Appeal No. 2006-0455 Page 8
Application No. 10/217,378
We turn next to the rejection of claims 1-20 under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103(a) as being unpatentable over Mitsui in view of Iwata. The
examiner’s position (answer, pages 3-5) is that Mitsui does not
expressly disclose that the drive is oriented at an angle.
To overcome this deficiency of Mitsui, the examiner turns to
Iwata for a teaching of orienting the disc receiving receptacle
at an angle between the vertical and horizontal orientations of
the drive.
Appellant’s position (brief, page 17) that “it is not
apparent how providing such a rotatable disk tray would improve
the operability of the optical disk drive of Mitsui, as the
operation of floppy drives and optical disk drives are
different.” It is argued that the proposed modification is in
direct conflict with Mitsui’s desire to orient the drive in an
upright position in order to reduce the size of the computer
unit, and (brief, page 18) that an artisan would not be motivated
to make the modification.
From our review of Mitsui, we find disclosed that for the
purpose of reducing the size of the computer unit, some CD-ROM
drives are built into the unit in an upright position. It is
further disclosed that in a conventional CD-ROM drive, if the CD
is put in a upright position, it slips out of the disc tray (col.
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007