Appeal No. 1998-1217
Application No. 08/405,599
An entirely different circumstance is presented by the
Examiner's § 103 rejection of appealed product claims 21-23 as
being unpatentable over Dick in view of Beckmann. This is 1
because the coal compact defined by the here rejected claims, in
our view, is indistinguishable from the consolidated coal slug
of Dick. We are mindful of the Appellants' point that Dick
contains no disclosure of the tensile/compressive strength
characteristics recited in the appealed product claims.
Nevertheless, patentee's, slugs and Appellants' compacts are
both formed by subjecting the same type of particulate feed to
the same type of compressive stress (cf., appealed process
claims 1 and 3 with lines 10-45 in column 3 of Dick). While
Dick's process does not include the type of heating step
defined, for example, by appealed process claim 1 as noted by
Appellants, it is significant that the product claims on appeal
contain no recitation of such a heating step and, perhaps more
importantly, that appealed process claim 1 would encompass a
1The Examiner has relied upon Beckmann for reasons not
relevant to the claims or issues under consideration.
Accordingly, we will not discuss this reference in our
assessment of the rejection of the appealed product claims
before us.
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