Appeal No. 2001-0421
Application 08/926,835
which the appellants may seek to address these claim
indefiniteness issues are not only very limited but also are
potentially very costly in terms of time as well as money. A sad
but conceivable outcome of the actions here taken by the majority
is that (after considerable expenditures of time, effort and
money) the majority’s section 112 rejection ultimately is
overcome with the consequence that at some distant point in the
future the very same prior art rejections of the very same claims
before us today are returned to the Board for an unnecessarily
delayed review. An even more sad but conceivable outcome is that
the appellants simply give up their attempt to obtain a patent on
the here claimed invention, not due to the merits of
patentability but rather, due to sheer exhaustion.
For the above stated reasons, the majority’s actions are
unnecessary and worse are antithetical to this agency’s missions
and goals in support of the patent system.
CONCLUSION
The majority’s new rejection is legally unwarranted and its
vacatur of the examiner’s prior art rejections is completely
unnecessary. There are no acceptable reasons in support of these
actions and yet many well founded reasons in disfavor of them.
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