Appeal No. 1999-2101 Page 6
Application No. 08/929,012
fashion as to minimize the amount of material required, which "has a direct correlation to the
'size' of the material." As for the vacuum source for holding the material on the work surface
and the means on the carriage for moving the material onto the work surface, the examiner
points to Le Blond and Gerber '980, concluding from them that it would have been obvious to
provide these features on the system of Gerber '572. See Answer, pages 6-8. The thrust of
the appellant's arguments in rebuttal to the positions taken by the examiner is that all of the
applied references disclose systems in which a marker instruction is generated by data
received prior to the start of the cutting operation, which results in a static marker being
generated, whereas the claim recites a system in which a marker is "continuously" generated
in response to a stream of data, and the instructions include providing a "specific length value"
for the sheet material to cause the carriage material coupling means to advance bites of
material onto the table in response to this value to avoid partial cutting of parts of the pattern.
See Brief, pages 6-11.
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).
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