Appeal No. 2006-2321
Application No. 10/706,254
the differing solutions proposed by them, any attempt to combine
them in the manner proposed by the Examiner could come only from
Appellants’ own disclosure and not from any teaching or
suggestion in the references themselves.
We also do not sustain the Examiner’s obviousness rejection
of claims 6-11, and 17 based on the combination of Bryant in view
of Hussein. The Examiner proposes (Answer, page 8) to modify the
self-servo writing disclosure of Bryant with the addition of the
selective gate enabling and disabling write teachings of Hussein
“in order to improve the system performance of a hard disk
drive.” We find the Examiner’s position, however, to be totally
devoid of any evidentiary support on the record. While the
Examiner (id.) does make reference to column 2, lines 29-32 of
Hussein which suggests the saving in power consumption by the use
of write gate selective enabling and disabling, there is no
evidence to support the position that such a technique would also
apply to self-servo writing since Hussein is not concerned with
self-servo writing. It does not matter how strong the Examiner’s
convictions are that the claimed invention would have been
obvious, or whether we might have an intuitive belief that the
claimed invention would have been obvious within the meaning of
35 U.S.C. § 103. Neither circumstance is a substitute for
evidence lacking in the record before us.
8
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007