Appeal No. 2004-1815
Application No. 09/781,582 Page 15
has not carried the burden of establishing a prima facie case of
obviousness. Consequently, we will not sustain the examiner’s
§ 103(a) rejection of claim 14 over Ness ‘289 in view of Simmons.
Similarly, the examiner has not furnished a prima facie case
of obviousness with regard to the separate rejections of claim 15
over Ness ‘289 in view of Newarski. See, e.g., page 16 of the
brief. Consequently, we shall likewise reverse that rejection,
on this record.
Concerning claims 19-28, 32-34 and 49, the examiner relies
on Ness ’289 together with Ward and Smith in fashioning a
rejection under § 103(a). Regarding the features of independent
claim 19 and the rejected claims requiring such by virtue of
their dependency on claim 19, we note that the examiner
references Figure 6 of Ness ‘289 in the statement of the
rejection at pages 10-12 of the answer. The examiner explains how
the disclosure of Ness ‘289 is relevant to some of the features
of the rejected claims depending on claim 19, but does not
specifically address how the examiner considers that the features
of claim 19 that are common to all those claims are rendered
prima facie obvious by the applied references in the statement of
the rejection. In particular, we note, for example, that
appellants argue that the Figure 6 embodiment relied upon by the
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