Appeal No. 2005-1042
Application No. 09/759,543
As for the Provi reference and the corresponding rejection
of claim 4, the appellants’ only comment is that Provi does “not
come closer to the presently claimed invention than the [Goss and
Patten] references discussed above and thus any detailed comments
thereon would be superfluous” (brief, page 8). As reflected by
our discussion above, however, we consider Goss and Patten to
evince a prima facie case of obviousness with respect to appealed
independent claim 1. For this reason and because dependent claim
4 has not been separately argued with any reasonable specificity,
we also hereby sustain the section 103 rejection of claim 4 as
being unpatentable over Goss in view Patten and further in view
of Provi.2
Our study of the applied references leads us to conclude
that it would have been obvious for an artisan to replace the
solid housing material of Goss’s level with a foamed metal
material in order to obtain the benefits taught by Brungs (e.g.,
see the paragraph bridging columns 3 and 4 as well as lines 3-32
in column 5). The appellants’ arguments in opposition to this
conclusion of obviousness are unpersuasive for reasons analogous
2
2 As a matter of interest, we point out that the Provi
reference does not appear to be necessary in this rejection of
claim 4. This is because the recess feature of claim 4 is
clearly disclosed by Goss (e.g., see Figure 2 and the
corresponding narrative disclosure).
6
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