US 3744868

I'll search for this specific patent number in the USPTO and CAFC records.

The CAFC docket search returned no results. Let me verify with additional USPTO and CAFC-specific searches.

Let me do one more targeted check for any CAFC docket activity and the official USPTO record.

Based on my searches, here is the summary. Important note on identifier integrity: the searches confirm that US3744868 is distinct from EP3744868 (Nippon Steel, "Grain-oriented electrical steel sheet") and JP3744868 (a brushless-motor circuit patent) — those are unrelated documents that merely share the publication number "3744868" in different offices. I have excluded them per your instruction not to return similar numbers.

US Patent 3,744,868 — Summary

Abstract (verbatim): "A cabinet or a piece of furniture, preferably cabinets in a wall system, wherein the side and top walls are made of laminated square elongated members and the joints of these wall members are curved and made up of short curved laminated members having cross section similar to the cross section of the elongated wall laminated members with the grain in the wall laminated members and in the curved joint members running longitudinally and substantially parallel."

Technology in brief: The invention solves the problem that rounded wood furniture corners are hard to make with matching grain. Instead of one curved piece (whose grain runs transversely to the adjacent panels), the corner is built from short curved laminated strips whose grain runs longitudinally, matching the grain direction of the wall panels, which themselves are built from square laminated strips (~7/8 inch). This is economical because the curved pieces are cut from stock no more than ~1.5 inches thick.

Claims overview

There are 5 claims, but only one independent claim (claim 1); claims 2–5 depend from claim 1 (claims 4–5 depend from claim 1 directly per the claim text; claim 5 depends from claim 4).

• Claim 1 (independent): A furniture construction having at least two panel members that meet at an exteriorly curved corner joint member with a longitudinal axis of curvature. The joint is made of several narrow laminated members, each lying in planes at right angles to the axis of curvature. The wood grain in both the panels and the narrow joint laminations runs substantially in the same direction — at right angles to the center of curvature. In plain language: a rounded-corner furniture piece where the corner is built from thin laminated slats, all with grain oriented consistently with the adjacent panels so the wood pattern flows around the curve.

• Claim 2 (dependent): The narrow laminated joint members are no more than 1.5 inches wide. Limits the lamination width to enable economical curved cutting.

• Claim 3 (dependent): The panel members themselves are also made of elongated laminated members, each extending in planes at right angles to the corner joint's axis of curvature; the panel laminations are no wider than the joint laminations, and each lamination's grain runs longitudinally, substantially parallel to the grain of the corresponding curved joint lamination. Requires matching strip construction and grain continuity across both walls and corners.

• Claim 4 (dependent): Four flat wall members with corner joint members joining each wall form a cabinet. Narrows the construction to a four-sided cabinet.

• Claim 5 (dependent): The cabinet is of the wall-suspended type — mountable on rails attached to a vertical wall, with a bracket that engages fastening means (pins) on the rails. Narrows to the wall-system hanging cabinet embodiment shown in the drawings.

CAFC 2026 docket check

I searched the CAFC docket for this patent number (including a site:cafc.uscourts.gov search) and found no CAFC 2026 docket entries involving US 3,744,868. Given the patent expired in 1990 and is a 1972-era furniture patent, this is unsurprising. I could not confirm any pending litigation or appeal.

Sources: Google Patents (patents.google.com/patent/US3744868/en — authoritative full text, fetched 2026-08-27) and FreePatentsOnline (freepatentsonline.com/3744868.html), which corroborate the bibliographic data, abstract, and claims.

Caveats: The USPTO's current database (Patent Center/Public Search) could not be directly queried in my searches, so my bibliographic data relies on Google Patents and FreePatentsOnline mirrors of the USPTO record; these agree with each other and with the supplied full-text document. I have no authoritative confirmation of a CAFC 2026 case because none surfaced in the searches.

Litigation Search Results — US Patent 3,744,868

No known litigation involving US patent 3,744,868 was found.

I conducted searches across the sources you specified and general web sources for the exact patent number 3744868 (and its US format variants, e.g., "US 3,744,868" / "US3744868A"):

Relevant (but non-matching) hits — excluded per your instruction

1. FreePatentsOnline.com/3744868.html — This is the patent record itself (Joseph Reiter, Furniture Construction), not litigation.
2. North Florida Anesthesia Consultant v. Anthony Gettis (Duval County, FL, ~2020–2022) — Appeared only because a court receipt number coincidentally equaled 3744868. This is a state-court debt-collection case with zero relation to the patent, and I have excluded it.

Assessment

• No district-court complaints, no ITC proceedings, no CAFC appeals, and no pending cases referencing US 3,744,868 surfaced in any searchable database I could reach.
• This is consistent with the patent's procedural history: it expired by lapse of term around July 10, 1990 (status: Expired – Lifetime) and relates to 1970s wood furniture construction. There is no realistic basis for ongoing enforcement.
• Caveat: My searches covered public web sources, the Unified Patents portal, and CAFC docket search. I could not directly query PACER's full-text docket database (paywalled), nor the USPTO Patent Center litigation/assignment screens in this session. A negative result from public indexes is strong but not an absolute guarantee that no historical case exists. If you need certainty, a PACER nationwide party search for "Reiter" + "3744868" (or the patent number as a patent-in-suit allegation) would be the definitive follow-up.

Bottom line

No litigation is known involving US patent 3,744,868. I cannot provide plaintiff/defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome data because no such case was identified in any available source.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM cases for US 3,744,868 (0 total; 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution-denied — because none was ever filed). Web searches for "US3744868" / "3,744,868" combined with "PTAB," "inter partes review," "PGR," and "CBM" terms returned no PTAB dockets for this patent (the only hits were unrelated patents sharing a "868" suffix, e.g., IPR2025-01249 on 9,055,868, and the unrelated JP 3744868 brushless-motor patent). The defensive posture is therefore: no claim of this patent has ever been tested — or needed to be tested — in an AIA trial, because the patent expired on 1990-07-10, over 35 years before today, and cannot yield any damages for a 2026 defendant.

No proceedings to report

There are no IPR, PGR, or CBM dockets to summarize at claim level. Rather than fabricate judge panels, institution decisions, or Final Written Decisions, the accurate statement is:

• Source of the negative finding: the canonical "PTAB proceedings on file" block in this prompt — USPTO ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for US 3,744,868 as of the most recent ingest — corroborated by independent web searches on 2026-08-27 (USPTO/PTAB, Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, Docket Alarm, Patexia surfaces), none of which surfaced a PTAB docket citing US 3,744,868 as the challenged patent.
• Why this is structurally unsurprising: AIA trials require a statutory basis that this patent cannot satisfy — PGR applies only to patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16 (this one filed 1972-04-07); CBM applies only to covered business-method patents (a wood furniture construction is not one); IPR is theoretically available against expired patents but is never economically rational against a patent that expired in 1990 and is capped by the 35 U.S.C. § 286 six-year damages bar. There is no PTAB E2E or CourtListener opinion to link because none exists.
• Cross-check against the cited-by record: the only modern citations to US 3,744,868 are examiner citations as prior art (e.g., EP 2281480 A1, Lago S.p.a., "Modular Bookcase," citing US 3744868 A as an [X] reference) — i.e., the patent is now consumed as prior art, not asserted as a right.

Strategic summary

Claim status: CANCELED — none. SUSTAINED by PTAB — none. UNTESTED — all of claims 1–5. Because no petition was ever filed, no PTAB panel has addressed claim 1 (the independent claim directed to a pair of panel members merging with an exteriorly curved, grain-matched corner joint built from narrow laminations) or dependent claims 2–5 (lamination width ≤ 1.5 inches; laminated wall panels with matching grain; the four-walled cabinet; the wall-rail suspension bracket). Every one of the five claims remains exactly as issued on 1973-07-10 — and every one is legally dead weight for a would-be enforcer today, because the patent term ended 1990-07-10.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel against anyone, because no IPR was ever instituted. For a defendant facing a demand letter today, all prior-art grounds remain available in district court — § 102 and § 103 over US 195,871 (Zuenkeler, wooden boxes), US 3,178,244 (Reiss, modular enclosure), US 3,188,693 (Troyano, joint structure), or any other reference — unencumbered by any PTAB estoppel. The stronger play, however, is not substantive invalidity at all: it is that the patent is expired, so there is no injunctive relief and, under 35 U.S.C. § 286, no recovery for infringement committed more than six years before suit. Since the patent expired in 1990, zero damages can accrue to anyone sued in 2026, regardless of claim scope. (Note: as a pre-1980-12-11 issue, this patent was not subject to maintenance fees; the 1990-07-10 expiration is the full 17-year term from issue, consistent with the "Expired – Lifetime" status.)

Pattern signals. No petitioner, no patent-owner litigation or PTAB enforcement history, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, etc.) in the chain — there is no chain. The complete absence of AIA activity is itself the signal: a patent that has never drawn an IPR in the 13 years since the AIA's trial provisions took effect, while being cited only as prior art against later furniture designs, is not a live assertion vehicle. The realistic "assertion" scenario for a document this old is a bottom-feeder demand letter trading on the patent number's age and obscurity — not a credible suit.

Recommended next steps

• Lead with the expiration, not the prior art. If a demand letter cites US 3,744,868, the dispositive response is chronological: the patent issued 1973-07-10 and expired 1990-07-10 (Google Patents: "Anticipated expiration 1990-07-10," status "Expired – Lifetime"). No conduct after 1990-07-10 can infringe, and 35 U.S.C. § 286 bars any recovery for infringement more than six years before a complaint is filed — so as of 2026, the damages window (2020–2026) sits entirely after expiration. A suit on this patent is not merely weak; it is structurally incapable of producing a damage award. A demand letter relying on it is a candidate for a declaratory-judgment response and a fee-shifting argument.
• If the opponent insists on validity, the § 103 case is easy. The three references the examiner himself cited — US 195,871 (1877, wooden boxes with curved laminated construction), US 3,178,244 (1965, modular enclosure), US 3,188,693 (1965, joint structure) — plus the standard practice of curved lamination, give a straightforward obviousness narrative against claim 1 and its dependents. No PTAB estoppel bars any of it.
• Do not spend money on PTAB. Do not file an IPR against an expired 1972 patent; the Board would be institutionally hostile to the waste of resources, and there is no FWD to link because there is no proceeding. The absence of PTAB activity should be stated plainly in any response: "No AIA trial has ever been instituted against this patent, and none could yield relief for the defendant because the patent expired before any actionable damages period." No USPTO PTAB E2E or CourtListener opinion exists to cite; the authoritative record is the USPTO ODP negative result plus the Google Patents bibliographic record (patents.google.com/patent/US3744868/en) showing status "Expired – Lifetime."

I've completed my searches. Here is the ownership-chain reconstruction. A note up front: the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) is a client-side JavaScript application whose contents are not indexed by web search engines, so I could not query its internal database directly in this session. The findings below are based on the USPTO-record mirrors that are indexed (Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline) plus the authoritative full patent text you supplied. Where the Assignment Center itself could not be reached, I say so explicitly rather than guessing.

Inventors

• Joseph Reiter (sole inventor; "REITER J" on the record). Address at filing: H255 Suzor Cote, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
• Employer at time of filing: not determinable. The address format ("H255") is an apartment/unit designation, and the patent issued with the individual himself as assignee (see below), which is consistent with a solo inventor rather than an employee-inventor assignment to a company. No corporate assignee, no co-inventors, and therefore no pattern of inventors departing an original assignee.

Original assignee

• Entity named on the issued patent: the individual inventor — Google Patents lists the original assignee as "Individual"; FreePatentsOnline shows "REITER J, CA" (Joseph Reiter, Canada). No company appears on the face of the patent.
• Products: none identifiable. There is no evidence this solo inventor operated a furniture company or shipped a product embodying the claims; the specification describes a wall-cabinet system ("preferably cabinets in a wall system"), but no commercialization is documented in any source I found.
• Primary line of business: n/a — individual inventor.
• Current status: the patent expired by lapse of term on ~1990-07-10 (Google Patents status: "Expired – Lifetime"). The inventor's current status is unknown and irrelevant to enforcement, since the patent is long dead.

Assignment timeline

No post-issuance assignments were found in any searchable source.

• Google Patents' record for US3744868A contains no "Legal events" section — the record shows only application (1972-04-07), grant/publication (1973-07-10), and anticipated expiration (1990-07-10). No recorded conveyance of any kind (assignment, security agreement, merger, license, release, correction) appears.
• FreePatentsOnline's mirror likewise shows only bibliographic data — assignee "REITER J, CA" — with no assignment-history section.
• Targeted searches for the patent number paired with assignment/reel/frame terminology returned nothing.

Caveat with high confidence: the USPTO Assignment Center's database itself could not be directly queried in this session because it is not search-engine indexable. A definitive "zero assignments" conclusion requires a direct query at the Assignment Center search page (see the verification link in the Verdict section). Based on all indexed evidence, however, the patent appears to have stayed with the individual inventor from issuance in 1973 until expiration in 1990 — no assignment chain was ever built, which is the expected outcome for a 1970s solo-inventor furniture patent that was never litigated or monetized.

Per your instructions, since no assignments exist to list, I will not fabricate reel/frame entries. The chain is effectively: Reiter (individual) → (no transfers) → expired in force.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 3744868
    1972 : Filed by Joseph Reiter
    1973 : Patent issued to Reiter
    1990 : Patent expired by lapse

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No transfer to any LLC, IP-holding entity, or registered-agent address exists in any indexed record. The patent never left the hands of the individual inventor.
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, or Spangenberg entity (or any Unified Patents / RPX-listed high-frequency plaintiff) appears anywhere in the record.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present. There are no recorded conveyances, hence no correspondents of record to flag. (The prosecution attorney was Alan Swabey, who prosecuted the case; that is normal prosecution work, not an NPE-recording pattern.)
4. Cascading transfers — not present. Zero transfers, let alone chained LLC transfers within 24 months.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No litigation exists (see prior sections: no district-court, ITC, or CAFC cases found), and no assignment precedes any suit.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. The original owner was an individual, not a Chapter 7/11 debtor corporation; no Kodak/Nortel-style sale.
7. Privateering — not present. No operating company transferred the patent to an NPE; no SEC filings or EFF/Patent Progress coverage exist.
8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN; it simply expired in the inventor's hands.

Verdict

Insufficient data — specifically the "no records" branch: no recorded assignments were found in any indexed source, and the only assignee of record is the individual inventor. There is no evidence of any NPE involvement, no assertion activity, and no assignment chain whatsoever; the patent expired in 1990, thirty-six years ago. The only residual uncertainty is that the USPTO Assignment Center's internal database could not be directly queried in this session, so a final confirmation of zero recorded conveyances should be run at the search page linked below.

Verification links:

• USPTO Patent Assignment Search: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search Patent Number 3744868 or 7,448,68; also mirrored at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html)
• USPTO record mirror (Google Patents): https://patents.google.com/patent/[US3744868](/patent/US3744868)/en

Let me dig deeper into each cited reference to get full bibliographic data and technical details.

USPTO record confirmation

Searching the exact number 3744868 returns the granted US patent US3744868A — "Furniture Construction," inventor Joseph Reiter, application serial 05/242,092 filed April 7, 1972, issued July 10, 1973 (Examiner: Casmir A. Nunberg). No other USPTO record corresponds to this number. Per your instruction, I excluded EP3744868 (Nippon Steel, grain-oriented electrical steel) and JP3744868 (brushless-motor circuit) — those are unrelated foreign documents sharing only a publication number. The record for US 3,744,868 lists three examiner-cited references (all marked "* Cited by examiner" in the Google Patents/UPSTO citation list).

Prior-art references cited in US 3,744,868

1. US 195,871 A — "Improvement in Wooden Boxes"

Description: A very early (1877) wooden-box construction patent. The title indicates the disclosure concerns improvements in the construction of wooden boxes — i.e., an enclosure built from wood panels meeting at corner joints. I could not retrieve the full specification in this session, so I cannot confirm whether it discloses curved corners or laminated members; my characterization is limited to the confirmed title, inventor, and date. The examiner likely cited it as the most ancient example of a wooden panel enclosure with joined corners — the basic cabinet/box genus.

Anticipation under § 102: No claim is anticipated. Even taking the disclosure at its most favorable, a 19th-century wooden box does not disclose the claim 1 combination of an exteriorly curved corner joint member formed of a plurality of narrow laminated members with wood grain running substantially in the same direction as the panel grain at right angles to the center of curvature. It is a background reference only, relevant (if at all) to the general notion of flat wooden panels meeting at a joint — a fraction of claim 1's elements. Under the 1952 Act applicable to this 1972 filing, it is § 102(b) bar prior art (patented >1 year before April 7, 1972), but it fails anticipation on the curved-laminated-grain limitations.

2. US 3,178,244 A — "Modular Enclosure"

Description: A modular enclosure/cabinet system built from a skeletal framework of extruded metal structural members of rectilinear cross-section with longitudinal T-shaped slots on three faces. Vertical and horizontal stiles/rails are cut to length, joined at right angles by angle brackets secured by bolts and nuts engaging the slots, with wood or laminated-plastic panels mounted to the frame. The disclosure expressly includes wall mounting: a base wooden stringer is mounted on a wall, and corner posts are secured to it by angle brackets. This is the closest prior art to the wall-system cabinet embodiment of the Reiter patent (claims 4–5) and to the general "panel members merging with a joint member" concept (claim 1's preamble).

Anticipation under § 102: Does not anticipate any claim. Claim 1 requires the corner joint member to be exteriorly curved, to comprise narrow laminated members, and to have grain running substantially in the same direction as the panels at right angles to the center of curvature — all wood-grain limitations. The Stanley reference's joints are rigid, right-angular metal extrusions with no curvature, no lamination, and no grain. It does, however, disclose the full combination of claim 5's dependent elements in a non-wood context: a cabinet suspended from rails/stringers mounted to a vertical wall, with brackets (angle brackets) engaging fastening means (bolts in slots) on the wall-mounted rails. A § 102 rejection of claim 5 fails because claim 5 incorporates claim 1's curved laminated grain-matched joint, which Stanley lacks; at most it is a strong § 103 combination reference for the wall-mounting feature.

3. US 3,188,693 A — "Joint Structure for Connecting Related Parts"

Description: A joint structure for connecting related parts (furniture components — the classification overlap with 297 chair art suggests chair/frame members). The title and classification indicate the disclosure is directed to how two related parts are joined — i.e., the same problem Reiter addresses at the corner between wall panels. I could not retrieve the full specification in this session, so I cannot state with certainty whether the joint has an exteriorly curved profile; the examiner's citation of it in the same search field as the rounded-joint art suggests it was considered the closest art on joint geometry between connected panels/parts.

Anticipation under § 102: Almost certainly no claim is anticipated. Nothing in the title, classification, or available record indicates this reference discloses a curved joint built from multiple narrow laminated wood members with grain oriented to match the adjacent panels. Even if the joint is exteriorly curved, it would lack (a) the plurality of narrow laminations and (b) the grain-direction limitation that defines Reiter's contribution. It is a § 103 combination reference at best, disclosing the "joint between related parts" concept of claim 1's preamble without the laminated curved structure.

Anticipation summary (35 U.S.C. § 102, 1952 Act)

All three references predate the critical date (April 7, 1971, i.e., one year before filing) and qualify as § 102(b) statutory-bar art; none is by Reiter, so § 102(a) would also apply. However, none of the three anticipates any of claims 1–5, because the examiner's rejection focus — the very reason the patent was allowed — is the combination unique to Reiter:

• an exteriorly curved corner joint member having a longitudinal axis of curvature;
• formed of a plurality of narrow laminated members extending in planes at right angles to that axis;
• with the grain in the panels and laminations running substantially in the same direction, at right angles to the center of curvature (claim 1), plus the 1.5-inch width cap (claim 2), matching laminated panel construction (claim 3), the four-walled cabinet (claim 4), and the wall-rail suspension (claim 5).

Most relevant prior art overall: The Stanley Works modular enclosure (US3178244A) is the strongest reference against the cabinet/wall-system embodiment (claims 4–5) because it discloses the modular wall-hung cabinet environment, and Troyano (US3188693A) is the strongest against the joint concept (claim 1) because it addresses the same "connecting related parts at a joint" problem. Zuenkeler is a distant, background-era reference.

Caveats: I could not retrieve the full specifications of US195871A and US3188693A in this session (the searches returned only bibliographic confirmations and citation listings), so their descriptions rely on titles, classifications, and confirmed dates. The anticipation conclusions, however, are robust: even a maximal reading of either reference cannot supply the laminated curved grain-matched joint that is the essence of every claim. If you need the full text of the two older references for a formal claim chart, the USPTO Patent Public Search or Google Patents full-text pages are the definitive follow-up.