Zentian Ltd. v. Apple Inc.

Zentian Ltd. v. Apple Inc. The Federal Circuit affirmed the Board’s construction of “feature vector” to include codewords/vector-quantized representative feature vectors because claim 1 covers quantities “extracted and/or derived” from a digital audio stream. Substantial evidence supported the Board’s finding that Jiang’s codewords met that construction, sustaining the obviousness determination. The decision underscores that “derived” claim language can broaden a data-processing term to cover representative or transformed values, including vector-quantized codewords, when supported by the claim text. Affirmed. The dispute centered on whether claim 1’s “feature vector” was limited to “pure” quantities extracted directly from the audio stream or also covered derived representations such as Jiang’s codewords. The court agreed with the Board that the claim phrase “extracted and/or derived quantities” gave separate meaning to “derived” and was not limited to directly extracted values. Zentian’s argument that a representation of a feature vector is not itself a feature vector failed because the Board found Jiang’s codewords were representative feature vectors under the proper construction. The court also rejected Zentian’s arguments that preexisting codewords could not be “derived from” the audio stream and that a codeword had only a single value, finding substantial evidence for the Board’s contrary findings. With Jiang’s codewords within the scope of “feature vector,” the Federal Circuit affirmed the Board’s obviousness ruling as to all challenged claims. § 103 claim construction non-precedential § 103 claim construction non-precedential § 103 claim construction