Appeal No. 2004-0659
Application No. 09/111,978
41. Reissue application claims 1 through 29 were indicated as
allowable by the examiner and are not involved in the appeal.
42. New reissue application claims 30 through 85, as amended, were
rejected by the examiner and are before the Board in this appeal.
EXAMINER’S REJECTION
43. The examiner rejected reissue application claims 30 through 85
under 35 U.S.C. § 251 maintaining that the claims seek to "recapture" subject matter
surrendered in obtaining allowance of claims during prosecution of the application which
matured into the patent sought to be reissued.
44. The examiner based the rejection of claims 30 through 85 on the
grounds that when faced in the original application with a rejection under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103 over the Kuchel and Bullock prior art patents, applicant made the following three
significant amendments and two significant remarks:
(1) Applicant amended application claims 1 and 14 to include
the limitation of moving the object “at a substantially constant velocity;” application
claims 1 and 14 ultimately became patent claims 1 and 14, respectively.
(2) Applicant amended application claims 1 and 14 to include
the limitation of the detector elements being “substantially uniformly spaced.”
(3) Applicant amended application claims 1 and 14 to include
the limitation of the detector and the projector being in “a substantially” fixed
relationship.
(4) Applicant remarked “only with the present invention are
multiple scans coordinated with relative motion at a substantially constant velocity of the
object to extract phase information from substantially uniformly spaced detector
elements” (underlining ours).
(5) Applicant remarked “the present invention is limited in that
the at least one projector is maintained in a substantially fixed relation to the detector.”
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