Appeal No. 1996-3621
Application No. 08/019,783
along an inclined line after rotation. According to appellant
(Brief, page 6):
The issue is whether it would be obvious to one
skilled in the art to assemble and rearrange pieces
of the prior art process. At first glance, it does
not appear to matter in what order the various skews
or the interpolation steps take place. (Regardless,
the fact does remain that the prior art does not
show nor suggest the claimed subject matter.)
We agree with the appellant (Reply Brief, page 3) that
the cited references neither teach nor would they have fairly
suggested “the claimed order of process steps to one of
ordinary skill in the art.” As indicated supra, scaling and
interpolation are not recognized as equivalents in the art.
The prior art cited by the examiner certainly has not
demonstrated such a fact. Nor has the examiner presented a
convincing line of reasoning as to why the skilled artisan
would have known that the two techniques are the same. A mere
statement by the examiner that they are the same can not take
the place of evidence or a convincing line of reasoning in the
record. The same holds true for the examiner’s dismissal of
the importance of performing the disclosed and claimed
vertical skew prior to interpolation and the horizontal skew.
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