Appeal No. 1999-1037
Application 08/804,284
appreciate that collapsible members made
of cylinders of HMW/HDPE may be utilized in such prior art
devices. Finally, we acknowledge that the crush resistance of
a collapsible member fabricated as a cylinder may very well be
varied by changing the wall thickness of the cylinder while
retaining all other design aspects thereof (i.e., by changing
only the wall thickness of the cylinder). The difficulty we
have with the examiner’s position, however, is its failure to
specifically point out where in the 50 sheets of drawings and
16 columns of specification of Carney ‘112 there is found a
teaching of using collapsible members of different crush
resistance in a highway safety crash cushion. Moreover, while
we appreciate that in evaluating prior art references it is
proper to take into account not only the specific teachings of
the references but also the inferences which one skilled in
the art would reasonably be expected to draw therefrom (see In
re Preda, 401 F.2d 825, 826, 159 USPQ 342, 344 (CCPA 1968)),
in the present instance we do not view this maxim of patent
law as relieving the examiner of the initial burden of
pointing out where the applied prior art teaches or suggests
-8-
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007