Appeal No. 97-3453 Page 6
Application No. 08/475,374
examiner fails to establish a prima facie case, an obviousness
rejection is improper and will be overturned. In re
Rijckaert, 9 F.3d 1531, 1532, 28 USPQ2d 1955, 1956 (Fed. Cir.
1993). With this in mind, we analyze the examiner’s
rejections.
The examiner rejects claims 2, 11, 13, and 15 as obvious
over Admission in view of Ottesen. At the outset, we observe
that the examiner fails to map the language of the claims to
the
disclosure of the Admission or reference. Instead, he begins
the rejection by characterizing Admission as follows.
On lines 7-16 of page 1, applicant admits that
“there is currently in progress the introduction of
a signal processing method ... which is a
combination of partial response equalization and
maximum likelihood decoding". For dependent claims
11 and 13, [Admission] employs a magnetoresistance
effect head as a reproducing transducer and uses a
magnetic disk as a recording medium. (Final
Rejection at 5.)
He admits that Admission “neither measures second harmonic
distortion nor signal to noise ratio.” (Id.)
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