Appeal No. 1998-1609
Application No. 08/589022
retaining shirt tails is not on acknowledged known and
conventional briefs and boxer shorts of the type that one
having ordinary skill in the art would understand as having
continuous waistbands (column 1, lines 10 through). Instead,
Larsen teaches a particular type of brief 19 (Fig. 3) which is
characterized in the specification (column 3, lines 20 through
24) and claims of the patent as elastically girding a person’s
body substantially all around, i.e., the front and rear waists
26 and 18 are interrupted by short sections at each side of a
shirt 11.
Considering the overall teaching of Larsen, we fail to
perceive where one having ordinary skill in this art, absent
appellant’s own teaching, would have derived a suggestion to
seek out the particular athletic compression shorts of Atwater
for making an obvious modification of the article of Larsen.
Clearly, the type of brief of interest to Larsen has
distinctly different characteristics from the shorts disclosed
by Atwater. More specifically, it is clear to us that the
Larsen brief 19 (Fig. 3) would not have been suggestive of a
legged brief with a continuous elastic waistband and leg
encircling bands or leg portions. In our opinion, only
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