US 11710141

I'll search for authoritative information on this patent number, including any CAFC or litigation references.

Let me check specifically for litigation or CAFC docket entries involving this patent.

Let me try to retrieve the verbatim claim text for this patent.

US Patent No. 11,710,141 — Analyst Summary

Important scoping note: I searched for this exact number and excluded similar numbers. All bibliographic data below comes from the authoritative full text you supplied (Google Patents, fetched 2026‑09‑28), corroborated by Justia, Patents‑Review, and FreePatentsOnline for the application/publication. One caution up front: the document I retrieved contains the Abstract, Summary, "Definitions," Description, and Landscapes, but not a numbered "Claims" section. So my plain‑language claim descriptions are derived from the Summary/Definitions text, which mirrors the claim language; I have not been able to verify verbatim claim text or exact claim numbering. I flag that explicitly rather than guess.

Bibliographic data

Prosecution/ownership chain (as literally recorded): The patent is a continuation of Ser. No. 16/928,925 (US 11,288,689) → 15/452,432 (US 10,713,671) → 14/298,782 (US 9,619,815) → divisional of 13/633,759 → continuation of 12/709,401 (US 8,281,005) → continuation of 11/852,775 (US 7,698,422). The critical priority date above (2007‑09‑10) derives from US 7,698,422. Assignment records show a Specific Media, Inc. → TI Newco LLC → Viant Technology LLC chain. A security interest to PNC Bank, National Association is recorded with a literal date of 2026‑04‑29.

(One inconsistency worth noting literally: an assignment entry lists an assignor "VANDERHOOK, CHARLES," whereas the inventor of record is "Christopher J. Vanderhook." I am not auto‑correcting this — it is simply a discrepancy in the record as retrieved.)

Abstract (verbatim)

"A method determines a user demographic profile of a user that visits one or more websites of a predetermined group of websites. The method includes generating a first record of visits by the user to the websites of the predetermined group of websites. The method further includes providing one or more website profiles comprising demographic characteristics of each website visited by the user of the predetermined group of websites. The method further includes calculating an estimated user demographic profile of the user by using the first record of visits by the user and the one or more website profiles."

⚠️ Note: several third‑party pages surface a different abstract ("A method and system determine a profile of a website…A website forecast is determined…") — that abstract belongs to the sibling continuation US 11,966,938, not to '141. Do not conflate the two.

Plain‑language overview of the independent claims

Based on the Summary and Definitions sections, the '141 patent appears to carry four independent claims, spanning the statutory classes:

1. Method of determining a user demographic profile of an anonymous user. The core independent claim. Steps: (a) when an anonymous visitor hits a site in a predetermined group ("member/client/partner" sites), determine whether the visitor's computer already has the unique user‑identification data (a cookie) installed; (b) if not, install it; (c) generate a first record of that user's visits across the group; (d) provide "website profiles" giving each visited site's demographic characteristics; and (e) calculate an estimated user demographic profile by combining the visit record with the website profiles. The description elaborates this as a weighted average of website composition vectors across visited sites, yielding a "user probability vector," with visit counts as weights.

2. Method of presenting information (advertisement targeting) to many anonymous users. Builds on the profiling method for a population, then adds: receiving a signal that one of those users is visiting a site in the group; using that user's estimated demographic profile to select the information/advertisement; and transmitting it to the user's computer.

3. Computer‑readable medium. A non‑transitory/computer‑readable medium storing instructions causing a general‑purpose computer to perform the same profiling method as claim 1 (determine ID cookie → install if absent → record visits → provide website profiles → compute estimated user demographic profile).

4. Computer system (means‑plus‑function form). Recites "means for" elements: means for receiving an Internet signal indicating whether a user's computer has the unique user ID installed; means for transmitting the ID to the computer if absent; means for generating the visit record from Internet signals; means for providing website profiles; and means for calculating the estimated user demographic profile.

Technical core shared by all four: (i) a cookie‑based anonymous identifier; (ii) ISP‑sourced web‑traversal logs sorted/merged at scale (8 GB+ via a custom pairwise merge plan); (iii) derivation of website demographic profiles using non‑anonymous or self‑assigned "profiled users" seeded via demographically skewed websites; and (iv) a probability‑vector estimate of an anonymous user's demographics (gender, age group, income, ethnicity, education, etc.) used for ad targeting. The specification touts processing ~10M users/day in 3–6 hours and claims >97% gender‑accuracy.

Litigation / docket status (searched)

• No Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit 2026 docket specifically for US 11,710,141 was found. I found a CAFC appeal 2026‑1702, but it relates to IPR2025‑00129 concerning US 7,861,260 (Viant v. Intent IQ) — a different patent, not '141. Do not attribute that appeal to '141.
• The '141 patent does appear as an asserted patent in district court: AlmondNet, Inc. and Intent IQ, LLC v. Viant Technology LLC, C.A. No. 23‑cv‑00174‑MN (D. Del.), where Viant moved to amend its counterclaims to assert US 11,710,141 and US 8,996,727 against the AlmondNet Group (AlmondNet, Intent IQ, and Datonics). A related later case, AlmondNet et al. v. Viant Technology, Inc., et al., No. 1:25‑cv‑00566 (D. Del.), also shows Viant counterclaiming on '141.
• Separately, Viant Technology LLC v. Intent IQ, LLC, IPR2025‑00129 (instituted 2025‑03‑25) involves US 7,861,260 — again, not the '141 patent.

Uncertainty / caveats

1. Verbatim claims not verified. The document I retrieved omitted the numbered claims. My claim descriptions are reconstructed from the Summary/Definitions and should be confirmed against the USPTO Patent Center / patent PDF before being relied upon for claim charts or infringement analysis. I have deliberately not assigned specific claim numbers.
2. Assignee history shows an acquisition lineage (Specific Media → TI Newco → Viant) plus a recorded PNC Bank security interest dated 2026‑04‑29; I report these literally.
3. No CAFC 2026 activity tied to '141 was found; absence of a search hit is not proof of absence, and PACER/docket‑specific confirmation would be needed for a definitive litigation status.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 11710141 across multiple sources.

Let me search more targeted sources for litigation involving this patent and its owner.

I found a key lead — Viant asserted the '141 patent as a counterclaim. Let me verify the details and check the related cases.

Litigation Involving U.S. Patent No. 11,710,141

Summary of findings

Based on my searches of patent-litigation resources (Unified Patents Portal, Docket Alarm, Justia Dockets, CourtListener, RPX, and related repositories), U.S. Patent No. 11,710,141 (the "'141 patent") is not the primary patent-in-suit in any standalone complaint. Instead, it appears in the litigation record as a defensive counterclaim asserted by its owner, Viant Technology LLC, against the AlmondNet group of entities in the District of Delaware. I was unable to locate any case in which Viant filed an affirmative complaint (as plaintiff) asserting the '141 patent, nor any PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR) challenging it.

⚠️ Verification caveat: I could not retrieve a single authoritative docket source that confirms the final disposition of the '141 counterclaim (e.g., whether leave to amend was ultimately granted, and whether the counterclaim survived). The details below reflect the litigation record as surfaced in the searches; several facts should be treated as provisional pending confirmation on PACER.

Case 1 — AlmondNet, Inc. et al. v. Viant Technology Inc. et al. (the '141 counterclaim)

Key record facts (from Viant's motion for leave to amend, D.I. 59, and related briefing):

• Viant's motion states: "Viant therefore seeks to assert two of its patents against the AlmondNet Group: U.S. Patent No. 11,710,141 (the '141 patent) and U.S. Pat. No. 8,996,727 (the '727 patent)."
• Viant argued the '141 and '727 counterclaims share overlapping discovery with the existing case and that it moved to assert the '141 patent "once it was apparent that the AlmondNet Group was not interested in taking a license to the '141 or '727 patents."
• Procedural posture: Viant "initially moved to amend its answer on February 12, 2024." The court denied Viant's February 12 motion without prejudice; Viant then revised its amended answer and filed a renewed motion. The AlmondNet Group opposed, raising undue-prejudice and joinder arguments (particularly as to adding Datonics).
• Docket entries noted: Scheduling Order at D.I. 29 (Dec. 18, 2023); Protective Order D.I. 47 (Feb. 22, 2024); Memorandum Order on discovery dispute D.I. 83 (July 15, 2024); Stipulation re case schedule D.I. 89 (Aug. 1, 2024); Stipulation re Infringement Contentions D.I. 126 (Feb. 5, 2025); Joint Stipulation re Disposition of Certain Patents D.I. 115 (Jan. 14, 2025).
• Outcome/status: The original asserted patents ('249, '307, '015) were dropped from the suit by Stipulation and Order dated January 14, 2025 (D.I. 115). I could not confirm the final disposition of the '141 counterclaim specifically. This case also generated an appeal referenced as AlmondNet, Inc. v. Viant Tech., U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (2024) — but that appeal arose from a discovery dispute (motion to compel more compliant infringement contentions, denied), not from the '141 patent.

Case 2 — AlmondNet, Inc. et al. v. Viant Technology, Inc. et al. (incl. Lockr, Inc.)

Related proceedings (context, not suits on the '141 patent)

• IPR2024-00421 / IPR2024-00422 — Viant Technology LLC v. Intent IQ, LLC, challenging U.S. 7,861,260 (Final Written Decision, Paper 41, Oct. 14, 2025). Note this is Viant attacking an AlmondNet patent, not a challenge to the '141 patent.
• IPR2025-00129 — Viant Technology LLC v. Intent IQ, LLC, IPR of U.S. 7,861,260 (filed 11/01/2024; instituted 03/25/2025).
• IPR2025-01317 — LiveIntent, Inc. v. Intent IQ, LLC (citing the Viant v. Intent IQ FWD as an exhibit).

Bottom line

1. No standalone infringement action was found in which U.S. 11,710,141 is the patent-in-suit.
2. The only identified assertion of the '141 patent is Viant Technology LLC's attempt to bring an infringement counterclaim on the '141 patent (together with U.S. 8,996,727) against AlmondNet, Inc., Intent IQ, LLC, and Datonics LLC in D. Del. Case No. 1:23-cv-00174-MN.
3. Defendant/counterclaim-defendant(s): AlmondNet, Inc.; Intent IQ, LLC; Datonics LLC. Counterclaim-plaintiff: Viant Technology LLC.
4. Status: The court initially denied Viant's motion to amend without prejudice; Viant renewed. I could not confirm the ultimate outcome of the '141 counterclaim. This should be verified directly on PACER for D. Del. 1:23-cv-00174 and 1:25-cv-00566.

Recommended verification steps: (a) PACER docket for D. Del. 1:23-cv-00174 (look for D.I. 59 and any subsequent order granting/denying leave to amend, and whether Viant's '141 counterclaim was ever served or dismissed); (b) PACER docket for D. Del. 1:25-cv-00566 (inspect the 9/24/2025 counterclaim and its Exhibit 1 & 2 to see if the '141 patent is included); (c) the USPTO Patent Assignment/PTAB records for any post-grant challenge to 11,710,141.

I did not find any CAFC appeal, ITC investigation, or final judgment specifically adjudicating U.S. 11,710,141, and I did not want to infer one where the record does not show it.

I'll verify the empty PTAB docket against public sources before finalizing.

Let me check the patent's family members and prior family litigation for any PTAB exposure, plus any post-grant challenge specifically to the '141.

One more targeted check for any Viant-owned patent challenge or reexam, then I'll finalize.

Proceedings overview

There are zero AIA trial proceedings on file for U.S. Patent No. 11,710,141. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal, canonical list) is empty, and my independent searches — PTAB docket aggregators, the USPTO PTACTS document portal, RPX Insight, Docket Alarm, and Federal Circuit docket trackers — surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM petition ever filed against the '141 patent, and no final written decision, institution decision, or appeal touching its claims. Bottom-line defensive posture:

The '141 patent is wholly untested at the PTAB — not "hardened," but also not "dead." All four independent claims remain live and unadjudicated. This is not the profile of a patent that has already been picked apart; it is the profile of a patent whose owner has been wielding PTAB challenges against others rather than defending against them.

⚠️ Critical do-not-conflate note: Viant Technology LLC appears repeatedly in PTAB records as Petitioner, attacking patents owned by AlmondNet, Inc. and Intent IQ, LLC. None of those proceedings involves the '141 patent. If you are handed a briefing that lists IPR2024-00421, IPR2024-00422, IPR2025-00126/00128/00129, IPR2025-01163, or IPR2026-00330 as "proceedings on the '141 patent," that is an error — every one of them is a Viant attack on an AlmondNet/Intent IQ patent ('260, '249, '146, '962). Likewise CAFC Nos. 26-1699, 26-1701, and 26-1702 are appeals from the '260 IPRs, not from any '141 proceeding.

Proceedings on US 11,710,141

None — no proceeding on file

• Type: N/A (no Inter Partes Review, Post-Grant Review, or Covered Business Method proceeding identified)
• Filed: N/A
• Status: N/A
• Judge panel: N/A
• Petition grounds: N/A
• Institution decision: N/A
• Final Written Decision: N/A
• Settlement / termination: N/A
• Appeal: N/A
• Defensive value: To be blunt about what this absence means: there is no PTAB precedent you can borrow. No claim has been canceled, so no claim has been immunized by adverse judgment; conversely, nothing has been sustained either. A defendant facing assertion of '141 cannot point to a prior petitioner's work product, cannot rely on a prior FWD's claim constructions, and cannot invoke § 315(e) estoppel against Viant. Any invalidity position must be built from scratch.

Adjacent PTAB activity (NOT on the '141) — context only

These are the proceedings that explain why the '141 docket looks the way it does. All are Viant-as-petitioner; none challenges the '141.

IPR2024-00421 / IPR2024-00422 — FreeWheel Media, Inc. & Beeswax.io Corp. v. Intent IQ, LLC (Viant joined via IPR2025-00128 / IPR2025-00129)

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Patent: U.S. 7,861,260 (Intent IQ) — not the '141
• Filed: 2024-03-01 (FreeWheel base petitions); Viant joinder petitions filed 2024-11-01
• Status: Final Written Decision issued 2025-10-14 — all challenged claims (claims 1–152) unpatentable; appealed (CAFC Nos. 26-1699, 26-1701, 26-1702)
• Panel: Administrative Patent Judges Nabeel U. Khan, Scott B. Howard (opinion author), and David Cotta
• Takeaway for a '141 defendant: Relevant only as evidence that Viant is a sophisticated, experienced PTAB petitioner with in-house capability and a demonstrated record of invalidating adversary advertising-tech claims. It tells you the counterparty knows the forum well.

IPR2025-00126 — Viant Technology LLC v. AlmondNet, Inc.

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Patent: U.S. 8,775,249 (AlmondNet) — not the '141
• Filed: 2024-11-01
• Grounds: Obviousness over Merriman + Jaye; Roth + Jaye; Merriman/Roth + Minor; plus secondary combinations (Coleman, Herz, Gardner)
• Defensive value: None for '141 claim scope. Confirms the same-party adversarial posture.

IPR2025-01163 — LiveIntent, Inc. & Viant Technology LLC v. AlmondNet, Inc.

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Patent: U.S. 8,959,146 (AlmondNet) — not the '141
• Filed: 2025
• Grounds: Pre-AIA § 103 — claims 1, 2, 5–9, 15–18, 21–22 over Burdick; and over Burdick in view of Grannan
• Notable: Petitioners filed a stipulation broader than § 315(e) estoppel, agreeing not to pursue in the parallel D. Del. cases the grounds raised or that reasonably could have been raised. Panel includes APJ John A. Squires.
• Defensive value: None for '141 claim scope.

IPR2026-00330 — Viant Technology LLC, AppLovin Corp. & Mediaocean, LLC v. Intent IQ, LLC

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Patent: U.S. 11,949,962 (Shkedi) — not the '141
• Filed: 2026-04-02
• Status: Pending
• Defensive value: None for '141; further evidence of ongoing, coordinated petitioner activity by Viant and its industry allies.

Strategic summary

Claim-level status of the '141. Every claim of the '141 is UNTESTED at the PTAB. Nothing is canceled; nothing is sustained. Based on the Summary/Definitions text in the specification (the retrieved document did not include a numbered claims section, so I deliberately do not assign claim numbers), the patent appears to carry four independent claims — a profiling method, an ad-targeting method, a computer-readable medium, and a means-plus-function computer system. All four are live exposure. The '141 also shares a specification and a 2007-09-10 priority date with a long continuation chain (7,698,422 → 8,281,005 → 9,619,815 → 10,713,671 → 11,288,689 → 11,710,141); I found no IPR against any member of that chain either, so there is no intra-family PTAB record to mine.

Estoppel landscape — the cleanest part of the picture. Because no petition has ever been filed against the '141, no § 315(e) estoppel attaches to it at all. Any defendant or prospective petitioner can raise any § 102/§ 103 ground based on patents or printed publications, with no "raised or reasonably could have raised" shadow. There is also no adverse judgment, no disclaimer, and no certificate of cancellation narrowing the claims. From a purely estoppel-and-record standpoint, the field is wide open. Conversely, you inherit no free work product and no favorable construction.

Two timing/threshold points that will control any future filing.

1. PGR is unavailable. The '141 claims priority to 2007-09-10 and is pre-AIA for post-grant purposes; PGR is limited to patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. CBM is also unavailable (the CBM program was closed to petitions filed on or after 2020-09-16, and the '141 did not issue until 2023-07-25). IPR is the only AIA trial vehicle left.
2. § 315(b) is running (or has run) for the obvious candidates. Viant's '141 counterclaim has been on the table in AlmondNet, Inc. v. Viant Technology (D. Del. 1:23-cv-00174-MN) since Viant's February 2024 motion practice and renewed motion to amend. Whether service of a counterclaim triggers the § 315(b) one-year bar is a contested and fact-specific question (the statute speaks of service of a "complaint," and the treatment of counterclaim defendants has been litigated), so I flag it rather than resolve it: if the bar applies, the AlmondNet group's window to petition on the '141 has likely closed, which would explain the total absence of '141 PTAB activity better than any merits consideration would. Verify against the PACER docket before relying on this.

Pattern signals. There is a clear asymmetry: Viant is a prolific PTAB petitioner against its adversaries, and no one has ever petitioned against Viant. There is no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents proceeding on the '141) — consistent with the patent's low public visibility as an assertion vehicle. Viant's own appeals posture is that of a successful petitioner rather than a defending patent owner. Note the present institutional environment as well: since the March 2025 rescission of the Fintiv guidance and the Director's 2025-10 announcement that he will personally make institution decisions, discretionary denials have risen sharply — so a fresh petitioner on an old-by-priority patent with parallel Delaware litigation should expect a harder road than the FY2023 ~67% institution rate would suggest. On the other hand, the "settled expectations"/long-issued-patent rationale for denial is weaker here, since the asserted '141 claims only issued on 2023-07-25.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and hoped the '141 had been knocked out: it has not. There is no FWD to link to, because there is no proceeding. Do not build a defense memo on the assumption that a sibling or an adversary already invalidated anything — verify against the USPTO patent file at USPTO Patent Center and the trial docket at PTAB E2E.
• Run a fresh § 315(b) analysis immediately. If you have been served with an infringement complaint asserting the '141, your one-year clock under 35 U.S.C. § 315(b) is the single most consequential date on your calendar. Coordinate with the D. Del. 1:23-cv-00174-MN and 1:25-cv-00566 dockets.
• Confirm the claim set before anything else. The full text I worked from omitted the numbered claims. Before drafting grounds, pull the printed claims from the USPTO Patent Center / the granted-PDF, and confirm the independent-claim count and numbering. My descriptions are reconstructed from the Summary and Definitions sections and must not be used as a claim chart.
• If you do file, the natural timetable is: petition → POPR due 3 months → institution decision due ~6 months from the petition's filing date (3 months from the POPR or its due date) → PO response, petitioner reply, PO sur-reply → oral hearing (~9 months) → FWD statutorily due within 12 months of institution (extendable up to 6 months for good cause). Track the Director's discretionary-denial posture, since he now decides institution in the first instance.
• If no proceeding exists and you are evaluating whether to file one: say so plainly. Absence of PTAB activity is not proof the patent is strong — here it most plausibly reflects a § 315(b) timing trap and/or licensing/co-existence dynamics rather than a merits judgment. Do not treat the empty docket as evidence of validity.

I'll research the assignment record for US 11,710,141 across USPTO Assignment Center, Google Patents legal events, and related sources.

Let me dig into the specific assignment records and Google Patents legal events.

Good — I found a concrete reel/frame lead. Let me dig into the full assignment chain for this patent family.

Let me try to pin down the remaining reel/frame records and the correspondent of record.

I'll research the prior art citations for US 11,710,141, starting with the patent's own cited references.

Let me dig into the specific cited references on the patent's face.

Let me get the front-page references for the '141 patent and the closely related '689 patent.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 11,710,141 ("the '141 patent")

0. Sourcing caveat (read first)

Two limits must be stated before the analysis, because they affect how much weight you can put on the mappings below.

1. I could not retrieve the literal front page ("(56) References Cited") of US 11,710,141B2 itself. What I could retrieve, and what the tables below are built from, is:
   • the front page of US 7,698,422 B2 (the priority patent in this family, filed 2007-09-10, issued 2010-04-13) — retrieved from the USPTO/Google Patents PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/2f/ed/98/dbda54d13f604d/US7698422.pdf; and
   • the citation record of the family member US 2010/0299431 A1 (Ser. No. 12/709,401), retrieved from patents.google.com/patent/US20100299431.
     Because the '141 is a straight continuation chain off the same 2007-09-10 specification (16/928,925 → 15/452,432 → 14/298,782 → 13/633,759 → 12/709,401 → 11/852,775), the art of record in the family is the best available proxy for the art of record in the '141 — but it is a proxy, not a verified quotation of the '141's own front page. Flagged.
2. The numbered claim set of the '141 has not been verified. As noted in the earlier generated section, the document retrieved for '141 contains the Abstract, Summary, Definitions and Description but no numbered "Claims" section. The claim numbering I use below (1–13 method; 14 presenting information; 15 computer-readable medium; 16–17 system) is that of the family's US 7,698,422 B2 (verbatim text retrieved via RPX and the '422 PDF) and of US 2009/0070443 A1 (the pre-grant publication of the '422), which mirror the four independent-claim families recited in the '141's own Summary. Confirm against the '141 as issued before relying on claim numbers.
3. One further flag: the '141's title is "System and method of determining a website demographic profile," but its Abstract says "a user" and its Summary recites the anonymous-user claim families. The sibling continuation US 11,966,938 carries the "website forecast" abstract (per the earlier section's warning). Whether the '141's issued claim 1 is directed to a user profile or a website profile should be confirmed; both readings are covered below.

1. The prior art of record (U.S. patents)

These are the U.S. patent references listed on the family's face. Dates are as printed (several show OCR artifacts, which I have left literally rather than "corrected").

2. Prior art of record (U.S. patent application publications)

3. Additional references in the family citation record (from the '401/'431 record)

4. Non-patent literature cited

• Billsus, D. and Pazzani, M., "Revising User Profiles: The Search for Interesting Web Sites," Dept. of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine — the first NPL reference on the '422 face; directly on user-profile revision, i.e., the "updating previously-calculated estimated user demographic profiles" concept (the UPV_Updated weighted-average update described at ¶[0153]–[0155] of the specification). Potential §102/§103 art against claims 11–13 and the updating-dependent claims.
• Gauch, S. and Pretschner, A., "Ontology Based…" (title truncated on the face of the '422) — ontology-based user profiles; §103 context.
• Web-traversal data and skewness statistics from comScore, iMedia Connection, eMarketer, Alexa Internet are data sources referenced in the specification (¶[0094]–[0096]); they are not asserted prior art but would be discoverable third-party evidence if the "skewed website" limitation were contested.

5. Closely-related references surfaced via "Cited By" that are nonetheless pre-priority art

These are documents that appear because they cite the Vanderhook family, but whose own effective filing dates pre-date 2007-09-10 — i.e., they remain potential §102(e) art:

6. Prioritized shortlist — the art that actually matters

Anticipation of the broadest claim requires a single reference disclosing all of: (a) detecting, at the moment an unidentified visitor arrives at a member site, whether a persistent unique identifier is already on the visitor's machine; (b) installing it if absent; (c) accumulating a visit record across the member-site group; (d) supplying per-site demographic profiles for the visited sites; and (e) computing an estimated user demographic profile by combining (c) and (d). Ranking by how much of that combination appears to be addressed by each reference:

1. US 6,643,696 B2 (Owen Davis / NetRatings, prio. 1997-03-21) — "tracking client interaction with a network resource and creating client profiles and resource database." This maps most directly onto the pair of data structures the claim requires (client/user profile + site/resource profile) and onto cookie-based client identification. Best single §102 candidate for claim 1.
2. US 2007/0180469 A1 (Finley, pub. 2007-08-02) — "Method of demographically profiling a user of a computer system." Title-level symmetry with the '141's stated purpose. Being published one month before the '422 filing, it is squarely §102(a)/(b) art. Strongest §102 candidate on the demographic-profiling element. ⚠️ I have not verified its full disclosure, and I could not definitively confirm whether it sits in the family's "Citations" (art of record) or "Cited By" column.
3. FR 2 867 584 B1 (Weborama, pub. 2006-06-09) — "method for determining a profile of a user of a communication network." A foreign §102(a)/(b) reference asserting the same result in the same medium.
4. US 6,044,376 (Kurtzman, II) and US 6,029,195 / US 5,754,939 (Herz) — the consumer-profile/desirable-object lineage; likely §102 for the profiling concept and §103 for the cookie/merge machinery.
5. US 5,675,510 (Pc Meter/Nielsen), US 6,108,637 and US 6,327,619 (Nielsen) — the metering lineage covering steps (b)–(c) and dependent claim 4 (date/time/URL/ID per visit).
6. US 2004/0205157 A1 (Bibelnieks) and US 7,769,764 B2 (Jumptap) — the targeting lineage that would bear on the "method of presenting information" independent claim (the '422's claim 14 analogue).
7. Billsus & Pazzani (NPL) — the "revising user profiles" reference, aimed at the profile-update claims.
8. US 8,190,475 / US 8,768,768 (Google "Visitor profile modeling," filed 2007-09-05) — the closest-in-time art; five days earlier. Verify its provisional/effective date before relying on it, but it is the most temporally dangerous reference in the record.

Practical note on anticipation posture: the '141's claims appear to be combination claims (cookie detection + install-on-demand + ISP-scale visit log + third-party website demographic vectors + weighted average). §102 anticipation will be hard to establish with any single one of references 1–54 because each tends to cover one limb. The likelier challenge vector is §103 built from (client-profile art: '696 / Kurtzman / Herz) × (audience-measurement art: Pc Meter / Nielsen) × (site-composition art: Opinionlab / comScore-derived data), which is also exactly the combination the '141's own specification concedes was known ("Traditional web-based advertising systems ... target content by displaying advertisements based on the content of the websites in the network").

7. Caveats and recommended verification steps

1. Do not rely on the claim numbering above as being the '141's. It is the '422's. Pull the '141 as-issued claims from USPTO Patent Center or the patent PDF.
2. Confirm the '141's own "(56) References Cited" list. I could not retrieve it. Family members frequently carry slightly different examiner citations (the '671, '689 and '938 may each have added art).
3. Two OCR anomalies on the '422 face were left literal: "US 6,098,065 Skillen" (the certificate of correction changes a different line, "Epartment"→"Department", but the OCR shows both "Skellen" and "Skillen"), and "US 6,353,680 B1 … 1/2005," which conflicts with the 2002 vintage of that number. Verify both.
4. The "cited by" column in Section 5 is a lead, not a conclusion — I have not verified the effective filing dates or the actual disclosures of the Google '475/'768 or the AlmondNet/Datonics families; a provisional application could push their dates either way.
5. No IPR/PGR challenging the '141 was found, and (per the earlier litigation section) the only identified assertion of the '141 is Viant's counterclaim in D. Del. 1:23-cv-00174-MN. If invalidity contentions exist in that docket, they are the single best independent confirmation of what the parties themselves regard as the most material art.

I'll research the prior art landscape for this patent family before building the obviousness analysis.

Good leads. Let me verify the most probative references — especially ones with dates close to the 2007-09-10 priority date.

Let me pin down the actual claim language and confirm two more high-value references.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 11,710,141

System and Method of Determining a Website Demographic Profile

Analysis under 35 U.S.C. § 103 | Prepared 2026-04-26

0. Scope, caveats, and what this analysis builds on

Three constraints carry over from the previously generated sections and I will not restate them in full:

1. The claim text was never retrieved. The source document contained the Abstract, Summary, Definitions, Description, and Landscapes — but no numbered Claims section. My analysis therefore runs against the reconstructed independent claims (method-of-profiling; method-of-presenting-information/ad-targeting; computer-readable medium; means-plus-function system) set out in the Patent Summary section. Every conclusion below is provisional on that reconstruction. Element mappings are stated at the level of the Summary/Definitions language; I have deliberately not assigned claim numbers.
2. The '141 patent is a continuation of the chain ending at US 7,698,422 (filed 2007-09-10). The 2007-09-10 date is the effective priority date I use throughout.
3. Note the two contradicting abstracts. The Abstract literally recited for '141 is the short "A method determines a user demographic profile of a user…" version. The longer "A method and system determine a profile of a website…website forecast…" abstract belongs to sibling continuation US 11,966,938 and must not be imported here.

What the "Prior Art section of this page" actually provided: the Google Patents record for '141 lists only algorithmically derived prior art keywords (website, users, user, demographic, certain embodiments) and the priority date. It cites no prior-art references. The reference set below is therefore assembled independently, and each reference is anchored to a verified date so its § 102 status is determinable.

1. Governing framework

1.1 Which § 103 applies

The '141 application (Ser. No. 17/707,786) was filed 2022-03-29 — post-AIA — but claims a continuous chain to 2007-09-10. Under AIA § 3(n)(1), pre-AIA §§ 102/103 govern only if no claim ever had an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. If the claims are entitled to 2007-09-10, pre-AIA § 103(a) applies. If any claim is not so entitled (new matter, or a priority break), AIA § 103 applies instead.

This distinction does not change the outcome here, because every primary reference below is a § 102(b) printed publication or patent issued between 1999 and 2007-03-29, comfortably more than one year before 2007-09-10. The only reference whose status is date-sensitive is the Microsoft publication, addressed in § 2.2.

1.2 Level of ordinary skill

A POSITA in 2007 would hold a bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or a quantitative field, plus roughly two to four years of experience building server-side web/advertising systems and applying statistical or machine-learning techniques to clickstream data — or a master's degree with less experience. This is corroborated by the specification's own framing (§ setting out Java/Unix/Linux implementation, CSV intermediate files, MySQL partitioning) — i.e., the patent itself assumes an engineer implementing, not inventing, these primitives.

1.3 What is actually in the claims vs. only in the specification

This is the pivotal threshold question, and it drives the entire analysis:

The commercially distinctive content of this patent family — the data-engineering at scale — is almost entirely unclaimed. The claims, as reconstructed, recite the result (an estimated demographic profile from a visit record plus website profiles) and the conventional mechanics (cookies, an ad server). That asymmetry is the central § 103 vulnerability.

1.4 Construction note relevant to § 103

The means-plus-function claim ("means for receiving a signal… means for transmitting… means for generating… means for providing… means for calculating…") is governed by 35 U.S.C. § 112(f). The corresponding structures disclosed are a general-purpose server, a database/file store, and a programmed processor. Under § 103, means-plus-function limitations are met by any reference disclosing structure performing the identical function — a low bar here, because the functions are generic server operations.

2. The reference set

2.1 Table of references and § 102 status

2.2 Why Microsoft '728 is the most dangerous single reference

Microsoft '728 was filed 2006-03-03 and published 2007-09-06 — four days before the '141 priority date. Its disclosure reads on the core of the reconstructed claim 1:

• The same problem statement: "many online users may not be registered, and therefore have not provided their demographic information voluntarily. Additionally, registered users may give incomplete or even incorrect demographic information." ('728 ¶[0003]) — verbatim the '141 Background ("Existing systems… do so purely through registration data… such systems do not provide sufficiently accurate information").
• Trained using known users, applied to unknown users: "predicting user demographic attributes for non-registered users and users with incomplete profiles. The invention uses demographic information from registered users and user search history logs…" ('728 Abstract) — structurally identical to the '141's "predetermined group of users" / "profiled users" seeding step.
• Website profiles with demographic characteristics: the page-demographic classifier associates web-page features with demographic attributes; ¶[0031]: "The page-demographic predictor can retrieve from the search log the user IDs of the users who browsed the corresponding training pages and can then retrieve the user demographic attributes from the user profile database."
• Calculating an estimated user demographic profile from the visit record + profiles: ¶[0033]–[0034]: a user-demographic predictor "combines the usage of a query-demographic predictor and a page-demographic predictor"; it collects the last J pages browsed and "can vote for the demographic attribute that has a higher corresponding confidence identifier," or "take the average of the confidence identifiers." That is Equation (1) of the '141 specification with different weights.
• Ad-targeting output: ¶[0036]–[0038]: "the predicted demographic attributes can be utilized by an advertiser for determining which search queries, web pages, or users that he/she desires to bid on," with a pricing mechanism scaled by the confidence identifier.

And the Microsoft WWW-2007 paper (May 2007) independently corroborates the same technique as a printed publication: "researchers looked at the Web surfing history for people whose gender and age they knew, then applied that data to predict how likely a gender or age group was to visit certain Web sites… grouped similar Web sites together, assuming people of similar demographic profiles visited similar sites," and reported 30% (gender) / 50% (age) improvement over baselines, with planned extension to occupation and geography.

2.3 Why Xerox '522 is the most useful primary reference

Xerox '522 issued 2007-01-09 and its divisional publications appeared 2007-03-29 — both solidly § 102(b). It discloses the calculation step in near-literal terms:

• Cookie-based detection of the user's visited pages: "this detection is performed by evaluating cookies stored by the user's web browser. Web pages that are referenced by the stored cookies are presumed to have been accessed by the user and are thus detected." (US 2007/0073681 ¶[0043]).
• A first record of visits: the user path vector, where "each dimension… corresponds to a separate web page" and "the value at each index of the vector is the number of times a user has accessed the web page" (¶[0045]) — functionally the '141's "sorted total log data file"/"user history file."
• Website profiles comprising demographic characteristics: the bias of a web page — "the difference between: the actual number of users having a certain attribute who visit the page, and the product of the total number of users who visit the page and the fraction of users having the attribute" (¶[0069]); and centroid vectors per demographic cluster (¶[0052]).
• Calculating an estimated user demographic profile by combining the record with the profiles: claim 1 of the '681 publication recites "combining said bias values of said subset of web pages to obtain a combination result; and assigning a selected user profile attribute to said user in response to said combination result indicating a positive bias." That is the '141's Equation (1) in Bayesian form.
• The claimed outputs: gender and age; reported accuracy "over 75%" (¶[0055]); multi-class extension to "age brackets, professions, and household income levels" (¶[0091]) — matching the '141's demographic categories.
• Express commercial purpose: ¶[0006] — the demographic characteristics "can help businesses and advertisers provide services to Internet users in particular demographic groups."

Murray (WebKDD'99) — "Inferring Demographic Attributes of Anonymous Internet Users" (cited on the face of Xerox '522) — is the closest NPL: its title is a near-synonym of the '422 parent's title, "System and Method of Determining User Demographic Profiles of Anonymous Users."

3. Element-by-element mapping (reconstructed independent claims)

The two gaps in the reconstructed claim 1 are (i) the install-if-absent step and (ii) the closed group framing. Both are addressed below.

4. Proposed grounds of rejection

Ground 1 — Xerox '522 in view of Merriman (claims 1 and 3)

Xerox '522 supplies every substantive element of the profiling method: cookie detection of visited pages, the visit vector, per-site demographic bias/centroid values, and the weighted combination that yields an assigned demographic attribute. Merriman supplies the cookie-based unique-identifier regime and the ad server that receives an identifier with a page request and returns a selected object, together with the express teaching that the request carries "a cookie if the browser is cookie enabled… (another form of identifier)."

The only remaining element — installing the identifier where absent — is the definitional operating behavior of the cookie regime Merriman describes, and the '141 specification itself concedes the point: "Cookies in general are known in the art as a means for authenticating, tracking, and maintaining specific information regarding a user." Where the specification admits the mechanism is conventional, a POSITA would read it into the combination as a matter of ordinary design.

Ground 2 — Microsoft '728 in view of Merriman (claims 1, 2, 3)

Microsoft '728 supplies the complete predict-demographics-for-non-registered-users pipeline (website classifier trained from known users; aggregation of page-level demographic predictions into a user-level profile; ad monetization keyed to the predicted attributes). Merriman supplies the cookie/identifier and the ad-server transmit step. This combination covers both independent method claims, including the ad-presentation claim, without needing to reach Xerox at all.

This is the ground I would rank strongest, subject to the § 102 status question in § 2.2: if any claim fails to secure the 2007-09-10 date, '728 becomes a clean § 102(a) reference and the analysis simplifies materially.

Ground 3 — Microsoft '728 in view of Xerox '522 (claim 1, claim 3)

Runs the two inference engines together with one supplying the cookie-based detection mechanism. Redundant to Ground 2 but useful if the patentee attacks the Merriman cookie theory.

Ground 4 — Any of Grounds 1–3 in further view of Guyot ('098), LeMole ('410), or Lazarus ('532) (claim 2)

Claim 2 adds only "receive a signal that the user is visiting a site of the group; use the estimated profile to select information; transmit it." Guyot discloses an ad server storing a per-subscriber personal profile and targeting ads on that profile; LeMole discloses an ad server that "dynamically configure[s] an advertising page specifically for that user"; Lazarus is described in the record as teaching "real time reactive targeting." The '141 specification concedes the website/ad-server architecture ("the website 20 can receive these advertisements from one or more advertisement databases or servers 40"; "the advertisement server… selects an advertisement based on the user probability vector 700, and transmits").

Ground 5 — Any of Grounds 1–4 as applied to claim 3 (computer-readable medium)

All references disclose software-implemented methods executing on general-purpose servers; recitation of a medium "having instructions stored thereon" adds no patentable weight. The '141 specification expressly contemplates this ("software code… is typically provided on a computer-readable medium, such as a CD-ROM").

Ground 6 — Any of Grounds 1–4 as applied to claim 4 (means-plus-function)

Each "means" element maps to (i) a server/network interface disclosed in Merriman, LeMole, or Kurtzman ("means for receiving" / "means for transmitting"), (ii) a log or database structure disclosed in Xerox, Microsoft, or Merriman ("means for generating a first record"), and (iii) a programmed processor performing the disclosed comparison/combination ("means for calculating"). Under § 112(f), the disclosure of any structure performing the identical function satisfies the limitation.

Ground 7 (if dependent claims recite the update/weighting equations) — + Bensemana ('076)

Bensemana (issued 2007-03-06) discloses "initially determining a profile for a consumer, and thereafter validating or invalidating the initial profile, and continuously updating the same," which reads on the '141's Equation (4) update (UPV_Updated ∝ UPV_Previous·nSites_Previous + UPV_New·nSites_New) and the 60-day staleness deletion rule. Weighted averaging itself is a routine mathematical expedient (KSR; In re Peterson).

5. Motivation to combine — the KSR rationales

1. Same field of endeavor. Xerox '522, Microsoft '728, Merriman, Guyot, LeMole, Lazarus, and the '141 patent are all directed to selecting advertising (or content) for Internet users based on inferred user characteristics. There is no field-crossing problem.

2. Same problem, articulated identically in the references themselves. This is unusually strong. Xerox '522 ¶[0004]–[0006]: "web sites may request Internet users to enter personal demographic information. However, such user-entered information may be incomplete… In other cases, demographic information supplied by an Internet user may be false or mistakenly incorrect." Microsoft '728 ¶[0003] is to the same effect. The '141 Background repeats the identical complaint and the specification quantifies it ("up to 36% of registrants submit inaccurate information"; "about 86% of registered users do not disclose their gender"). When references and the challenged patent frame the problem the same way, the "motivation" is supplied by the art itself, not by hindsight.

3. Predictable result / "obvious to try." KSR, 550 U.S. 398, 421: where a finite number of identified, predictable solutions are available, the combination is obvious. Here the solution set is closed and small: identify the anonymous browser (a cookie), look up which sites it visited (a log), look up each site's demographic skew (a published website profile), average, and serve the best-matching creative. Each step was individually known; only the assembly was new. Nothing in the '141 specification identifies a technical obstacle the assembly overcame at the claim level (the obstacles it does describe — 8 GB sorts, RAM ceilings — are addressed by technique and are unclaimed).

4. Design incentive / market pressure. Both Xerox '522 and Microsoft '728 state the commercial payoff. The '141 specification touts ">97%" gender accuracy and processing of ~10 million users/day. Advertisers were paying premiums for demographically-targeted inventory, and untargetable anonymous impressions were a known, quantified loss. That is a "market demand" rationale under KSR.

5. No criticality or unexpected-results boundary. The claimed weighting (visit counts as weights, in Equation (1); cumulative counts in Equation (4)) is disclosed as one of several alternatives and no criticality is asserted. A POSITA's choice among weighting schemes is a routine optimization (In re Peterson).

6. Anticipated patentee rebuttals, and where the art is vulnerable

Rebuttal A — "No reference teaches installing the identifier when absent." This is the strongest available argument, because it is a negative limitation on the only step not squarely disclosed by Xerox or Microsoft. Counters: Merriman's cookie regime presupposes installation-upon-first-contact; the '141 specification concedes cookie mechanism is conventional; and Ground 2 does not depend on the argument, because the ad-serving step is separately supplied by Merriman/Guyot/LeMole. Residual risk: moderate.

Rebuttal B — "The '141 claims a closed group of member/client/partner websites." Merriman (DoubleClick's affiliate network), LeMole, and Kurtzman all operate across plural affiliated sites served by a common ad server, so an ad-network "predetermined group" is disclosed. Residual risk: low — but this depends entirely on how the term is construed, which I could not confirm without the claim text.

Rebuttal C — "The references do not teach demographic (as opposed to behavioral/interest) targeting." This argument fails against Xerox '522 and Microsoft '728, which are explicitly demographic (gender, age, income, profession, ethnicity categories). It would only work against a Merriman-only rejection, which no ground here relies on. Residual risk: low.

Rebuttal D — "Secondary considerations: unexpected accuracy (>97%), long-felt need, failure of others." The specification asserts >97% gender accuracy, but the asserted figure is a specification assertion, not record evidence of nexus. More damaging to the patentee: Xerox '522 reported >75% gender accuracy, and the Microsoft WWW-2007 paper reported ~30–50% improvement over baseline — both predating the '141 priority date. That materially undercuts any "unexpected results" narrative and, if anything, establishes that the accuracy was an incremental improvement along a known trajectory. No objective indicia appear in the record I could access (no commercial-success, licensing-due-to-patent-worthiness, or copying evidence).

Rebuttal E — "The scale/performance limitations are the invention." If (and only if) a dependent claim recites the 64-way pairwise merge with a sorting-plan file, the 500 MB chunk ceiling, or the (N mod 2999) mod 120 partitioning, that claim is materially harder to invalidate. But: (i) the specification concedes Unix sort and Java ArrayList/HashMap/TreeMap approaches exist and only fail above certain sizes; (ii) the reduction to practice is presented as engineering tuning; and (iii) mere throughput/scale is generally given no patentable weight absent a claimed structural change. Residual risk: high for such a dependent claim, low for the reconstructed independents.

Rebuttal F — Priority/§ 102 status. If the patentee defends the 2007-09-10 date, pre-AIA § 103(a) applies and Microsoft '728's status rests on § 102(a)/§ 102(e) rather than § 102(b). If the patentee instead narrows the priority claim for some other reason, '728 converts to clean § 102(a) art. The patentee cannot have it both ways, and either branch leaves '728 available.

7. Bottom line

On the reconstructed claim scope, US 11,710,141 appears highly vulnerable under § 103. The claims recite a combination of (i) cookie-based anonymous identification, (ii) a log of visits to a network of affiliated sites, (iii) per-site demographic profiles, and (iv) a weighted aggregation producing an estimated user demographic profile used to select an advertisement — and each element, plus the motivation to assemble them, is disclosed in § 102(b) art from 1999–2002 and in two 2007 references (Xerox '522 and Microsoft '728) that state the identical problem the '141 patent states.

The two most probable grounds are:

• Microsoft US 2007/0208728 A1 in view of Merriman US 5,948,061 (and, for claim 2, further in view of Guyot US 6,119,098) — covers both independent method claims.
• Xerox US 7,162,522 in view of Merriman US 5,948,061 — covers the profiling claims with the strongest § 102(b) footing and an express "combine bias values → assign profile attribute" teaching that parallels the '141's Equation (1).

However, three things must be verified before this analysis is relied upon for a validity opinion, an IPR petition, or claim charts:

1. The verbatim claim text and numbering (USPTO Patent Center / the granted PDF). Everything above is contingent on this. In particular, the scope of "predetermined group of websites," whether the install-if-absent step is a positive or negative limitation, and whether any dependent claim recites the merge-sort or partitioning specifics.
2. The prosecution histories of the '141 and its parent '422, to determine whether Xerox '522, Microsoft '728, or Murray were cited and overcome — and if overcome, how. If the applicant distinguished these references on the "install-if-absent" or "closed group" elements, that distinction defines the battleground and the § 112(f)/claim-construction positions above must be revised.
3. PACER docket for D. Del. 1:23-cv-00174-MN (the '141 counterclaim docketed at D.I. 59 and any subsequent order). Per the Litigation section, Viant's '141 counterclaim is the only identified assertion; if the counterclaim was ultimately dismissed or dropped, the invalidity analysis has no litigation anchor, and if it survived, invalidity contentions would already exist in the record that I have not seen.

One further caution: the '141 family's § 101 exposure (Alice/Step Two) is at least as acute as its § 103 exposure, given the Federal Circuit's treatment of analogous ISP-based targeted-advertising claims in Bridge and Post, Inc. v. [Verizon Communications, Inc.](/litigations/by-defendant/Verizon%20Communications%2C%20Inc.), 2018-1697 (Fed. Cir. July 5, 2019) (holding claims directed to "using persistent identifiers to implement targeted marketing" and "communicating information using a personalized marking" ineligible). That is outside the § 103 scope of this task but bears directly on the patent's enforceability in the pending Delaware actions.