Appeal No. 2004-1914
Application No. 09/739,288
relied on the limitations of dependent claims, as argued in the briefs, expressly
conceding the propriety of the instant rejection of claim 1.
Claim 4 requires that each of the first contact piece and the second contact piece
is placed so that a longitudinal direction thereof is aligned with a radial direction from a
center of the insulating substrate. The examiner has provided an illustration, at page 8
of the Answer, to show how claim 4 is deemed to read on Figure 6 of Boyd. Appellants
respond (Reply Brief at 3) that “even though the Examiner picked the ‘center’ arbitrarily
in order to support the rejection, not even a single one of the contacts is aligned to point
at the asserted ‘center.’”
Claim 4, however, does not recite that the contact pieces are aligned to “point at”
the center, but that a longitudinal direction thereof is “aligned with” a radial direction
from a center of the substrate. A definition of the transitive verb “align” is “[t]o arrange in
a line or so as to be parallel: align the tops of a row of pictures; aligned the car with the
curb.” The American HeritageŽ Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition,
Copyright 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company, available at http://dictionary.reference.
com/search?q=align (Feb. 15, 2005).
Appellants thus seem to submit that “aligned” in claim 4 should be limited to the
meaning of arranging in a line, rather than including the equally valid dictionary meaning
of arranging so as to be parallel. The examiner’s broad reading of “aligned” appears to
be reasonable, in the interests of ascertaining the broadest reasonable interpretation of
the claim. Appellants could have amended claim 4 to be consistent with the position
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