Appeal No. 1998-2314 Page 4
Application No. 07/902,957
All of the rejections are under Section 103. The test for obviousness is what the
combined teachings of the prior art would have suggested to one of ordinary skill in the art.
See, for example, In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413, 425, 208 USPQ 871, 881 (CCPA 1981). In
establishing a prima facie case of obviousness, it is incumbent upon the examiner to
provide a reason why one of ordinary skill in the art would have been led to modify a prior
art reference or to combine reference teachings to arrive at the claimed invention. See Ex
parte Clapp, 227 USPQ 972, 973 (Bd. Pat. App. & Int. 1985). To this end, the requisite
motivation must stem from some teaching, suggestion or inference in the prior art as a
whole or from the knowledge generally available to one of ordinary skill in the art and not
from the appellant's disclosure. See, for example, Uniroyal, Inc. v. Rudkin-Wiley Corp., 837
F.2d 1044, 1052, 5 USPQ2d 1434, 1439 (Fed. Cir.), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 825 (1988).
The objective of the appellants’ invention is to provide an entertainment medium by
utilizing the radiant energy environment of the cooking chamber of a microwave oven to
cause food such as popcorn to self-inflate the containers in which it is cooked into a shape
that simulates an article such as an animate object, a recognizable character or article, or
an animal. In furtherance of this objective, independent claims 1 and 15 recite, in
somewhat different terms, an inflatable container and a mass of unpopped popcorn in the
container. The inflatable container is pre-formed so as to be substantially fully inflatable into
a predetermined three-dimensional external shape by inflation gas generated in the
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