Appeal No. 2005-1386
Application No. 10/010,620
obvious to one of ordinary skill in this art at the time of
appellants’ invention to combine the lofted mat of Kane as an
additional layer in the multilayer laminate of Arnold to produce a
particularly desired lofty product of Arnold as well as enhance the
structural integrity of the product for further processing.
Therefore we affirm the examiner’s rejection of the product claim
21, and claims 22-25, 27, and 29-38 which stand or fall with claim
21, under section 103(a) over Arnold in view of Kane.
With regard to the process claims, we note that the examiner
has not set forth any rationale for this rejection in the statement
of the rejection (Answer, pages 3-4). However, in the “Response to
Argument” section (Answer, page 5), the examiner states that the
rejection does not rely on the HAK of Arnold for crimping but that
the claims could be interpreted as having the fibers already
crimped by the process of Kane before being deposited on the
substrate of Arnold. Although we agree with the examiner that the
second layer of crimped homofilament fibers in step (c) of claim 7
includes already crimped fibers, we determine that the examiner has
failed to establish that step (d) of claim 7 was disclosed or
suggested by the combination of Arnold and Kane (see the Reply
Brief, pages 4-5). The examiner has not found that Kane discloses
or suggests a crimp-setting step (see the Answer in its entirety).
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