Appeal No. 2002-2208 Page 10
Application No. 09/543,989
burden to appellant to prove that Yoder’s plank member 24 does not possess the
resiliency required by claim 25. Appellant has not come forth with evidence or
reasoning to meet this burden. Thus, we shall sustain the examiner’s rejection of claim
25, as well as claims 26 and 27 which fall with representative claim 25, as being
anticipated by Yoder.
We turn finally to the examiner’s rejection of claims 25-34 as being anticipated
by Groh. As articulated on page 4 of the answer, the examiner’s rejection is based on a
determination that the structure illustrated in Figure 6, which includes the rolled steel
bleacher beam 130 and the “generally rigid” thermoplastic cover 131 installed over the
steel beam, is an extrusion as called for in appellant’s claim 25. While the cover 131 is
a coextrusion of a capstock 119 and substrate 120, it does not comprise a pair of inner
and outer leg members as recited in claim 25. The steel beam 130, on the other hand,
comprises a pair of outer leg members (outer vertical walls 136), a pair of inner leg
members (intermediate vertical walls 133), an upper load bearing horizontal portion
(upper ledges 134 and upper central table 132) and a lower horizontal support member
(horizontal bases 135) connecting each outer leg member to an adjacent inner leg
member, but cannot reasonably be considered to be a resilient extrusion as called for in
claim 25 (see brief, page 5). We thus cannot sustain the examiner’s rejection of claim
25, or claims 26-34 which depend from claim 25, as being anticipated by Groh.
CONCLUSION
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