Appeal 2007-0796
Application 10/236,088
type of article addressed in each reference. Rather, the retractable
information strip concepts appear to be technology-independent.
While Appellant may be correct that Mengel does not teach a cap
having an internal storage compartment for accommodating an extendable
and retractable elongated member, a person of ordinary skill in the art at the
time of Appellant's invention would have readily appreciated, from the
teachings of Klophaus and Fisher, how to provide such storage within the
cap while still permitting the cap to accommodate the container and function
as a cap. We therefore do not agree with Appellant that the incorporation of
a rectractable and extendable information strip within a cap for the Mengel
container would be structurally impossible or that such a strip would not fit
within a cap for the container. While some reconfiguration of the profile of
the cap might be desirable to better accommodate and format the
information provided on the information package or strip, this would not
appear to be beyond the technical grasp of one of ordinary skill in the art.
For all of the above reasons, modification of Mengel to provide a
retractable and extendable information strip in the cap, either in place of or
in addition to the retractable and extendable information package provided
within the container itself, is simply a predictable use of prior art elements
according to their established functions, well within the technical grasp of a
person of ordinary skill in the art, and thus would have been obvious. The
rejection is sustained.
Rejection (6)
Claim 8 depends from claim 1 and further recites that the elongated
member comprises information relating to the use of the contents of the
container. We find Mengel's discussion of the need of containers "to
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