Appeal No. 1999-0956
Application No. 08/584,084
comprising” phrase denoting those elements of the claimed
combination which appellants consider to be new or improved.
Based on the claim format appellants have chosen to use, the
examiner’s attempt to read the preamble recitations out of claim
28 is not appropriate. This is so because 37 CFR § 1.75(e)
indicates that in an “improvement comprising” claim, the portion
of the claim following the preamble is not a self-contained
description of the structure being claimed, and the subject
matter described in the body of the claim does depend for
completeness upon the introductory (preamble) clause.
Accordingly, we view claim 28 as being drawn not merely to a
“device for folding a work piece,” as urged by the examiner, but
rather to “a card package production system” that is capable of
producing the specialized “card packages” described in the
preamble of the claim.
Turning to Labombarde, we note that the device disclosed
therein is a “mechanism for folding the leading flaps of a
plurality of flat articles such as box blanks advancing
individually and successively along the paper line of a folding
machine” (column 1, lines 15-18). The operation of a
representative embodiment of Labombarde’s mechanic is illustrated
in Figure 1-5, wherein it can be seen that when the leading end
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