Appeal No. 1999-0510
Application No. 08/728,787
To comply with the written description requirement of §
112, first paragraph, the application as filed must convey
with reasonable clarity to those of ordinary skill in the art,
either explicitly or inherently, that the applicant invented
the subject matter claimed. Reiffin v. Microsoft Corp., 214
F.3d 1324, 1346, 54 USPQ2d 1915, 1917 (Fed. Cir. 2000). In
the present case, the application as filed does not show in
the drawings, or explicitly disclose in the specification
and/or claims, that the body portion of the separator device
60 is folded upon, i.e., contacts, itself. Nor is such
contact inherently disclosed. At the oral hearing, counsel
for appellant asserted that the folded separator would contact
itself (I) at its edges (80 and 82) where the edges extended
beyond the containers 10, or (ii) between the articles, if the
articles in a layer were spaced sufficiently far apart.
However, while one might visualize that such contact could
possibly occur, neither of these possibilities is suggested in
the disclosure; the width of the separator is described only
as extending completely across the top surface of the layer of
articles (page 8, lines 25 and 26, and page 9, lines 10 and
11), and the articles in each layer (e.g., 10a and 10b) are
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