Appeal No. 2006-1654
Application No. 09/929,488
considered claim 1 as the representative claim for this rejection, we will also
sustain the examiner’s rejection of claims 2-7 and 10-17.
We find that the examiner has clearly met his/her burden of
establishing that claims 1-7 and 10-17 are prima facie obvious by showing
(as admitted by appellant; see corrected brief, page 6) that the claimed
range of representative claim 1 is completely encompassed by the prior art.
See In re Harris, supra at 1341. Once the examiner has established a prima
facie case of obviousness, the burden then shifts to appellant to provide an
affidavit or declaration showing unexpected results, as discussed supra.
Because appellant has failed to provide evidence of unexpected results
associated with the claimed narrower range, we need not reach the other
arguments raised by appellant in the briefs asserting, inter alia, that Baur is
already optimized at a twist angle range of -15 to +15 degrees and
therefore there is no suggestion in the reference to separately adjust the
twist angle parameter [corrected brief, page 6]. Nevertheless, in order to
provide a complete response to appellant’s arguments, we disagree with
appellant’s assertion that there is no suggestion in the Baur reference to
separately adjust the twist angle parameter [id.]. In particular, we note
again that Baur explicitly discloses that a “liquid crystal has a twistable
structure and the amount of light transmission through the liquid crystal
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