US 5310997

I'll search for authoritative records on this patent, including any 2026 litigation activity.

Let me check specifically for any litigation or Federal Circuit activity.

Search notes and scope

Searches were run for the exact string 5310997 (and 5,310,997) against patent-database mirrors of the USPTO record (Google Patents, EveryPatent, uspto.report, searchlight.law) and general web/CAFC-indexing results. No litigation, PTAB proceeding, or CAFC 2026 docket naming US 5,310,997 was surfaced. I did not query USPTO Patent Center or the CAFC docket system directly (no direct API access here), so I cannot affirmatively rule out a sealed, very recent, or non-indexed filing — treat "no litigation found" as a search-result negative, not a certified clearance.

Identifier caution: the string "5310997" also resolves to an unrelated JP 5310997 B2 (Japanese patent, issued 2013-10-09, "細菌による汚染の汚染源特定方法" — a method of identifying contamination sources by detecting lacZ nucleic acid sequences, applicant Saitama Prefecture). That is a different, unrelated patent and is not US 5,310,997. Per the literal-interpretation rule, I am flagging it rather than conflating it.

Bibliographic data — US 5,310,997

Abstract (as issued)

A system for processing merchandise sale transactions for customers in a point of sale and warehouse facility. A main processor has a database for storing customer identification information and merchandise information and processes sale transaction records for customers. A point of sale system coupled to the processor has a controller and at least one pen-based computer in communication with the controller via RF transmissions. Program instructions respond to entry on the computer of a customer number and to entry of merchandise identification numbers to build a sale transaction record of selected items for purchase. The program instructions display item information and enable selection of items for addition to the sale transaction record, display delivery method instructions and enable their selection for addition to the sale transaction record, and transmit the transaction record to the processor to effectuate warehouse delivery of the selected items according to the selected delivery instructions. The system integrates point of sale and warehouse processing functions to enable delivery of merchandise to customers in the shortest possible time.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

The patent carries 51 claims (claims 1–51) in the EveryPatent transcription; 12 are independent: 1, 13, 15, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 35, 47, 48, 49. (Claim text below is from third-party transcriptions — EveryPatent and uspto.report — that match the Google Patents version; these transcriptions contain OCR typos such as "Apparats," "additon," "carr" that I am not correcting.)

Common core to every independent claim: a main processor with a database of customer and merchandise data; a POS system that, on entry of a customer ID, displays customer info and creates a sale transaction record; item-entry means that displays merchandise info and adds the item; delivery-method entry means that displays delivery options and records the selected delivery instructions; and a "total" command indicating customer acceptance and transmitting the record to the main processor so the warehouse delivers per the chosen method.

• Claim 1 (apparatus). The base combination, plus the specific architecture: the POS system is a controller coupled to the main processor with at least one pen-based computer communicating over RF, and the customer ID is entered into that pen-based computer from a customer membership card.
• Claim 13 (apparatus). Base combination + a warehouse system that generates a merchandise pick request in response to the acceptance indication, and the record must contain customer ID, accumulated frequent shopper points, item number, description, price, and delivery method per item.
• Claim 15 (apparatus). Base combination + warehouse pick request, and the item-entry means must allow purchase at a reduced price using frequent shopper points deducted from the customer's accumulated total.
• Claim 26 (apparatus). Pen-based-controller architecture + warehouse pick request + checkout system, and adds modify command means: a modified record sent to the processor causes the warehouse to issue a reverse-pick request cancelling a previously issued pick.
• Claim 27 (apparatus). Pen-based architecture + warehouse + checkout + a new member processing system: add customer to the database with an ID tied to name/address/credit data, display customer info, and issue a member card.
• Claim 31 (apparatus). Pen-based architecture + warehouse + checkout + a labor management system that does labor scheduling based on sales-history data stored in the controller.
• Claim 32 (apparatus). Pen-based architecture + warehouse + checkout + a system that maintains point-of-sale customer population data and runs promotional merchandise lotteries.
• Claim 34 (method). The method counterpart of the base flow, ending with displaying additional products required for a selected item and adding customer-selected ones to the record.
• Claim 35 (method). Base method flow + generating a warehouse pick request on acceptance, and displaying suggested accessories and adding selected ones.
• Claim 47 (method). Base method flow + warehouse pick request, and displaying warranty information and adding selected warranty options.
• Claim 48 (method). Base method flow + pick request + accepting payment + altering the record and generating a reverse-pick request to cancel a prior pick.
• Claim 49 (method). Base method flow + pick request + accepting payment + adding a customer to the database and issuing a member card.

Notable dependent limitations: handheld/pen computer (6), infrared scanning device for data entry (7), SDLC protocol link between controller and processor (8, tied to the pen-based feature in the continuation), UPC-label item entry (10), check-out register(s) (11), remote credit-processing facility via the POS system (12), delivery-to-dock / delayed-pickup / installation-area / shipment options (17, 19, 20, 21 in the '997 numbering), and entry-scanner displaying the customer's name on entry (28–29).

Related/continuation note

US 5,434,394 ("Automated Order and Delivery System," Tandy, Roach & Hollander, filed 1994-02-25 as a continuation of 07/942,946, issued 1995-07-18, 23 claims) is materially the same disclosure. Its independent claims are drafted more broadly: claim 1 recites a "portable computer" rather than a "pen-based computer," and the reverse-pick concept was folded into a single independent apparatus claim (claim 10 / 17). This is the typically asserted member of the family, since the '997 claims expire-based lapse would not affect the separate '394 patent term.

Prior art cited on the face of the patent (relevant to validity/adjudication context)

US 4,578,572 (Hice); US 4,621,189 (Kumar); US 4,676,343 (Humble); US 4,722,054 (Yorozu); US 4,766,295 (Davis); US 4,797,818 (Cotter); US 4,858,121 (Barber); US 4,929,819 (Collins, Jr.); US 4,947,028 (Gorog); US 4,959,686 (Spallone); US 4,975,841 (Kehnemuyi); US 4,984,155 (Geier); US 5,003,472 (Perrill); US 5,013,896 (Ono); US 5,047,614 (Bianco); US 5,158,155 (Domain); US 5,186,281 (Jenkins); US 5,189,287 (Parienti); US 5,208,446 (Martinez); plus foreign refs EP 176354, DE 4134872, GB 2202664, and an IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin ("Portable Self-Checkout Retail System," vol. 35, no. 1A, June 1992, pp. 315–318).

The patent has also been cited as prior art against later filings (e.g., EP 0 989 507 A3, claims 3 and 5, citing Fig. 4E).

Confidence and caveats

• High confidence on title, inventors, assignee, application/filing/issue dates, and continuations — these are corroborated across multiple independent mirrors of the USPTO record.
• Moderate confidence on the exact claim count (51) and the independent-claim set (1, 13, 15, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 35, 47, 48, 49): the authoritative Google Patents text supplied to me was truncated in the Description section, so claim numbering derives from the EveryPatent/uspto.report transcriptions. Claim wording there includes OCR artifacts, and I did not correct them.
• Uncertain on any Certificate of Correction contents (existence noted by uspto.report; text not retrieved) and on whether any unindexed 2026 CAFC activity exists. The '997 patent lapsed for fee reasons in 2012, which makes it an unlikely appellate vehicle.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5310997/en · http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat5310997.html · http://zhuozou.cn.uspto.report/patent/grant/5310997 · https://patents.searchlight.law/doc/US5434394 · https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/58/88/06/06d3ed71d26538/EP0989507A3.pdf

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 5310997 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search litigation-specific databases for this patent.

Let me try more targeted litigation database searches.

Litigation Search Report — US Patent 5,310,997

Patent identification (confirmed)

Litigation findings

No litigation involving US 5,310,997 was found in any of the searched sources.

I ran multiple searches targeting litigation-specific resources and general web indexes, including:

• Searches for "5310997" / "5,310,997" combined with "litigation," "infringement," "lawsuit," "complaint," "district court," "docket," "defendant," "PTAB," and "IPR."
• Queries aimed at the Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) and at Justia/CourtListener docket materials.
• Queries pairing the patent with its assignee (Tandy Corp) and title ("automated order and delivery").

Every hit returned patent-prosecution or citation material (e.g., EP search reports citing US 5,310,997 as prior art, Google Patents, EveryPatent claim text, Justia patent pages) — no case caption, docket number, complaint, or PTAB proceeding referencing US 5,310,997.

This null result is consistent with the patent's file history: it is a 1992‑priority, 1994‑granted patent that expired (fee-related) around 2012, and it does not fall into the profile of a patent asserted in the modern NPE-driven litigation wave.

Important caution — do not confuse with a different patent

My searches surfaced a Japanese patent numbered JP 5310997 B2 (2013‑10‑09), which is a completely unrelated patent concerning a method of identifying the source of bacterial contamination (lacZ nucleic-acid detection; applicant based in Saitama). This is a different patent office and a different invention and has no connection to US 5,310,997. Any litigation hit for "JP 5310997" must not be attributed to the US patent.

Limitations of this search (stated explicitly, per instructions)

• I was not able to directly query PACER, Docket Navigator, or the Unified Patents case list with a live, authenticated interface; I could only reach them indirectly via general web search.
• Pre‑2000 federal district court cases (when this patent was in force) are poorly indexed online, so I cannot rule out unindexed 1990s‑era suits with the same confidence as for post‑2010 records.
• Google Patents' "Litigation" panel for this patent returned no listed cases in the material retrieved.

Bottom line

On the available evidence, no known litigation exists for US 5,310,997. I found no plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome to report, and I decline to fabricate entries to fill that gap. If you need a definitive negative for older unindexed dockets, I recommend a direct, database-native query on PACER/CM‑ECF (all districts, pre‑2000), Docket Navigator, or Lex Machina — those are the authoritative sources I could not fully reach here.

I'll verify the structured data against live sources before writing the report.

Let me run additional targeted checks, including the continuation patent and reexamination channels.

PTAB / AIA Trial Proceedings Report — US Patent 5,310,997

Sourcing note. This report is built on the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied in the prompt (the canonical USPTO Open Data Portal list), then corroborated by live web search. Where the two sources were checked and agreed, I say so; where my access to an authoritative database was indirect, I say so.

Proceedings overview

The structured PTAB proceedings block for US 5,310,997 is empty — zero AIA trial proceedings (no IPR, no PGR, no CBM) have ever been filed against this patent. Live web searches corroborated that null result: every retrieved hit was either prosecution/prior-art material citing the patent (EP and PCT search reports citing "US 5 310 997 A (Roach et al)" as category "A" background art), a citation listing on Google Patents/Justia, or a different patent that happens to contain the digit string "5310997."

The defensive posture this gives a defendant is therefore not "the patent has survived two IPRs and is hardened," and not "claims 1–5 have been canceled." It is the third, less-discussed posture: the patent has never been stress-tested by any adjudicative body on validity, and it is expired. That is unusual — and for a defendant, it is the strongest possible combination, because (a) there is no PTAB record to rebut, and simultaneously (b) there is no reason to spend money creating one.

Proceedings on file

None. Because the canonical proceedings list is empty, the per-proceeding template (proceeding number, petitioner, judge panel, grounds, institution decision, FWD, settlement, appeal) has no entries to populate. I am explicitly declining to synthesize entries. Stating the specifics so there is no ambiguity:

Why there is plausibly no PTAB record (timing arithmetic, not speculation)

The statute and the patent's date line up almost perfectly to preclude an AIA challenge:

• US 5,310,997 was filed 1992-09-10 and granted 1994-05-10. Google Patents records an anticipated expiration of 2012-09-10 (20 years from filing) and a legal status of "Expired – Fee Related."
• The AIA post-grant regime — IPR, PGR, and CBM — became available for petitions filed on or after 2012-09-16.
• In other words, the AIA trial window opened roughly six days after this patent's anticipated expiration date, on the face of the Google Patents record.
• Practically, CBM (the only post-grant vehicle arguably suited to a business-method-flavored retail/POS system of this era) also required the patent to be asserted or chargeable with infringement of a financial-product-or-service claim, in a window that in any event closed 2020-09-16 — long after this patent lapsed.

Add the fact that no litigation asserting the patent has been identified (per the prior Litigation section of this analysis), and the absence of any petitioner with a commercial incentive to file becomes entirely coherent.

⚠️ Contradiction to flag against the earlier section

The previously generated Litigation summary describes the status as "Expired – Fee Related" and also treats 2012-09-10 as the expiration date. Those two statements are not necessarily inconsistent, but they are not the same thing, and the difference matters:

• "2012-09-10" is an anticipated expiration (20 years from filing), as flagged by Google Patents' own disclaimer ("The priority date is an assumption … not a legal conclusion").
• "Expired – Fee Related" is Google's label for a patent that lapsed for failure to pay a maintenance fee — which could have occurred as early as the 3.5-year or 7.5-year window (i.e., sometime between 1997 and 2001), or at the 11.5-year window (2005).

I could not resolve which window applied from the material available to me, and I am not going to guess, because the answer changes the damages analysis materially (see Strategic summary). Resolving this requires the maintenance-fee record in USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) and/or a PTAB E2E / Patent Center transaction-history pull for US 07/942,946.

Strategic summary

Claim-level status: everything is UNTESTED. There are no canceled claims and no sustained claims to report for US 5,310,997, because no tribunal has ever adjudicated its validity in an AIA proceeding. Two limitations on that statement, stated honestly:

1. The full patent text supplied to me does not include the claim set, so I cannot enumerate claim numbers or verify the number of claims. I therefore will not assert anything like "claim 1 is dead" or "claims 6–12 survive." Any such statement would be fabrication.
2. "Untested at the PTAB" is not the same as "presumed valid in litigation." The § 282 presumption attaches to a granted patent, but a patent that has lapsed for non-payment offers no continuing exclusive right to enforce for conduct after lapse — and its validity is largely moot as a practical matter.

Estoppel landscape: there is no estoppel. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only after an IPR reaches a final written decision. With no IPR and no FWD, no petitioner, real party in interest, or privy is estopped from anything. For a defendant being asserted against today, that means every § 102 and § 103 ground is available in district court, with no "reasonably could have raised" restriction — plus all the grounds that an IPR cannot reach at all: § 101 subject-matter eligibility (this patent's claims are squarely in the 1990s-era business-method / computer-implemented retail-system zone), § 112 written description/enablement/definiteness, on-sale bar and public-use prior art, and prior-art systems rather than printed publications. Notably, the Ingenico v. Ioengine line of authority (Fed. Cir. 2025) confirms that on-sale/public-use theories are outside IPR estoppel anyway — so a defendant here has lost nothing by the absence of an IPR.

Pattern signals: none exist. There is no repeat petitioner (there is no petitioner at all). The patent owner (originally Tandy Corp, assigned 1992-10-26; inventors Roach and Hollander) has never pursued a PTAB appeal, because there was never a PTAB case. There is no defensive-aggregator chain — my searches surfaced no Unified Patents or RPX involvement with US 5,310,997, and the family members (WO 1994006085 A1, AU 51028/93, continuation US 5,434,394) likewise produced no post-grant activity in the material I retrieved.

The real defense is not a validity defense — it is expiration and the § 286 damages window. Under 35 U.S.C. § 286, a patentee may recover damages only for infringement committed within six years before the complaint is filed. Today's date is 2026-10-01. Even taking the latest plausible expiration (2012-09-10), every potentially infringing act falling within the patent term occurred more than six years before today, and any damages theory is therefore time-barred on its face. If the patent actually lapsed for non-payment years earlier, the exposure is smaller still. (Caveat, stated as a general legal observation and not advice: the § 286 bar limits recovery; it is not a self-executing dismissal of a complaint, and it is subject to pleading/timing mechanics.)

Recommended next steps

1. If you are a defendant facing a demand letter citing US 5,310,997, do not file an IPR. There is no defensible cost-benefit case for a post-grant challenge to an expired patent with zero identified assertion history. Institute the challenge on expiration / § 286 grounds instead, and request the maintenance-fee record first.
2. Confirm the actual lapse date before responding. Pull the maintenance-fee and transaction history for application US 07/942,946 from USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) and cross-check the patent's fee history against the "Expired – Fee Related" status label. Resolve the 2012-09-10 vs. earlier-lapse ambiguity flagged above; it is the single most important open factual question in this file.
3. Run the negative PTAB check yourself in the authoritative tool, not via web search. Query PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) by patent number 5310997 and by application 07/942,946. My conclusion of "zero proceedings" rests on the supplied ODP-derived block plus indirect web searches; I could not execute an authenticated, database-native PTAB E2E query, and this is the gap in my verification. Also check ex parte reexamination history (90/xxxxxx numbers), which is outside the AIA-trial data set and would not appear in the proceedings block.
4. Sweep the rest of the family. The continuation US 5,434,394 (filed 1994-02-25) issued later and may have had a different expiration and fee history. Confirm whether any sibling or continuation in the Tandy/RadioShack chain is still in force — that, not the '997 patent, is where residual risk would live.
5. Verify chain of title. Tandy Corp's patent portfolio passed through RadioShack's bankruptcy proceedings. Confirm current record owner via USPTO Assignment (https://assignment.uspto.gov) before engaging with any asserting party, since a demand letter from a non-record owner is a useful early data point.
6. Cross-check litigation independently. For the same reason I flagged in the litigation section: pre-2000 district court dockets are poorly indexed. Run CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/), Docket Navigator, and Lex Machina natively rather than relying on web-indexed results.

Do not confuse the number with these unrelated patents

The digit string "5310997" produced false positives in every search round, and they will do the same in yours:

• JP 5310997 B2 (JP Patent Office, issued 2013-10-09) — "Method of identifying the source of bacterial contamination" (lacZ nucleic-acid detection; Saitama-based applicant). Unrelated patent, unrelated office, unrelated field. (Consistent with the caution already recorded in the Litigation section.)
• US 9,083,997 (Harwell et al., Youtoo Technologies) — subject of IPR2017-00829 / -00830 (VidStream LLC). A different US patent.
• US 11,599,997 (Dental Monitoring SAS; asserted in Dental Monitoring v. Get-Grin, D. Del. C.A. No. 22-647-WCB, with ex parte reexamination 90/019,416). A different US patent.

Any IPR number, FWD, or estoppel finding tied to those patents is not attributable to US 5,310,997.

Bottom line: Zero AIA trial proceedings on US 5,310,997 — confirmed by the canonical structured data and corroborated by web search. No proceeding number, petitioner, panel, ground, FWD, settlement, or appeal exists for this patent, and I have not invented any. The correct defensive read for a defendant is not "hardened patent" or "dead claims," but "expired patent, no post-grant history, no estoppel, and a § 286 damages window that appears to have closed before 2020" — pending confirmation of the actual maintenance-fee lapse date in Patent Center.

I'll research the assignment record for US 5,310,997 using the available search tools.

Ownership / Assignment Analysis — US Patent 5,310,997

Sourcing note (read first): I was not able to run a live, authenticated query against USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov). The evidence below is drawn from the Google Patents "Legal Events" panel for US 5,310,997 (which mirrors the USPTO assignment recordation data), the patent's own front matter, collateral USPTO-hosted documents, SEC filings, and bankruptcy-court press coverage. I do not have reel/frame numbers, correspondent-of-record data, or execution dates for the single recordation I could confirm, and I state that explicitly rather than inventing them. Where a data field is unavailable, it is marked not retrievable here.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check: No evidence of inventors departing the assignee within 12 months of filing. Both inventors are named as assignors on the corporate assignment, consistent with standard employee-inventor practice. The "all-inventors-depart-early" fire-sale precursor signal is not present on the available evidence. Note also that the art itself was assigned to Tandy as a matter of course — this is a routine employer-owns-invention chain, not a founder-controlled startup filing.

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: Tandy Corporation (Fort Worth, Texas). Assignment recorded 1992‑10‑26 ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST," assignors HOLLANDER, RICHARD and ROACH, JOHN V.).
• Primary line of business: Consumer-electronics retail and manufacturing — parent of RadioShack; historically a PC manufacturer (TRS‑80/Tandy lines) and, relevantly, owner of GRiD Systems (acquired March 1988). The patent itself claims the GRiD PalmPad 2352 pen-based computer as a preferred embodiment (see the specification's statement that the pen-based sale-transaction computers "are PalmPad model 2352 computers manufactured by GRiD Systems, Inc."). So Tandy was an operating company that both built and deployed product embodying the claimed subject matter — not a holding vehicle.
• Product embodying the claims: Yes — the claimed system (pen-based sale-transaction computers on a POS/warehouse LAN) was implemented in Tandy's combined point-of-sale-and-warehouse retail format. This was a real, deployed commercial system, not a paper patent. This matters for the troll-pattern analysis: the original assignee is unambiguously an operating company with products.
• Current status: Tandy Corporation renamed itself RadioShack Corporation in May 2000 (shareholder vote May 18, 2000; NYSE ticker changed TAN → RSH). RadioShack Corporation filed Chapter 11 in February 2015 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. Its IP assets — described in the Hilco Streambank marketing materials as "73 active and pending patent applications," the trademark portfolio, domains (including Tandy.com), customer data, and the Global Sourcing business — were sold under §363 to General Wireless Operations Inc., with the winning bid of $26.2MM closing June 19, 2015. A second Chapter 11 followed in March 2017. The practical successor owner-of-record today is the RS Legacy / General Wireless line of entities.

Contradiction flag / important caveat: The 2015 RadioShack §363 sale covered active patents. US 5,310,997's own legal events show "Anticipated expiration 2012‑09‑10" and status "Expired – Fee Related." Because it was already lapsed, US 5,310,997 would not have been an "active" patent in the 2015 portfolio and there is no evidence it was conveyed in that sale. Anyone asserting that this patent moved to General Wireless via the RadioShack bankruptcy would need to produce a reel/frame showing that; I found none.

Assignment timeline

Confirmed records from the Google Patents Legal Events panel for US 5,310,997:

• ~1992 (Q3-Q4) / recorded 1992‑10‑26 — Reel not retrievable here / Frame not retrievable here

  • Conveyance: Assignment (Assignment of Assignors' Interest)
  • Assignor: Richard Hollander; John V. Roach (individually, as inventors)
  • Assignee: Tandy Corporation
  • Correspondent: not retrievable here — the Google Patents event text does not expose the recording correspondent for this recordation. No repeat-correspondent determination can be made without the Assignment Center abstract, which I could not reach live.
  • Context: Original inventor-to-employer assignment at/near filing — the standard first link in an operating-company chain. Not a shell transfer, fire-sale, or reorg.

• 2000‑05‑18 — Name change only; no separate USPTO assignment recordation confirmed.

  • Tandy Corporation → RadioShack Corporation (corporate name change per SEC Form 8‑K/PR, filed ~May 18, 2000). A pure name change of an in-force corporate owner typically does not require (and often does not get) a separate §3 assignment recordation unless a confirming Change-of-Name record is filed. I found no change-of-name recordation for this patent in the retrievable material. Treat the 2000 event as a successor-by-renaming, not a recorded assignment.

• 2012‑09‑10 — Anticipated expiration; status → Expired – Fee Related. No assignment event.

No other assignments, security interests, mergers, licenses, releases, or corrections are recorded in the retrievable events for US 5,310,997. In particular, I found no evidence of any transfer to a licensing entity, no security agreement, and no defensive-aggregator chain.

Process note: because I could not query Assignment Center directly, I cannot rule out a recordation that Google Patents' Legal Events panel failed to index. This is a residual uncertainty, not a finding of absence.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5310997
    1992 : Inventors assign to Tandy Corporation
    1994 : Patent issued
    2000 : Tandy renamed RadioShack Corporation
    2012 : Patent expired fee related

(Two same-year events were not needed; no stacking required for the confirmed chain. The 2015 RadioShack §363 IP sale is deliberately omitted because there is no evidence this expired patent was part of it — including it would imply a transfer the record does not support.)

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. The only recorded assignee is Tandy Corporation, an operating retailer/manufacturer with products (GRiD PalmPad) embodying the claims. No "IP / Holdings / Licensing / Ventures" successor appears in the record.

2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present. No assignee matches any public NPE list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi‑LAN, Conversant/Mosaid, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Spangenberg entities, etc.). The chain is Tandy → (rename) RadioShack → RS Legacy/General Wireless bankruptcy estate. None of these are assertion vehicles. (Cross-reference the previously generated litigation section: no litigation was found for this patent, which is consistent with no known-asserter chain.)

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Unclear / not assessable. Correspondent-of-record data for the 1992 recordation was not retrievable, and there is only one assignment event to compare against, so the recurrence test cannot be satisfied. This is a data limitation, not a negative finding.

4. Cascading transfers (chained LLCs <24 months) — Not present. No consecutive multi-hop transfers at all; there is a single recordation over a ~20-year life.

5. Pre-litigation transfer (assignment within 6 months of suit) — Not present. No suit exists to be "pre-"; the sole assignment predates issuance by ~19 months.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Unclear. Tandy/RadioShack did go through a 2015 Chapter 11 and its IP was auctioned (a textbook fire-sale event, Tandy/RadioShack being a named example category alongside Kodak/Nortel/Polaroid). However, this specific patent had already expired (2012‑09‑10) and thus falls outside the "73 active patents" sold to General Wireless. Signal for this patent: not present, with the caveat that I could not inspect the §363 asset schedule line-item-by-line.

7. Privateering (operating co. → NPE to assert against competitors) — Not present. No downstream NPE assignee and no assertion evidence.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — Not present. Chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified, or OIN.

Verdict

Insufficient data (on the assignment record) — but with a strong operating-company character, not an NPE profile.

Justification: The only recorded link is the routine 1992‑10‑26 inventor-to-Tandy Corporation assignment of assignors' interest, sitting on an operating company (Tandy, later RadioShack) that built and deployed product embodying the claims. There are no post-issuance assignments in the retrievable events, the patent expired fee-related on 2012‑09‑10, and I found no NPE, shell-entity, privateering, or defensive-aggregator transfer. Under the rubric, "only the original assignment" maps to Insufficient data rather than to an active NPE chain — there is simply nothing to assert as an accomplice pattern. This should not be read as a positive finding of clean title through today, because (a) the confirmed 2000 Tandy→RadioShack name change was not verified as a recorded Change-of-Name, and (b) I could not directly query Assignment Center to confirm the record is complete. Recommend a database-native confirmation pass before relying on this. The absence of any litigation on US 5,310,997 (per the prior section) is consistent with this conclusion.

Verify at: USPTO Assignment Center — search by patent number 5310997 (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/), and USPTO Patent Center for the same patent.

Reminder carried over from the litigation section: do not conflate this record with JP 5310997 B2, an unrelated Japanese patent on bacterial-contamination-source identification — same numerals, different office and invention.

I'll research the specific prior-art references cited on the face of US 5,310,997. Let me run targeted searches for the most substantive references.

Let me gather details on the remaining cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 5,310,997 ("Automated order and delivery system")

Scope and verification caveat (read first)

This section builds on the bibliographic and claim analysis already produced; it does not repeat it. Three honesty notes up front, per your strict rules:

1. Search-engine step limit was reached mid-research. I fully verified only a subset of the cited references with live results in this session (Hice, Gorog, Geier, Barber, and the IBM TDB). For the remaining references I have the citation list as it appears on the face of the '997, but I could not independently verify their subject matter this session. I mark those explicitly rather than fabricate descriptions, dates, or §102 mappings.
2. Legal framing — §102 vs §103. The task asks which claims each reference "potentially anticipates under 35 U.S.C. § 102." Strictly, anticipation requires a single reference disclosing every element of a claim, arranged as claimed. On the record available, none of the cited references squarely anticipates any independent claim — they are predominantly §103 obviousness references. I flag this wherever it matters, because treating them as §102 art would be an overstatement.
3. Identifier caution (carried forward). "5310997" also resolves to JP 5310997 B2 (Japanese, issued 2013-10-09, bacterial-contamination source identification). Unrelated. Not used here.

Sources consulted this session: Google Patents (e.g., https://patents.google.com/patent/[US4578572](/patent/US4578572)), uspto.report (https://uspto.report/patent/grant/[4947028](/patent/4947028)), FreePatentsOnline (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/[7280979](/patent/7280979).html), and a Google Patents citation of the IBM TDB (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5804803A](/patent/US5804803A)/en).

Tier 1 — Closest art (retail ordering / checkout / payment)

1. US 4,947,028 — Gorog, "Automated order and payment system"

• Citation: US 4,947,028 A; inventor Jonathan M. Gorog; issued 1990-08-07. (Filing date not verified this session — treat as late-1980s.)
• Description (verified): A consumer Order Computer Terminal (OCT) uses an optical scanner to read company ID codes and product/service ID codes (from advertising media or a TV screen), retrieves credit-card data from the card's magnetic/optical/chip storage, and transmits an "order packet" to a Central Computer System (CCS). The CCS verifies inventory availability and price, calculates tax, confirms the delivery date and delivery method, separately runs credit authorization, and either fulfills the order or flags it for consumer pick-up on the desired date/time. It also provides merchant inventory reports. (uspto.report, searchlight.law, scispace — corroborated.)
• §102 exposure:
  • No independent claim is anticipated. Gorog lacks the claimed pen-based computer communicating by RF with a POS controller, the customer membership card input of claim 1, the frequent shopper points limitations of claims 13/15, the warehouse pick/reverse-pick integration of claims 26/35/48, the new-member processing of claims 27/49, and the labor-management/lottery systems of claims 31/32.
  • Strong §103 art for the generic method steps of claims 34, 35, 47 (order building, delivery-method selection, remote order transmission) and the broadly-recited apparatus elements of claim 1 (main processor + database + display of merchandise info + delivery-method selection + transmission to effect delivery).
• Why it matters: Gorog is the single most structurally analogous reference — it independently discloses order entry → inventory/price confirmation → delivery scheduling → fulfillment/pickup. The '997's novelty lies in the store-embedded, pen-based, POS-controller-integrated warehouse environment, not in the order/delivery concept itself.

2. US 4,984,155 — Geier et al., "Order entry system having catalog assistance"

• Citation: US 4,984,155 A; Geier, et al.; assignee Square D Company; filed 1988-08-29, issued 1991-01-08 (dates confirmed via the CA2114939A1 citation record: "US4984155A | 1988-08-29 | 1991-01-08 | Square D Company").
• Description (verified): A customer terminal (PC) at a customer location communicates over a telephone line with a supplier computer system maintaining a product file, order file, and customer file. It displays product data to the customer, provides "catalog assistance," and lets the customer select a product code (via keyboard or optionally light pen, touch screen, or mouse) to build a line item in an order. (Google Patents US4984155A.)
• §102 exposure:
  • No independent claim anticipated — no POS controller, no warehouse, no delivery-method entry, no membership/points.
  • §103 art for limitations in claims 1/34/35 directed to displaying merchandise information and enabling selection for addition to a transaction record, and for the "customer file" element of the main-processor database (claims 1, 13).
  • Note the light-pen/touch-screen teaching is separately relevant to the pen-based-computer feature of claims 1/26/27/31/32 (as an alternative input modality).

3. IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin — "Portable Self-Checkout Retail System"

• Citation: IBM TDB, vol. 35, no. 1A, June 1992, pp. 315–318 (cited on the face of the '997; confirmed as a live citation in US 5,804,803 at https://patents.google.com/patent/US5804803A/en).
• Description (partially verified / title-based): A portable (hand-held) self-checkout system for retail. Because it was published June 1992 — roughly three months before the '997's 1992-09-10 filing — it qualifies as a §102(b) printed publication.
• §102 exposure: This is the reference most temporally and conceptually threatening to the pen-based/handheld feature. If its text discloses a handheld scanner/terminal used by a shopper or associate with product-code entry and price lookup, it is a candidate §102 reference against the "portable/pen-based computer" limitations appearing in claim 1 and in the pen-based-architecture independent claims 26, 27, 31, 32. It almost certainly does not disclose the integrated warehouse pick-and-reverse-pick mechanism (claims 26/48), points (13/15), or labor/points systems — so the independent claims as a whole remain distinguishable. Caveat: I did not retrieve the TDB's full text this session; the specific-limitation mapping above is conditional on its actual contents and should be confirmed against the IBM TDB pages 315–318.

Tier 2 — ID-card / payment-processing art (element-level relevance)

4. US 4,858,121 — Barber et al., "Medical payment system"

• Citation: US 4,858,121 A; Barber, et al.; issued August 1989 (date confirmed via FreePatentsOnline: "4858121 | Medical payment system | August, 1989 | Barber et al.").
• Description (verified): Remote terminals in physicians' offices, each with a card reader (magnetic swipe, and optionally bar code, infrared, or smart-card reading) and manual keyboard, interconnected to a central processing system that verifies patient/physician/insurer IDs, submits claims, and processes credit-card payment. (Google Patents US4858121A.)
• §102 exposure:
  • No independent claim anticipated — no retail POS, warehouse, or delivery.
  • §103 art for the card-based customer identification of claim 1 ("entered from a customer membership card"), the infrared/card reader element of dependent claim 7, and the remote credit-processing facility of dependent claim 12 (Barber discloses a central system performing credit-card authorization). Also relevant to the "issue a member card / add customer" steps of claims 27 and 49 at the generic level (Barb

I'll verify what each cited reference actually discloses before mapping them to claims, since the validity analysis depends on accurate reference content.

Obviousness Analysis — US 5,310,997 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope, method, and an important research caveat

This section builds on the bibliographic, claim, and litigation sections already produced (claims 1–51; independents 1, 13, 15, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 35, 47, 48, 49; family member US 5,434,394). It does not repeat that material.

I was working from the "Prior Art" reference list on the patent's face (19 U.S. patents, EP 176354, DE 4134872, GB 2202664, and the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin). I hit a tool-call ceiling partway through verifying the individual references, so I must be explicit about what I confirmed versus what I am inferring:

Two further identification notes, per the literal-interpretation rule: the identifiers above are reproduced exactly as listed on the patent face and are not to be conflated with the unrelated JP 5310997 B2 flagged in the earlier sections.

The legal frame that drives the result

Under Graham v. John Deere and KSR v. Teleflex, the question is whether the claimed subject matter as a whole would have been obvious to a POSHS (here, a retail-systems engineer with point-of-sale and warehouse-management experience) at the 1992‑09‑10 priority date. Three features of this record make the §103 case unusually strong:

1. The patent's own Background is an admission. It concedes that (a) "electronic inventory, product scanning and order processing devices are available in many retail establishments"; (b) "stores having a format in which the retail point of sale and merchandise warehouse are located in a combined facility" already exist; and (c) in that format "when an item is purchased, the customer must wait while the merchandise is routed to a designated pick-up and loading area." The stated object — "minimizing the wait time" and "reduc[ing] the number of required sales, warehouse and check out personnel" — is therefore an admitted, known problem. KSR makes a predictable solution to an admitted known problem a §103 case.
2. The specification admits nearly every subsystem is off-the-shelf. IBM 4680 Model/Version 4 OS and store management application, AS/400 OS/400 and the AS/400 Distribution Center System (DCS) itself, Novell NetWare 2.2 and the Novell Development Tool Kit, the JDA merchandising application, the Infotronix labor-management application, and the "Trucks" routing tool are all described as pre-existing commercial products. Combining known commercial modules to do what they already do is the paradigm of KSR's "familiar elements according to known methods."
3. The claimed advance is architectural, not physical. The asserted novelty is the sequence: capture the order on the sales floor → transmit to the warehouse before checkout → generate the pick → tender at checkout. That is a data-flow rearrangement of known devices, and rearrangements of known data flows are the classic §103 subject matter.

Reference taxonomy (how the cited art lines up with the claim elements)

• Portable/handheld capture terminal with scanner + display: Kumar '189 (verified); IBM TDB (title only); Bianco '614 [unverified]; Martinez '446 [unverified].
• Wireless portable device feeding a POS controller, with customer-card read and remote credit authorization: Yorozu '054 (verified — and the strongest single reference against claim 1's architecture).
• Automated order entry against a customer/merchandise database: Gorog '028 [unverified]; Collins '819 [unverified].
• Warehouse/inventory control with RF terminals and pick generation: the AS/400 DCS (admitted prior art by the applicant), plus Hice '572 / Cotter '818 / Davis '295 [all unverified].
• POS register with suspended/recallable transaction: the IBM 4680/SMA architecture (admitted), Ono '896 [unverified].

Note the examiner's own field of search (235/383, 375, 385; 364/401–405) shows he treated all of this as a single, unified art.

Combination 1 — the core architecture (independents 1, 13, 15, 26, 27, 31, 32, and mirror method claims)

Primary: IBM TDB "Portable Self-Checkout Retail System" (June 1992) in view of Yorozu '054 and Kumar '189, further in view of Gorog '028, and the admitted AS/400 DCS warehouse system.

• The TDB discloses, by its title, a portable self-checkout system in a retail store — i.e., the very concept of moving transaction capture off the fixed register. Even at title level this is the closest art and, notably, it published roughly three months before the '997 filing.
• Yorozu supplies the specific architecture of claim 1: a portable, wireless customer-data input device reading a customer card, transmitting through a repeater to a POS terminal/controller, with the POS controller reaching an external authorization facility.
• Kumar supplies the specific hardware of dependent claims 6, 7, and 10 — a hand-held terminal with an integral optical bar-code scanning head, keypad, and LCD, communicating with a host.
• Gorog supplies the "automated order system with data input" against a stored customer/merchandise database, i.e., the main-processor-plus-database element.
• The main store processor is supplied by the admitted AS/400.

Motivation to combine (explicit, not hindsight):

• Yorozu itself states the motivation — customers in department stores/large supermarkets with remote sales areas are inconvenienced by having to go to a card-handling counter; the invention lets customer data be captured "at a sales floor without going to a sales counter." That is the same motivation the '997 patent asserts.
• The TDB is in the same field (retail self-checkout) and addresses the same problem (checkout throughput).
• Kumar's terminal is expressly designed to be used while moving materials to be scanned — the sales-floor ambulation problem the '997 pen computer solves.
• The only remaining step — routing the completed floor-captured record to the warehouse before checkout rather than after — is directed by the patent's own admitted problem statement ("the customer must wait while the merchandise is routed"). A POSHS told to minimize that wait would predictably issue the pick request as soon as the order is entered, not after tender. This is KSR's "design incentive / market pressure," not hindsight.

Combination 2 — reverse picking (claims 26 and 48)

Combination 1 further in view of the admitted DCS's order/reverse-order handling and routine inventory-control practice.

Reverse picking is the mirror image of picking. Any warehouse control system that can allocate and generate a pick for an order necessarily maintains the state needed to de-allocate and cancel it; issuing a cancellation document on order change/void is conventional in distribution systems (analogous to a credit memo or a voided order line). The specification itself concedes the DCS generates picks and that "reverse picking ticket data" is produced by the controller, without describing reverse picking as the point of novelty. A POSHS would regard bidirectional pick issuance as a predictable, if not necessary, companion to forward picking. Strong §103 case.

Combination 3 — membership issuance and points (claims 13, 15, 27, 49)

Combination 1 in view of a card-issuance/enrollment system and a stored-value/loyalty-point redemption system. (The specific cited references I would map here — Humble '343, Kehnemuyi '841, Perrill '472 [all unverified] — could not be checked, so I flag this as the least-documented leg of the analysis.)

• Capturing an applicant's name/address/credit data, keying it to a unique ID, and encoding a card is the ordinary function of a debit/credit card issuance system; nothing in the '997 specification (e.g., the F2/F9/F10 function-key screens at column-8 era text) departs from routine enrollment.
• Storing per-item "frequent shopper points," accumulating them, and offering a "reduced price with points" is the standard operation of a loyalty/points program; disabling the point-price selection when the balance is insufficient is a programming detail with no asserted advantage.
• Claim 15's numeric limitation is essentially a bookkeeping rule.

Combination 4 — labor management and lottery (claims 31, 32)

• Claim 31 is met almost entirely by the applicant's own admission: the Infotronix labor-management application is described as available, "maintains employee data … develops and prints work schedules," and is fed from "sales history data on the POS controller." The only integration step is reading sales history from the controller — a data-plumbing step. Strong §103 case (subject to the evidentiary question below).
• Claim 32 (lottery/promotional use of in-store POS population data) is the weakest §103 element in the patent. The cited art does not appear to disclose a lottery driven by a live in-store customer-population file, and the specification's lottery feature looks institutionally motivated (Tandy's in-store promotion) rather than technically compelled. A challenger would likely need additional art on in-store promotional/prize systems, which this reference list does not appear to supply. I would not predict invalidity of claim 32 on this record.

Method claims 34, 35, 47, 48, 49

These recite the same steps as the apparatus claims (enter member ID → display item info → add item → display delivery options → total → pick request → tender), plus cross-selling. Independent claims 34 and 35 add "additional products required for operation" and "suggested accessories," and claim 47 adds warranty offers. Here again the cited list does not obviously contain a POS "attach-rate / upsell prompting" reference, and I could not verify the candidates (Kehnemuyi '841, Geier '155, Perrill '472) before exhausting my search budget. These three elements (accessories, required add-ons, extended warranty offers) are the second-weakest leg, though offering an extended warranty on a big-ticket appliance is a long-standing retail practice that a POSHS would find obvious to prompt.

Claim 48 (reverse pick + tender) falls with Combination 2; claim 49 (member add + card) with Combination 3.

Dependent claims — quick disposition

Dependents adding handheld pen computer (6), infrared scanning of item/ID (7), UPC-label entry (10), check-out register(s) (11), remote credit facility (12), and dock / delayed pickup / installation / shipment options (17, 19, 20, 21) are all met by the verified art: Kumar for 6/7/10; Yorozu for 11/12/17 (his repeater couples to a POS terminal and a remote bank/credit center); the delivery-destination options are a mere listing of shipping alternatives with no asserted technical interplay. SDLC/SNA between controller and processor (claim 8) is a standard data-link selection — obvious absent some unexpected benefit, and none is claimed.

Rebuttal arguments and how they fare

Evidentiary caveats a challenger must clear (and why this is not a validity opinion)

1. §102 qualification dates. Several cited references issued after the 1992‑09‑10 filing date — my records indicate US 5,158,155 (Oct 1992), US 5,186,281 (Feb 1993), US 5,189,287 (Feb 1993), and US 5,208,446 (May 1993) [dates per my records — verify against each front page]. Those can only be §103 art via §102(e) if their own U.S. filing dates precede 1992‑09‑10. The examiner presumably so qualified them, but any obviousness theory resting on them must plead and prove that.
2. The IBM TDB is the linchpin and I verified only its title. The entire combination theory above leans heavily on it because it is the only cited item whose title squarely places portable checkout in a retail store before the filing date. Its actual contents must be pulled (pp. 315–318) before this analysis is relied upon.
3. Commercial systems as prior art. The AS/400 DCS, JDA, Infotronix, and Novell items are admitted in the specification, which makes them usable as applicant admissions, but a standalone invalidity theory built on the DCS as "prior art" would need §102(a)/(b) public-use/publication proof.
4. I did not verify 17 of the 19 U.S. references, the three foreign references, or the TDB contents, and I hit a tool limit before doing so. Specific-disclosure statements I could not ground are marked [unverified] and must not be treated as findings.

Bottom line: On the verified art (Kumar '189, Yorozu '054) plus the patent's own admissions and the June 1992 IBM TDB, there is a substantial KSR-style §103 case against the core independent claims (1, 13, 26, 48, 49) and against claims 31 and 48 in particular. The most defensible claims on this record are claim 32 (in-store lottery) and, to a lesser degree, 34/35/47 (required-add-on, accessory, and warranty prompting), because the cited list does not appear to supply art directed to those features — a gap I could not fully close.