Appeal No. 96-3543
Application No. 08/153,623
establishing a prima facie case of obviousness, it is
incumbent upon the examiner to provide a reason why one of
ordinary skill in the art would have been led to modify a
prior art reference or to combine reference teachings to
arrive at the claimed invention. See Ex parte Clapp, 227 USPQ
972, 973 (Bd. Pat. App. & Int. 1985). To this end, the
requisite motivation must stem from some teaching, suggestion
or inference in the prior art as a whole or from the knowledge
generally available to one of ordinary skill in the art and
not from the appellants’ disclosure. See, for example,
Uniroyal ,Inc. V. Rudkin-Wiley Corp., 837 F.2d 1044, 1052, 5
USPQ2d 1434, 1052 (Fed. Cir.), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 825
(1988).
Independent claims 1 and 9 stand rejected as being
unpatentable over Dilbey in view of Gullen. Among the
appellants’ arguments against this rejection is that neither
of these references teaches that at least one of the weft
members be differently colored from the remaining ones, and at
least one of the warp members be differently colored than the
remaining ones, as is required by both of these claims. The
8
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