Appeal No. 2005-2412
Application No. 10/018,818
1, as being unpatentable over the Beall references. This is due
to the fact that the modification proposed by the examiner in
this Section 103 rejection, even if made, would not cure the
previously discussed deficiency of Beall ‘510 and Beall ‘485.
Concerning the Section 102 rejection based on the Ruiz
patent, the examiner argues that patentee’s disclosure of
vertically stacked edible bowls (e.g., see 37 in figure 6)
anticipatorily satisfies the claim 1 limitations concerning both
the snack pieces and the shaped container bottom. As
explained on page 6 of the answer, “[t]he examiner relies on the
bottommost edible bowl (snack piece) [of Ruiz] as being the
. . . shaped container bottom.” Again, the examiner’s
interpretation of claim 1 is neither reasonable nor consistent
with the appellants’ specification. A review of this
specification clearly establishes that the here claimed shaped
container bottom cannot be interpreted to be the bottom one of
patentee’s edible stack (just as it cannot be interpreted to be
the bottom one of a Pringles® potato chip stack which the
appellants describe as prior art on page 1 of their
specification).
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