Appeal No. 2001-0048
Application No. 08/497,481
Claims 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12 and 13 stand rejected under
35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Vaswani and
Cochcroft.
Rather than reiterate the viewpoints of the Examiner and
Appellants, we make reference to the answer (Paper No. 22, mailed
November 22, 1999) for the Examiner’s complete reasoning in
support of the rejection and the appeal brief1 (Paper No. 21,
filed September 13, 1999) for Appellants’ arguments thereagainst.
OPINION
At the outset, we note that Appellants state that claims 1,
7, 10 and 13 constitute one group while claims 3, 6, 8, 9 and 12
stand or fall together (brief, page 6). It is unclear why
Appellants have grouped independent claims 3, 9 and 12 separately
from their corresponding dependent claims 7, 10 and 13. Although
Appellants have provided a statement regarding the groupings of
the claims, Appellants provide no particular explanation in
support of grouping claims 7, 10 and 13 with claim 1 as required
by 37 C.F.R. § 1.192(c)(7) (1997), nor do we discern proper
justification from the language of the claims. We will, thereby,
1 A supplemental appeal brief was filed apparently in response to a
communication from the Examiner (paper No. 20, mailed August 30, 1999)
subsequent to filing the original appeal brief (Paper No. 19, filed June 14,
1999).
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