Appeal No. 1998-2002
Application 08/690,016
patenting rejection. Nothing in the appellants’ Reply Brief
or the majority’s reiteration thereof vitiates the merit in
the examiner’s point that the appealed claims merely recite
the corresponding apparatus or “means” for carrying out the
process recited in the claims of Patent No. 5,492,682. The
process claimed in this patent can be practiced only by way of
suitable apparatus, namely, apparatus of the type defined by
the claims here on appeal. By contending that the claimed
process of the patent would not have rendered the here claimed
apparatus obvious to an artisan with ordinary skill, the
majority and the appellants implicitly cast a degree of doubt
on whether the artisan would be able to practice the process
defined by the patent claims.
The very general arguments presented in the Reply Brief
and reiterated in the majority opinion do not support a
conclusion of nonobviousness with respect to the here claimed
apparatus and do not justify doubting enablement with respect
to the process claims of the patent. On the other hand, the
legal presumption that an artisan processes skill rather than
stupidity (In re Sovish, 769 F.2d 738, 743, 226 USPQ 771, 774
(Fed. Cir. 1985)) supports a conclusion that the claimed
-12-
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007