Appeal No. 1997-4287
Application No. 08/275,864
1229, 1232, 212 USPQ 561, 563 (CCPA 1982). On the record of
this appeal, the examiner has provided no acceptable reasoning
and no evidence at all which supports his aforenoted
enablement viewpoint.
It follows that we also cannot sustain the examiner’s
section 112, first paragraph, rejection of the appealed
claims.
The pivotal consideration in assessing the propriety of
the section 103 rejection before us relates to whether the
examiner has properly interpreted the “bicomponent filaments”
feature of independent claim 1 and the “sheath around a core”
feature of separately argued dependent claims 6 through 8. As
a consequence, it is appropriate to emphasize that in
proceedings before the Patent and Trademark Office, claims in
an application are to be given their broadest reasonable
interpretation consistent with the specification and that
claim language should be read in light of the specification as
it would be interpreted by one of ordinary skill in the art.
In re Sneed, 710 F.2d 1544, 1548, 218 USPQ 385, 388 (Fed. Cir.
1983). As thoroughly explained by the appellants in their
brief, the examiner’s interpretation of the previously
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