Appeal No. 1998-0696 Page 5
Application No. 08/444,664
We fail to follow the examiner’s reasoning. Hanson is
concerned with increasing head sensitivity by reversing bias
current direction dependent on the position of a given burst
pattern with respect to the center of the servo pattern and
does not appear to be concerned at all with the problem of the
instant claimed invention which is to limit the range of motion
of the read element to be equidistant from the track center
when the magnetoresistive head is reading, writing or
formatting. Although appellants make this argument, as well as
point to specific claim limitations which are believed not
suggested by the applied references [brief, pages 8-10], the
examiner’s response is merely to state [answer-page 7] that
“[i]f two places are ‘mirrored’ about a central location, they
are equally distant from each other” and that the examiner
relies on APA for the claimed range of motion limitations. The
examiner’s response is not persuasive to us that the skilled
artisan would have been led, from Hanson’s teaching of
reversing current flow in a magnetoresistive head to correct
for the head’s asymmetric response, to modify APA to provide
for a range of motion of the read element to be equidistant
from the center of the track during the three functions of
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