Appeal No. 97-1872 Application 08/371,620 interpretation to be given to the language “release material” found in each of the independent claims on appeal. The examiner is of the view that the term may be broadly interpreted so as to read on the support web 18 of Instance ‘043 and/or the support web 26 of Instance ‘686 (answer, page 9), whereas appellant argues that the “release material” language of the claims is not met by the support webs 18 and 26 of the respective references. Like appellant, we do not believe that the ordinarily skilled artisan would consider that web 18 of Instance ‘043 and/or web 26 of Instance ‘686 provides a “release material” when such language is given its broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with appellant’s specification as such would be understood by one of ordinary skill in the art (In re Sneed, 710 F.2d 1544, 218 USPQ 385 (Fed. Cir. 1983); In re Tanaka, 551 F.2d 855, 193 USPQ 138 (CCPA 1977)). The disclosures of the present application, the Instance ‘043 patent, and the Instance ‘686 patent are consistent in their use of terms like “release material,” “backing of release material” and “release backing material” to describe the web of material that carries -4-Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007