Appeal No. 1998-0296
Application 08/431,312
deformation of the package during the molding step" (emphasis
added). Claims 24, 25 depend on claim 21 and claim 28 depends
upon claim 27.
The Examiner admits that Ina does not disclose this claim
limitation, and both Appellants and the Examiner make
substantially the same arguments in regard to Ina as presented
above for Kitamura. Therefore, we again find that this claim
limitation is not a "product-by-process" step as asserted by
the Examiner but defines physical form aspects of structure of
the plastic package by limiting the difference between the
maximum and minimum thicknesses to twice the maximum expected
deformation.
We also find the Examiner's contention that Ina discloses
the claimed difference "as much as Applicant does" to be
without factual basis. This limitation is supported by
Appellants' specification, pages 15 and 16, and figure 7 and
was present in the originally filed claim 22. Ina does not
disclose this limitation.
Finally, the Examiner's finding that one skilled in the
art would recognize that the molding process may be formed to
11
Page: Previous 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007