Appeal No. 2004-1862
Application No. 09/784,041 Page 6
Appellant maintains that the examiner’s proposed
modification of Muraoka is not supported by the evidence relied
upon by the examiner. In this regard, appellant argues that
there is a lack of a legally specific suggestion for the
examiner’s proposed modification. Appellant further asserts that
the examiner appears to have employed impermissible hindsight in
fashioning the rejection on what could be termed an obvious to
try rationale. Appellant returns several times to Muraoka in
asserting that Muraoka developed a chafer rubber composition
having the desired properties of high aging resistance, high
durability and high hardness without using BCl. Consequently, in
appellant’s view that fact militates against the examiner’s
proposed modification.
We disagree with appellant’s arguments because Muraoka, as
discussed above, expressly teaches that the chafer rubber
composition disclosed therein can include additional rubber
additives that are generally used in tire production. Here, the
examiner has made the unchallenged factual determination that
reversion agents are such a generally used additive. Given the
disclosure in Majumdar that BCl is an anti-reversion agent (anti-
aging agent), one of ordinary skill in the art would have
reasonably expected that the addition of such an agent to the
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007