Appeal No. 1998-2726
Application 08/440,991
in the art. See, for example, In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413,
425,
208 USPQ 871, 881 (CCPA 1981). In establishing a prima facie
case of obviousness, it is incumbent upon the examiner to
provide a reason why one of ordinary skill in the art would
have been led to modify a prior art reference or to combine
reference teachings to arrive at the claimed invention. See
Ex parte Clapp, 227 USPQ 972, 973 (Bd. Pat. App. & Int. 1985).
To this end, the requisite motivation must stem from some
teaching, suggestion or inference in the prior art as a whole
or from the knowledge generally available to one of ordinary
skill in the art and not from the appellants' disclosure.
See, for example, Uniroyal ,Inc. V. Rudkin-Wiley Corp., 837
F.2d 1044, 1052, 5 USPQ2d 1434, 1052 (Fed. Cir.), cert.
denied, 488 U.S. 825 (1988).
The first of the rejections under Section 103 is that
independent claim 1 and dependent claims 2-8 and 13 are
unpatentable over the European reference in view of Ryder.
Claim 1 recites a garden system having a plurality of
integratable growing modules, each of which comprises a bottom
5
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