Appeal No. 2005-0537
Application No. 08/925,985 Page 6
(brief, page 4).3 Consequently, we select claims 1, 4 and 25 as
the representative claims for our consideration of that ground of
rejection with respect to appellants’ claim groups I, II, and IV,
respectively. See 37 CFR § 1.192 (c)(7 and 8)(2000). Also,
appealed claim 9 (labeled as claim group III by appellants) and
appealed claim 30 (labeled as claim group VI by appellants) are
each separately argued with respect to the examiner’s rejection
of the appealed claims under the second paragraph of 35 U.S.C.
§ 112.
Concerning representative claims 1 and 25, the examiner
asserts that the terms “pure metallic material” and
“substantially pure metallic planar upper surface” as
respectively used in those representative claims represent
relative terms of undeterminable scope to one of ordinary skill
in the art given that no standard for assessing the meets and
bounds thereof has been furnished by appellants. See page 5 of
the answer.
Appellants, on the other hand, maintain that one of ordinary
skill in the art would understand the scope of the representative
3
3 Appellants’ group I includes claims 1, 2, 7, 8 and 10,
appellants’ group II includes claims 4-6, and appellants’ group
IV includes claims 25, 29 and 31-33.
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