Appeal No. 2000-1101 Page 4
Application No. 08/702,325
combine the relevant teachings of the references to arrive at the claimed invention.
See In re Fine, 837 F.2d 1071, 1074, 5 USPQ2d 1596, 1598 (Fed. Cir. 1988) and In re
Lintner, 458 F.2d 1013, 1016, 173 USPQ 560, 562 (CCPA 1972).
All the claims under appeal require in one manner or another a lubricant over
both the landing zone and the data zone of a thin film magnetic disc wherein the
lubricant has been fractionated to exclude fractions of high molecular weight relative to
molecular weights of the lubricant prior to fractionation.
In the rejection before us in this appeal, the examiner (1) set forth teachings of
the applied prior art (answer, pp. 3-4); and (2) determined that it would have been
obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to (a) use a purified lubricant as taught by
Ohnuki on Gonnella's magnetic disc, and (b) use carbon dioxide to purify Ohnuki's
lubricant as suggested by the Polymer Science Encyclopedia (answer, pp. 4-5).1
Based on our analysis and review of Gonnella and the claims under appeal, it is
our opinion that one difference is the limitation that the lubricant over both the landing
zone and the data zone of the thin film magnetic disc has been fractionated to exclude
1 The examiner did not ascertain the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue or
determine that the claimed subject matter would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to
a person of ordinary skill in the art.
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