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In re Harris

484 F.2d 965, 179 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 299, 1973 CCPA LEXIS 260
CourtCourt of Customs and Patent Appeals
DecidedSeptember 20, 1973
DocketPatent Appeal No. 9037
StatusPublished

This text of 484 F.2d 965 (In re Harris) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Customs and Patent Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
In re Harris, 484 F.2d 965, 179 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 299, 1973 CCPA LEXIS 260 (ccpa 1973).

Opinion

BALDWIN, Judge.

This appeal is from the decision of the Patent Office Board of Appeals, adhered to on reconsideration, sustaining the rejection of claims 5 and 6 of appellant’s application,1 on the basis of 35 U. S.C. § 103. Claims 1-4 of that application stand allowed.

The Invention

The invention relates to aiming devices for firearms, optical instruments, parabolic microphones and the like. The nature of the basic invention is sufficiently indicated by claim 5:

5. In an optical aiming device of the type which projects a spot of light rearwardly of the device to be aimed and the user aims by keeping both eyes open, one eye seeing the light spot and the other eye seeing the target so that the spot is superimposed on the target, the improvement which comprises:
a light source of a first color embedded in a light gathering filter of a second color whereby under conditions of high ambient lighting intensity a light spot appears as said second color and under conditions of low ambient lighting intensity said light spot appears as said first color.

The specification states that while the human eye is most sensitive to light in the green range, the fact that aiming must often be done against green foliage precludes the use of that color for the light spot during daylight. In appellant’s preferred embodiment, the light gathering filter, and thus the light spot, are red when ambient lighting is high, because red contrasts well with both green and blue backgrounds. Also in said embodiment the “light source of a first color” is green radioluminescent material, so that when ambient lighting is low (e. g., at dusk, or after dark) and that source thus becomes the primary source of light, the light spot appears green. Claim 6 is directed to that preferred embodiment.

The Prior Art

The examiner rejected all of the claims under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpat[966]*966entable over patents to Holme2 and Rickert et al. (Rickert).2 3 The board reversed the examiner’s rejection of claims 1-4, stating that “[t]he Rickert et al. apparatus and Holme apparatus operate in entirely different manners.” The board sustained the rejection of claims 5 and 6 without reliance on the Holme patent. Therefore we need describe only the disclosure of Rickert.

Rickert is concerned with luminous ret-icles for rifle telescopes and similar instruments. One embodiment of the invention is shown in Rickert’s Figure 1: [967]*967Reticle illuminator 6 directs light through reticle 2, which has transparent or translucent lines or other indicia, one example being lines in the form of a sighting cross. The light rays from reticle 2 are reflected through the eyepiece from the semitransparent mirrored surface of beam splitter 80. Thus the viewer simultaneously observes the target image and the illuminated image from the reticle.

[966]

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Related

Conditions for patentability; non-obvious subject matter
35 U.S.C. § 103

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Bluebook (online)
484 F.2d 965, 179 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 299, 1973 CCPA LEXIS 260, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/in-re-harris-ccpa-1973.