Appeal No. 1998-1562 Page 4
Application No. 08/611,416
claims, to the applied prior art references, and to the
respective positions articulated by the appellants and the
examiner. As a consequence of our review, we make the
determinations which follow.
The indefiniteness issue
We will not sustain the rejection of claim 20 under
35 U.S.C. § 112, second paragraph.
Claims are considered to be definite, as required by the
second paragraph of 35 U.S.C. § 112, when they define the
metes and bounds of a claimed invention with a reasonable
degree of precision and particularity. See In re Venezia, 530
F.2d 956, 958, 189 USPQ 149, 151 (CCPA 1976).
The examiner determined (answer, p. 4) that claim 20 was 2
indefinite since it was incomplete "because it omits
2Claim 20 reads as follows:
The combination as set forth in claim 19 which further
comprises a pair of stops, each stop being disposed in a path
of movement of a respective gripper element to move said
respective gripper element from a holding position gripping a
tube to a release position to release a tube therefrom.
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