Appeal No. 2000-0331
Application No. 08/822,145
argue (brief, pages 10 through 15; reply brief, pages 2
through 9) that the skilled artisan would find that the scope
of the claims bears a reasonable correlation to the scope of
enablement provided by the specification. To buttress their
argument, appellants have submitted a declaration executed by
Jürg Faas, one of the co-inventors of the subject application.
In paragraph 4 of the declaration, Mr. Faas acknowledges that:
[P]rior to the presently claimed invention, it was
known to the ordinarily skilled artisan that the
coarse cleaner can handle substantially a same
maximum throughput as the bale opener. Further,
prior to the presently claimed invention, it was
known to the ordinarily skilled artisan that the
coarse cleaner could not process different fiber
materials at a same throughput rate and still
maintain a predetermined quality unless the coarse
cleaner settings were adjusted. At that time, it
was necessary, as known to the ordinarily skilled
artisan, to stop production as each new fiber
material was introduced and to manually adjust the
coarse cleaner settings to accommodate the new fiber
material, then restart the process.
In paragraph 6, declarant states that:
[I]t is my belief that the ordinarily skilled
artisan would be able to empirically determine
optimum settings of the coarse cleaner for specific
fiber material bales (or provenances) through a
trial and error procedure. My belief is supported
by the fact that, as noted above, a certain amount
of empirical determination was required prior to the
present invention, however, the machines were
required to be stopped and manually set as bales
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