Appeal 2006-1708
Application 10/186,253
1 The Declarations contain only assertions that the fin design claimed in the
2 subject application has achieved commercial success. This alone is insufficient to
3 establish the required nexus. Claims are not technical descriptions of the disclosed
4 inventions but are legal documents like the descriptions of lands by metes and
5 bounds in a deed which define the area conveyed but do not describe the land.
6 Because of this characteristic of claims, the commercial success of a machine
7 "claimed" may be due entirely to improvements or modifications made by others to
8 the invention disclosed in the application for patent. Such success is not pertinent
9 to the nonobviousness of the advantages inherent in what is specifically disclosed
10 in the application are not to be considered in determining nonobviousness. In re
11 Vamco Machine & Tool, Inc., 752 F.2d 1564, 1577 n.5, 224 USPQ 617, 625 n.5
12 (Fed. Cir. 1985). Furthermore, the Appellants have failed to submit any factual
13 evidence that would demonstrate the nexus between the sales and the claimed
14 invention-for example, an Affidavit from the purchaser explaining that the product
15 was purchased due to the claimed features. In the present case, the sales may have
16 been due to lower manufacturing costs, the market position of the Appellants or the
17 prior relations between the other companies. In sum, the Appellants simply have
18 not carried their burden to persuasively establish that a nexus existed between any
19 commercial success and the novel features claimed in the application.
20
21 Rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b)
22 The third issue is whether Yamamoto discloses fin walls having a V-shape.
23 We find that Yamamoto discloses a heat exchanger having a series of parallel
24 spaced, vertically oriented, flow tubes (102) (Yamamoto, Fig. 6) having opposed
25 surfaces (102A) separated by a distance (Hf) (Hf is equal to c of the claimed
26 invention) ranging from 3 mm to 10 mm (Yamamoto, col. 4 ll. 12-15). A
11
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013