Appeal No. 2002-1015
Application 09/129,339
considerations, appellants appear to be attempting to secure
broad patent protection for a known device.
At the top of page 4 of our prior decision we repeated the
language "to control the shape of the wavefront of a beam in the
illumination beam path" from claim 25 and then we went on to
state that it "is this language that is stated at the bottom of
page 9 of the brief to be 'the main issue to be decided on
appeal'." Appellants' urgings at page 8 of the Request for
Rehearing that it is the Board who has unduly limited appellants'
claim 25 on appeal are clearly misplaced. No other feature than
the quoted feature of claim 25 was argued in the brief and reply
brief before us when we rendered our prior decision. Even so, we
also explained, beginning at page 5 of our earlier decision, all
of the elements of claim 25 were correlated to teachings and
showings in Hakamata's Figure 7 just as the examiner did at page
3 of the answer.
As plainly set forth in our prior decision, we agreed with
and expanded upon slightly the examiner's reasons of
unpatentability of the various claims on appeal under 35 U.S.C.
§ 102 and 35 U.S.C. § 103 as set forth in the final rejection and
answer. We addressed and found unpersuasive appellants' argu-
ments in the brief and reply brief. Appellants' are now hard
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