Appeal No. 2005-0121
Application No. 10/074,154
skill in the art.
Accordingly, we shall not sustain the standing 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) rejection of
independent claims 1 and 5, and dependent claims 3, 4, 6 and 7, as being unpatentable over
Murphy.
II. The provisional obviousness-type double patenting rejection of claims 1 and 3 through 7 over
claims 1 through 10, 12 through 14 and 17 of co-pending Application No. 09/572,214 in view of
Murphy
This rejection is unsound on its face due to the examiner’s failure to analyze each of the
rejected claims vis-a-vis individual ones of the co-pending claims of Application No.
09/572,214.
On a more substantive level, in explaining the rejection the examiner seems to have
confused the subject matter recited in the rejected claims with that recited in the claims of
Application No. 09/572,214 (see the sentence bridging pages 3 and 4 in the answer). Suffice to
say, however, that none of the claims in Application No. 09/572,214 contains limitations
corresponding to those in rejected independent claims 1 and 5 relating to the tray and to the
substantially equal planar or surface area sizes. The examiner’s reliance on Murphy to overcome
these deficiencies is ill founded for the reasons discussed above in connection with the § 103(a)
rejection.
Consequently, we also shall not sustain the standing provisional obviousness-type double
patenting rejection of claims 1 and 3 through 7 over claims 1 through 10, 12 through 14 and 17
of co-pending Application No. 09/572,214 in view of Murphy.
5
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007