Examiner's BRI gambit sunk by BPAI in Givens: adjectives count

The set-up paragraph of the BPAI decision gives one the flavor of the "adjectives count" ruling by the BPAI in Ex parte Maurice Givens :

The Examiner finds that Lin teaches an LMS adaptive noise canceller
1412 that includes a sub-band spectral subtraction routine 1410 (Ans. 13).
The Examiner further finds that Appellant has not provided a specific
definition of “sub-band spectral subtractive routine” and thus, giving the
term its broadest reasonable interpretation, the term can include any adaptive
filter (Ans. 12). We cannot agree.

Even absent a definition, the words in the term matter:

Any interpretation that fails to give weight to
“sub-band,” “spectral,” “subtractive,” and “routine” deprives the words in
this claim term of their normal meaning. Thus, the “sub-band spectral
subtractive routine” does not include just any adaptive filter, but rather refers
to a specific filtering routine. Further, the output from Lin’s LMS based
adaption circuit is fed to a summer 1124, 1224 (Lin Fig. 14), not a sub-band
spectral subtractive routine. A summer is an additive circuit and not a
subtractive circuit. Also, Lin does not describe the summer as operating on
a sub-band. Thus, because Lin does not disclose each and every element of
Appellant’s invention, Lin does not anticipate claims 1-15. RCA Corp. v.
Appl. Dig. Data Sys., Inc., 730 F.2d 1440, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1984).

[Note the Givens case was decided in August 2009; the cases below were decided after
but publicized first.]

Previous IPBiz posts about "broadest reasonable interpretation" {BRI]-->


USPTO found "too broad" in giving "broadest reasonable construction"

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2010/03/broadest-reasonable-interpretation-and.html