Appeal 2007-2127
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,621
disclosing the same subject matter. Common subject matter must be
disclosed, in both applications, either specifically or by an express
incorporation-by-reference of prior disclosed subject matter. Nothing
in section 120 itself operates to carry forward any disclosure from an
earlier application. In re de Seversky, supra at 674, 177 USPQ at
146-47. Section 120 contains no magical disclosure-augmenting
powers able to pierce new matter barriers. It cannot, therefore "limit"
the absolute and express prohibition against new matter contained in
section 251.
Facts
1. The 1982 and 1985 applications and the '603 patent (1990 application)
state that "[l]exical analysis is performed by a 'scanner' and is the process of
forming a sequence of source code bytes into meaningful symbols or tokens,
somewhat like forming a sequence of characters into English words" (1982
application, page 1; 1985 application, page 2; '603 patent, col. 3, lines 1-5)
and that "[t]hese [lexical and syntactic] analyses are very much like parsing
the words of an English sentence" (1982 application, page 1; 1985
application, page 2; '603 patent, col. 3, lines 13-14).
2. The two preceding statements are omitted in the 1994 application.
3. The 1990 application added disclosure not found in the 1982 and 1985
applications that the code being entered or edited at the keyboard "may
constitute either a formal or a natural language" ('603 patent, Abstract).
4. The 1990 application also added disclosure not found in the 1982 and
1985 applications that stated (now at '603 patent, col. 2, lines 31-55):
The language or other alphanumeric code processed by the
present invention may be either a natural language such as English, or
a formal language such as a programming language, or the numbers
and strings of a spreadsheet or database. Both natural and formal
languages are generally written in the same ASCII code, and the
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