Appeal No. 1997-0540
Application No. 08/209,847
In light of the foregoing, it is our determination that
the reference evidence adduced by the examiner establishes a
prima facie case of obviousness within the meaning of
35 U.S.C. § 103. In this regard, it is the appellants' basic
position that they have rebutted the examiner's prima facie
case of obviousness with evidence of nonobviousness in the
form of declaration (i.e., the Rorabaugh Declaration of
record) and specification (i.e., pages 21-23) data which is
said to evince unexpected results with respect to higher Z-
direction tensile strength. We cannot agree with the
appellants on this matter for several reasons.
In the first place, it is not clear that the tensile
strength exhibited by the inventive examples is unexpectedly
superior to the comparison examples. By way of
exemplification, the tensile strength exhibited by Comparison
Sample A2 does not appear to be significantly different from
the tensile strength exhibited by Inventive Samples B5, B6 and
B8 on Declaration, page 4. Further, the declarant gives no
clarifying explanation as to why the tensile strengths of
Inventive Samples B5, B6 and B8 are considered to be
-7-
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