Appeal No. 2000-0477
Application No. 08/834,410
independent claim 6.2 It follows that we also cannot sustain the
Section 103 rejection of claim 10 as being unpatentable over
Masters or the Section 103 rejection of claim 9 as being
unpatentable over Masters in view of Drummond.
Finally, the Section 103 rejection of claims 6-10 as being
unpatentable over Drummond in view of Masters likewise cannot be
sustained. This is because the rejection is fatally flawed by
the examiner’s position that the laser annealing step of Drummond
corresponds to the laser sintering step of the appealed claims.
Utterly no support for this position has been presented by the
examiner. On the other hand, the appellant has attached to his
reply brief definitions of the terms “anneal” and “sintering”
which unquestionably reflect that an annealing step may be
completely unrelated to the here claimed sintering step. On this
record, the examiner quite plainly has failed to carry her burden
of establishing a prima facie case for her previously mentioned
position.
2For clarification purposes, we point out that the now-dropped
alternative Section 103 rejection of claims 6-8 over Masters also did
not involve a conclusion of obviousness with respect to combining
certain of patentee’s disclosed features such as an inkjet printer,
particles in the form of a slurry and a laser for fusing particles in
order to sinter them together. Instead, this now-dropped rejection,
in essence, replaced the examiner’s previously mentioned inherency
theory (i.e., regarding the appellant’s claimed evaporating and
sintering steps) with an alternative theory based on obviousness.
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