Opinions — Friday, September 25, 2026

The Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's determination that all claims of Zentian Ltd.'s U.S. Patent No. 10,062,377, directed to speech-recognition systems, are unpatentable as obvious over prior art reference Jiang. The central dispute concerned whether Jiang's disclosure of "codewords"—vector-quantized representations of feature vectors used to reduce computational load—satisfied claim limitations requiring calculations performed using "feature vectors" comprising quantities "extracted and/or derived" from a digital audio stream.

The court's analysis turned on the claim language itself, particularly the disjunctive "extracted and/or derived" in the feature vector definition. Applying the presumption that different claim terms carry different meanings, the Federal Circuit agreed with the Board that "derived" must mean something distinct from "extracted," bringing Jiang's codewords within the claim scope even though they are not quantities actually extracted from the audio stream. The court rejected Zentian's arguments that codewords are mere "representations" (illustrated by Zentian's invocation of Magritte's "This is not a pipe"), that advance determination of codewords precluded them from being "derived from" a later audio stream, and that codewords lack the requisite plurality of quantities, finding substantial evidence supported the Board's conclusion that selecting an appropriate codeword to represent computed feature vectors still constitutes deriving quantities from the stream.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's grant of judgment on the pleadings that claims of three related AudienceScience patents directed to selecting internet advertisements are ineligible under § 101. The asserted claims recite methods for selecting and displaying advertisements based on keywords mapped from a user's browsing history and the current webpage, with advertisements weighted by a "performance score" reflecting revenue generation. The court held that the claims are directed to the abstract idea of targeting advertisements to internet users to maximize revenue generation.

At Alice step one, the court rejected AudienceScience's argument that the claims address a problem specific to computer networks under DDR Holdings, reasoning that selecting effective advertisements is a non-internet-centric problem analogous to conventional targeting in print or television media. The court found that the claims merely apply a known business process to the internet environment, and that the recited steps—though "highly granular"—describe functional results rather than a specific technological solution. At step two, the court determined that neither the performance score limitation nor the combination of two conventional advertising approaches (user history and page context) constituted an inventive concept, noting that the specification failed to describe a precise weighting methodology beyond rating by revenue generated.