Appeal No. 2002-0815
Application 08/902,171
must be apprised of what the patent covers, so that those who
approach the area circumscribed by the claims of a patent may
more readily and accurately determine the boundaries of
protection in evaluating the possibility of infringement and
dominance. See In re Hammack, 427 F.2d 1378, 1382, 166 USPQ 204,
208 (CCPA 1970).
In the present case, the claimed terminology respecting the
wholesale price as set forth in claims 2-4 is not a reasonably
predictable physical property of the claimed garment. Rather,
as basically found by the examiner at page 4 of the answer,
a wholesale price can be determined by a variety of methods based
on a number of disconnected business decisions and unexpected
eventualities leaving the scope of what claims 2-4 cover unclear.
Piggybacking such indeterminate pricing methodologies onto an article
of manufacture, as in claims 2-4, results in an improper aggregation
of disconnected economic/business considerations with the claimed article
of manufacture itself and is in violation of the requirements and
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