Appeal No. 1999-0509
Application No. 08/693,585
See In re Schreiber, 128 F.3d 1473, 1477, 44 USPQ2d 1429, 1431 (Fed. Cir. 1997), In re
Paulsen, 30 F.3d 1475, 1478-79, 31 USPQ2d 1671, 1673 (Fed. Cir. 1990), and RCA
Corp. v. Applied Digital Data Systems, Inc., 730 F.2d 1440, 1444, 221 USPQ. 385, 388
(Fed. Cir. 1984).
Claim 35 relates to the application of a heat shrinkable material to an article that
is formed with a body portion having an outer convex sur face centered about the article=s
central vertical axis. Claim 35 recites that the convex surface has a continuous curvature
to present a sector of maximum diameter between the top and bottom edges of the convex
surface. According to the method steps in claim 35, the heat shrinkable segment is
adhesively attached to the sector of maximum diameter along a narrow area of the sector
while wrapping the segment around the convex surface so that major portions of the
segment on either side of the narrow area are unattached, presumably to the sector prior
to heat shrinking those major portions onto the convex surface.
The Dickey patent also discloses a method of attaching a heat shrinkable material
in the form of a label to an article, namely a container. In addition to the container
configurations in the illustrated embodiments (i.e., the right-circular cylindrical container
of Figure 2 and the cup shaped container of Figure 9), Dickey discloses that the body
portion of the container may be Aelliptical in vertical cross-section@ (emphasis added)
(column 3, line 10). The elliptical shape corresponds to a flattened circle having its
widest or greatest dimension along the x axis (sometimes called the major axis) of the
ellipse to define convex end portions that are bisected by the x axis. These convex end
portions in the vertical cross section of Dickey=s elliptical container body define a convex
surface to present a sector of maximum diameter lying along the x axis and hence
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