Appeal No. 2004-1671
Application No. 09/905,024
case of obviousness with respect to the subject matter of claims 5
and 15 which has not been sufficiently rebutted by appellant.
Issue 5: The Rejection over Winn, Reichert, Lam, Baker and York
To reject claims 24 and 28, the Examiner adds York. Appellant
argues that York does not teach a programmable control system
responsive to operator selection of a particular size pack to be
stamped for automatically adjusting operating parameters to
accommodate the particular size pack selected (Brief, p. 16). The
examiner finds that the cranks 30 and 48 of York constitute a
progammable control system. I agree with appellant that a manually
turned crank is not a programmable control system. As those words
are understood in the processing arts, they require a control
system that can accept computer programming code.
I conclude that the examiner has failed to establish a prima
facie case of obviousness with respect to claims 24 and 28.
Issue 6: The Rejection over Winn, Reichert, Lam, Baker, and Mattei
To reject claims 23 and 27, the examiner adds Mattei (Final
Rejection, p. 14). Appellant argues that because Mattei discloses
handling individual cigarette packages rather than a carton of
cigarette packages, it is inappropriate to combine Mattei with the
other relied upon references (Brief, p. 17). I do not find this
argument convincing because Mattei provides a suggestion of how to
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