Appeal No. 2004-1074
Application No. 09/924,772
To overcome this admitted deficiency, the examiner looks to
Okamoto’s disclosure of a noise suppressing electrical connector
designed to facilitate automated assembly. This connector
includes a filter block 1 comprising “a plurality of lead
terminals 2 arranged in parallel, a capacitor array 3 for the
lead terminals 2, and an earth metal plate 4, all stacked one
upon the other and molded together with an insulating synthetic
resin 5” (column 3, lines 7 through 11).
In proposing to combine Cohen and Okamoto to reject claims 1
and 13, the examiner submits that
it would have been obvious to overmold an insulative
pin holder over the filter assembly 18 of Cohen
(including or not including the insulator 14), as
taught in Okamoto, and as suggested by figures 2-5, 10,
and 11 of Cohen. The suggestion or motivation for
doing so would have been [to] facilitate automated
assembly as taught in Okamoto [answer, page 4].
The test for obviousness is not whether the features of a
secondary reference may be bodily incorporated into the structure
of the primary reference; nor is it that the claimed invention
must be expressly suggested in any one or all of the references.
Rather, the test is what the combined teachings of the references
would have suggested to those of ordinary skill in the art. In
re Keller, 642 F.2d 413, 425, 208 USPQ 871, 881 (CCPA 1981).
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