Appeal No. 1997-3868 Page 8
Application No. 08/538,838
claims 1 or 114, the only independent claims on appeal. In
this regard, unlike the secondary references, the process of
Watkin employs continuous webs of plastic material that are
coated with a heat-activated adhesive for use in a particular
lamination process without the use of a release liner for that
adhesive. The examiner dismisses the claimed process
differences over the process of Watkin as “being held/seen to
be ANCILLARY AT BEST (and trivial at worst)” (answer, page 7).
However, such a statement simply does not furnish a
viable rationale for a modification of the process of Watkin
that one of ordinary skill in the art would have been led to
make from the prior art teachings being relied upon. In order
4 We note that an amendment (Paper No. 13, page 2)
directed that the words "pair of" be entered before the term
"fluoropolymer" in line 3 of claim 11. However, the term
"fluoropolymer" appears twice in that line and the amendment
did not direct at which occurrence of that term the added
words were to be entered. Notwithstanding that impreciseness
in the amendment directions, the words "pair of" were
clerically entered after the second occurrence of
"fluoropolymer." A reading of the claim and the copy of claim
11 in the appendix to the brief would appear to suggest that
appellants desired that amendment to be entered prior to the
first occurrence of "fluoropolymer." We leave it to
appellants and the examiner to straighten out this matter
prior to final disposition of this application.
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