Appeal No. 2006-0269
Application No. 10/166,154
The prior art reference cited by the examiner is:
Thaman et al. (Thaman) 4,891,227 Jan. 2, 1990
Maddern et al. (Maddern) 5,910,455 Jun. 8, 1999
Farrell (Farrell) 6,063,390 May 16, 2000
Brennan et al. (Brennan) 6,361,784B1 Mar. 26, 2002
Charambura et al. (Charambura) 6,610,311B2 Aug. 26, 2003
Grounds of Rejection
1. Claims 1, 2, and 6-11 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a), as obvious
over Farrell in view of Brennan and Thaman.
2. Claim 3 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a), as obvious over Farrell in
view of Brennan and Thaman and Maddern.
3. Claims 1 and 8 -11 are provisionally rejected under the judicially created
doctrine of obviousness-type double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 1 of US
Pat. No. 6610311 B2 taken with Brennan and Thaman.1
We affirm these rejections.
1 We note that with regard to the double patenting rejection both the Final Rejection and the Answer refer
specifically to claim 1 of U.S. Pat. No. 6,610,311 B2 in the statement of the rejection but both rejections
additionally refer to Brennan and Thaman in the body of the rejections. The examiner indicates on page
11 of the Answer that “[i]t is noted that the mention of the secondary references that are used in the
[double patenting] rejection was inadvertently omitted in the rejection statement, but the body of the
rejection clearly refers to the Brennan and Thaman patents and the conclusion statements are based on
the motivations to combine the Charambura with the secondary references.” In spite of the examiner’s
clarification of the nature of the rejection in the Examiner’s Answer, the appellants chose not to comment
with respect to the double patenting rejection in the form of a Reply Brief. We agree with the examiner
that the actual discussion of the double patenting rejection makes clear that the examiner rejected the
claims over Charambura taken with Brennan and Thaman and include them in the double patenting
rejection.
2
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