Appeal No. 2003-1575 Page 4
Application No. 09/420,306
examiner is insufficient to establish a prima facie case of obviousness with respect to
the claims under appeal. Accordingly, we will not sustain the examiner's rejection of
claims 2 to 4 under 35 U.S.C. § 103. Our reasoning for this determination follows.
In rejecting claims under 35 U.S.C. § 103, the examiner bears the initial burden
of presenting a prima facie case of obviousness. See In re Rijckaert, 9 F.3d 1531,
1532, 28 USPQ2d 1955, 1956 (Fed. Cir. 1993). A prima facie case of obviousness is
established by presenting evidence that would have led one of ordinary skill in the art to
combine the relevant teachings of the references to arrive at the claimed invention.
See In re Fine, 837 F.2d 1071, 1074, 5 USPQ2d 1596, 1598 (Fed. Cir. 1988) and In re
Lintner, 458 F.2d 1013, 1016, 173 USPQ 560, 562 (CCPA 1972).
With this as background, we analyze the prior art applied by the examiner in the
rejection of the claims on appeal.
Bleeker's invention relates to a massaging apparatus comprising two rollers
which are each rotatable about one of two mutually parallel spaced-apart roller
spindles, these rollers are to be placed onto the skin of a person with their
circumferential surfaces and are rotationally drivable in a given direction of rotation
when the massaging apparatus with its two rollers is moved over the skin of a person in
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