference did not err in
concluding that the level of ordinary skill in the art was
best determined by the references of record); In re Oelrich,
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