Appeal No. 1997-3403
Application No. 08/032,889
will not be considered. It is our function as a court to
decide disputed issues, not to create them.”).
Analysis
At the outset, we note that Appellants [brief, page 3]
have elected to group the claims as follows. Claims 1, 5, 9,
14 and 15 form the first group; claims 2, 6 and 10 form the
second group and 3, 4, 7, 8, 11 and 12 form the third group.
The rejection
All the claims, 1 to 15, are rejected under 35 U.S.C. §
103 over Smith and Rodrigues. We consider the various
groupings below.
Claims 1, 5, 9, 14 and 15
We take up claim 1 as a representative of this group.
The Examiner identifies the differences between Smith and the
claimed invention and then employs Rodrigues to meet these
differences. Thus, the Examiner asserts [answer, page 4] that
“it would have been obvious ... to modify the grommet of
Smith by adopting the teachings of Rodrigues et al. (‘079) to
minimize the water passage through the basic claimed grommet
and to facilitate the installation of the basic claimed
grommet to an enclosure with a plurality of the openings.”
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