Appeal No. 2001-2046
Application No. 08/665,046
In other words, Athere still must be evidence that >a skilled artisan, . . . with no
knowledge of the claimed invention, would select the elements from the cited prior art
references for combination in the manner claimed.=@ Ecolochem Inc. v. Southern
California Edison, 227 F.3d 1361, 1375, 56 USPQ2d 1065, 1075-76 (Fed. Cir. 2000).
In the present case, the examiner has failed to indicate and provide evidence of
the specific understanding or principle within the knowledge of a skilled artisan, explicit
or implicit, that would have motivated one with no knowledge of appellants= invention to
make the combination in the manner claimed. In re Rouffet, 149 F.3d 1350, 1357, 47
USPQ2d 1453, 1457 (Fed. Cir. 1998). In re Kotzab, 217 F.3d 1365, 1369-70, 55
USPQ2d 1313, 1316 (Fed. Cir. 2000).
On the facts and record before us, we find that the examiner has not established
a prima facie case of obviousness, as the examiner has failed to provide supporting
prior art evidence of Asubstantially uniformly distributing sources of the sex pheromone
having an effective component release rate of 0.01-2 g/day over the central region of
the field at 1 to 50 locations/ha, and substantially uniformly distributing sources of the
sex pheromone having an effective component-release rate of 0.01 to 0.05 g/day over
the peripheral region of the field at 500 to 2000 locations/ha,@ as claimed.
We find it unnecessary to reach additional rebuttal argument and Declaration
evidence of appellants as we find the examiner has not met the burden of setting forth
a prima facie case of unpatentability based on obviousness. In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d
8
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007