Appeal No. 2003-2003
Application No. 09/746,474
indicated by the examiner, this statement has no apparent
relevance to Meckel’s lustrous gray or silver color coatings
which do not contain carbon. In any event, the “comprised of”
language in appealed independent claim 1 permits the inclusion of
other unrecited elements and thus does not exclude carbon as
implied by the appellants’ statement. See In re Baxter, 656 F.2d
679, 686, 210 USPQ 795, 802 (CCPA 1981).
In light of the foregoing and for the reasons expressed by
the examiner, it is our determination that the Welty and Meckel
references establish a prima facie case of obviousness with
respect to the independent claim on appeal which the appellants
have failed to successfully rebut with arguments and/or evidence
of nonobviousness. See In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1445, 24
USPQ2d 1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992). It follows that we will
sustain the examiner’s section 103 rejection of claims 1-7 and
12-14 as being unpatentable over Welty and Meckel. The
additional section 103 rejections of claims 8-11 as being
unpatentable over these references and further in view of the
Moysan references likewise will be sustained since these
rejections have not been contested by the appellants on the
record before us.
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