Appeal No. 2004-0350
Application No. 09/570,507
to said ladder and wrapped thereabout. Further details of this
appealed subject matter are set forth in the appealed independent
claims which are claims 1, 10, 14 and 15. A copy of these claims,
taken from the Appellant’s brief, is appended to this decision.
The references set forth below are relied upon by the Examiner
as evidence of obviousness:
Hailer et al. (Hailer) 4,932,657 June 12, 1990
Kraushaar 5,165,694 Nov. 24, 1992
Schmidt 5,539,957 July 30, 1996
Claims 1-3, 5-11 and 14 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103(a) as being unpatentable over Kraushaar in view of Hailer,
and claims 15 and 16 stand correspondingly rejected over these
references and further in view of Schmidt.1
We refer to the brief and reply brief2 and to the answer for
1 On page 5 of the brief, the Appellant has identified
three separate claim groupings, namely, (1) claims 1-3 and 5-11,
(2) claim 14 and (3) claims 15 and 16. Accordingly, in our
assessment of the above noted rejections, we will focus on the
independent claims in these respective claim groupings with
respect to which the dependent claims will stand or fall. See
37 CFR § 1.192(c)(7)(2002).
2 Via paper no. 21, the Examiner has indicated that the
reply brief has been entered and considered but that the
documents submitted therewith as secondary evidence have not been
entered. It follows that we have not considered these non-
entered documents in our disposition of this appeal.
2
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