Appeal No. 97-3669
Application 08/391,745
requiring no peeling. Appeal Brief at 6-7. Appellants point to
nothing else to distinguish their invention from the prior art.
None of those three features is found in the rejected
claims. I would affirm the anticipation rejection on that basis.
The obviousness rejections stand on the same footing, since
Appellants make no further arguments.
Even if one were to consider the (non-argued) limitation
that the assistant material must “decompose,” that limitation is
met by Aoyama. Only by unduly narrowing the term “decompose”
could one distinguish the claims over Aoyama. Claims undergoing
examination are given their broadest reasonable interpretation
consistent with the specification, and limitations appearing in
the specification are not to be read into the claims. In re
Etter, 756 F.2d 852, 858, 225 USPQ 1, 5 (Fed. Cir. 1985) (in
banc).
In the present case, the specification offers no precise
definition of the claim term, “decompose.” The specification
states that:
The term “decomposition” as here employed should
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