Appeal No. 2001-1493 Page 7
Application No. 09/109,016
suggests that the examiner has misinterpreted claims 11 and 16. Claims 11 and 16 do
not require a punch head that may encompass various shapes or even a plurality of
interchangeable punch heads of various shapes. Rather, these claims limit the shape of
the cutout to one of the seven shapes enumerated therein. In any event, we find no
suggestion in the plastic bag punch apparatus of Piazze, which comprises punch
members 54 for forming spindle receiving openings, such as openings 14, and punch
members 53 for forming cutouts 18, for modifying any of the shapes of the punch pins 27 of
the Yerkes punch. The cutouts 18 are formed in the plastic bags by Piazze’s apparatus for
the particular purpose of reducing the amount of material between the spindle receiving
openings 14 and the edge of the bag so that the bag can be easily removed from the
spindle by tearing. As the paper sheets perforated by the Yerkes punch apparatus are
intended to be stored in ring binders or pin files and not to be carried on spindles and
removed therefrom by tearing, an artisan would have found no incentive to provide the
Yerkes punch with structure for forming such cutouts in the sheets of paper. Thus, the
teachings of Piazze with respect to the cutouts 18 would not have commended themselves
to such an artisan in designing the punch heads of the Yerkes punch.
As claims 11 and 16 depend from claims 10 and 15, respectively, and as the
above-noted deficiency of the combination of Yerkes and Szanto finds no cure in the
teachings of Piazze, for the reasons just discussed, the rejection of dependent claims 11
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007