Appeal No. 2003-1924 Page 2
Application No. 08/554,533
the examiner's rejection of claims 16, 17, 37 through 39, and 59 through 62 under
35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over McLeod in view of Burgess.
We have carefully considered the arguments raised by the appellants in their
request for rehearing, however, those arguments do not persuade us that our decision was
in error in any respect.
In our affirmance of the rejection of claims 16, 17, 20, 23, 27, 30, 32 through 39, 42,
45, 49, 52, 54 through 62, 65, 68, 72, 75, and 77 through 81 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a), we
(1) determined the scope and content of the applied prior art (i.e., Murphy and McLeod);
(2) ascertained the difference between Murphy and claim 16; and (3) concluded that it
would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person of ordinary skill
in the art to have modified Murphy to arrive at the subject matter of claim 16 as suggested
and taught by McLeod.
The points that the appellants believe this panel of the Board of Patent Appeals and
Interferences to have misapprehended or overlooked in our earlier decision are:
a. In rejecting the claims as being obvious over Murphy in view of McLeod at page
6 of the Decision, the Board was essentially making a new rejection which
overlooked the teachings of the McLeod reference as a whole and therefore was
improper.
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