Appeal 2006-3349
Application 09/908,360
The double patenting rejection
Appellants do not contest the merits of the Examiner’s rejection of
claims 80 and 82-99 under the judicially-created doctrine of obviousness-
type double patenting (Answer 7) in either their Appeal Brief or their Reply
Brief. Appellants filed a Terminal Disclaimer on October 17, 2005 in an
attempt to obviate the rejection. As noted by the Examiner (Answer 2), the
Terminal Disclaimer was not accepted, and therefore is not effective to
obviate the rejection, because it was not signed by an attorney of record in
the application. Appellants do not challenge the Examiner’s refusal to
accept the Terminal Disclaimer, instead offering that “[a] subsequent
Terminal Disclaimer signed by an attorney of record will be filed upon
indication of allowable subject matter” (Reply Br. 3). In light of the absence
of either a substantive argument on the merits of the rejection or an accepted
Terminal Disclaimer, we summarily sustain the obviousness-type double
patenting rejection of claims 80 and 82-99.
The anticipation and obviousness rejections
All of the Examiner’s anticipation and obviousness rejections are
grounded in part on the Examiner’s determination that Kojima discloses “a
two robot drive hub with four coaxial shafts along a vertically oriented
longitudinal axis” as called for in Appellants’ independent claims 80 and 86
(Answer 4, 7). Appellants argue that Kojima does not disclose such a two
robot drive hub (Appeal Br. 7-8) and that none of the other applied
references makes up for this perceived deficiency (Appeal Br. 8-11).
Appellants allege no other error in the Examiner’s rejections. Accordingly,
the only issue in this appeal is whether Kojima discloses “a two robot drive
5
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013