Appeal No. 2003-0065
Application 09/491,284
if the bottom surface of the slider is characterized as the pad,
the entire rigid body slider must constitute the pad, in which
case the leading edge is not narrower than the trailing edge
(Br8). Appellants refer to a Board opinion in Application
08/161,234, wherein a panel held that it was error for the
examiner to rely on only part of a load-bearing surface in a
patent to Coughlin to meet the claim.
The examiner relies on the bottom surface of the slider as
the pad and does not address appellants' argument that the whole
slider must be considered the pad (EA8). The examiner dismisses
the arguments in the '234 application as irrelevant because the
Coughlin reference has not been applied (EA8).
Initially, we note that claim 10 does not recite slider
structure other than the transducer and the pad and claim 10 does
not define the structure of the pad. Therefore, nothing in
claim 10 prevents the pad from reading on slider 1 in Fig. 7.
However, the pad must be the whole slider, not just the bottom
surface as interpreted by the examiner. The pad in Fukuoka is
basically a rectangular parallelepiped with two corners rounded
off and it is not fair to say that the leading edge has a width
substantially narrower than the trailing edge when only part of
the edge is narrower. While an argument could have been made
that it would have been obvious to shape the whole slider 1 in
the U-shape of the bottom surface, the present rejection is based
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