Appeal No. 1997-2848
Application No. 08/444,106
of complying with the burden of presenting a prima facie case
of
obviousness. Note In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1445, 24
USPQ2d
1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992).
With respect to independent claims 1, 19, and 20, the
Examiner, as the basis for the obviousness rejection, proposes
to modify the recording and reproducing system disclosure of
Koyama which the Examiner asserts discloses a ring recording
head having a magnetic gap length g. As recognized by the
Examiner (Answer, pages 3 and 4), Koyama lacks a teaching of
selecting the gap length g so that the recording head
generates a side fringe magnetic field which extends beyond
the width of the recording track. To address this deficiency,
the Examiner turns to Suyama which describes a recording
head having a recording track narrower than a reproducing
track and which generates side fringe magnetic fields
extending outside a selected recording track. In the
Examiner’s line of reasoning, the skilled artisan would have
found it obvious to modify the recording head of Koyama so as
to
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