Appeal No. 1998-2476
Application No. 08/074,485
Rejections under 35 U.S.C. § 103
Various combinations of the references are suggested by
the examiner to reject various claims. We will now consider
each of these combinations separately.
McClure and Toupin3
The examiner rejects claims 115-144, 149-169, 174-194,
199-219, and 224-230 as being unpatentable over McClure in
view of Toupin at pages 6 to 11 of the final rejection. The
examiner asserts, id. at 7, that “[i]t would have been obvious
. . . to utilize McClure’s piezoelectric material connected to
the medium, as taught by Toupin . . . .” Appellants counter
the examiner’s position at pages 36-44 and 48-83 of the brief.
We have reviewed the positions of the examiner and appellants
and conclude that there is no motivation or reasoning to
combine Toupin and McClure as each of them provides its own
way of having an optimum arrangement of either the movement of
the recording medium or the movement of the head while keeping
the other fixed. Furthermore, the examiner has not shown how
he proposes to modify Toupin by replacing the head of Toupin
3We treat the combination of Toupin and McClure as the
same as that of McClure and Toupin.
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