US 5418713

I'll search for the specific patent number and related docket information.

Let me check for any CAFC 2026 appellate activity and the known district court litigation.

Summary of U.S. Patent 5,418,713

I searched for this specific number. Live sources (Google Patents, USPTO.report, Unified Patents) confirm the bibliographic data below. No CAFC 2026 docket entry or appellate activity for patent 5,418,713 was found in my searches — I cannot confirm any pending Federal Circuit appeal, and I'm flagging that as an explicit uncertainty rather than guessing. The only litigation reference I can ground is a district-court case listed on the patent page.

Bibliographic data

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5418713/en ; https://uspto.report/patent/grant/5,418,713 ; https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-5418713-A

Abstract (as issued)

"An on demand data delivery system is provided for the manufacture of original content recordings at a remote location. A data capture facility for retrieving data from an item of material is connected to a data resampling means for compressing data which is accessible to a storage facility connected to a central host server. The central host server is connected to a communications network for communication to a remote server which controls a manufacturing control device connected thereto. The manufacturing control device duplicates original content recordings on blank media upon receipt of a data representation of the original content recording from the remote server which retrieves said data representation for a selected original content recording from the central host server over the communications network."

Independent claims (plain language)

The patent has two independent claims — claim 1 and claim 5 — with dependent claims 2–4.

Claim 1 — Central-capture / remote-manufacture system (title and packaging).
A system that:

1. Captures, at a central location, both content data and corresponding informational data for each available title — where the informational data includes a "materials manufacturing data portion" (i.e., the data needed to make the packaging).
2. Stores that captured content plus informational data in a per-title item data file at a central mass storage facility.
3. Uses a central host server to retrieve and transmit the item data file when it receives a request command.
4. Connects via a communications network that carries the request command.
5. Employs a remote server at the remote site that (a) sends the request over the network, (b) receives the item data file back, and (c) produces a bit stream data representation of the selected title and its associated packaging material.
6. Includes a manufacturing facility at the remote site that manufactures the title and the packaging materials from that bit stream.
7. Includes a selection device at the remote site that selects the title and generates/transmits the selection command to the remote server.

Net effect recited: selecting a title at the selection device causes the title and its packaging to be manufactured at the remote location.

Claim 5 — Remote manufacture on blank media in a user-selected format.
A system that uses an item data file retrieved from a central location to manufacture a user-selected title at a remote location on blank media in a user-selected format:

1. A capture facility at the central location captures content data plus informational data including a plurality of formatting codes per title.
2. A storage facility at the central location stores these in a per-title item data file.
3. A central host server retrieves from storage and transmits the item data file over the network upon receiving an item data file request command.
4. A remote host server sends the request, receives the item data file, and transmits a stream of content data for the selected format upon receiving the request command and a selected format command.
5. A user selection facility receives the user's selection (title + format) and sends the request command and format command to the remote host server.
6. A title manufacturing facility with the corresponding blank media receives the content-data stream for high-speed recording onto that blank media.
7. A packaging manufacturing facility manufactures the graphical and textual packaging for the manufactured title.

(Note: the issued claim 5 text as published contains an apparent drafting redundancy — "receiving the stream of content data from said item data file for high-speed recording on said blank media, receiving a stream of content data" — I am reporting it as published and not correcting it.)

Dependent claims 2–4 (for completeness)

• Claim 2: adds a "likelihood of remote use indicator" in the item data file and local caching at the remote location's memory when that indicator falls in a predetermined range.
• Claim 3: adds a central-host index of authorized remote servers, permitting transmission only upon receipt of a valid remote server authorization code.
• Claim 4: adds a central accounting file on non-volatile memory at the central location, updated by the central host server on receipt of a request command and authorization code.

Overview / context

The patent is a 1993-filed, 1995-issued "manufacture-on-demand at retail" system aimed at eliminating large in-store inventory of music/video/game titles. Its technical distinctions over the cited Freeny device (U.S. 4,528,643) are: (1) central storage rather than per-store storage of every title, (2) mathematical (psychoacoustic) resampling/compression of the audio — asserted to cut data up to ~90% — enabling real-time delivery over a high-bandwidth (≥45 Mbit/s packet) network, (3) statistical "caching"/hierarchical storage to place high-use item data files on faster media, and (4) manufacturing the physical product (CD, cassette, etc.) plus graphics/text packaging at the remote store from a retrieved item data file. Related material includes consumer profiling/advertising (FIG. 8) and royalty accounting, though those aspects are not clearly claimed as independent claims here.

Uncertainties

• I found no authoritative evidence of a 2026 CAFC appeal or docket involving 5,418,713. If one exists, my searches did not surface it; treat the absence of appellate activity as unverified, not confirmed.
• The priority date is rendered as 1993-08-05 by Google Patents and as 1993-08-04 by Unified Patents. I've reported both literally.
• Claim-count/independent-claim characterization is based on the claims text reproduced above (claims 1–5, independents 1 and 5); I have not independently re-verified against the USPTO's official printed copy beyond these sources.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 5418713 across litigation databases.

Let me dig into specific litigation databases and the case referenced in the patent record.

Litigation Report — U.S. Patent No. 5,418,713

Patent: U.S. 5,418,713 (Allen), "Apparatus and method for an on demand data delivery system…" — filed Aug. 5, 1993; granted May 23, 1995; expired Aug. 5, 2013 (per Google Patents legal-status data).
Assignee chain: Richard Allen → BV Technology, Inc. (1993) → Newleaf Entertainment Corp. (1997) → Digital On-Demand, Inc. (1998) → security interests later recorded in favor of General Electric Capital Corp. and Union Bank of California.

1. Litigation listed directly against the patent/family

One case is listed. The Google Patents record for US 5,418,713 carries a "Family has litigation" flag sourced from Unified Patents' Litigation Data, pointing to a single U.S. case:

Primary source cited by the patent record:

• https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/California%20Eastern%20District%20Court/case/3%3A04-cv-02155
• Family-level litigation index (Darts-ip): https://patents.darts-ip.com/?family=22289723

I must be explicit: my searches did not return an independently verifiable docket sheet (PACER/Justia/CourtListener) for E.D. Cal. 3:04-cv-02155, and I could not confirm the party names, filing date, or disposition. I am reporting the case number and jurisdiction because they appear in the patent's own litigation metadata, not because I verified the docket. Treat the parties/outcome fields as unknown pending a PACER pull.

2. Related non-patent litigation involving the patent owner

Muze, Inc. v. Digital On-Demand, Inc. — this appears to be a breach-of-license / trademark-type action, not a patent infringement suit, involving Digital On-Demand, Inc., the recorded assignee of the '713 patent. The decision text discusses a Licensing Agreement covering Muze's music "Database" and "Clips," proprietary-rights notices on "Terminals," and irreparable-harm/goodwill findings. Source: http://g.casetext.com/case/muze-inc-v-digital-on-demand-inc-3

This is relevant context (same corporate owner), but it is not litigation asserting U.S. 5,418,713.

3. A conflation risk I want to flag explicitly

My searches surfaced PTAB/IPR papers referring to "the '871 patent" in the context of E-Watch, Inc. and E-Watch Corporation v. Apple Inc. (E.D. Tex. 2:13-cv-1061 and consolidated cases), HTC IPRs (IPR2014-00987/'168, IPR2014-00989/'871), and Iron Dome LLC (IPR2014-00439), plus IPR2015-00411/00412/00413.

These references should NOT be assumed to be U.S. 5,418,713. The IPRs in question address camera/imaging art — primary references Parulski (U.S. 5,666,159), McNelley (U.S. 5,550,754), and Umezawa (U.S. 5,491,507) — and describe a patent related to U.S. 7,643,168, which is inconsistent with the media-delivery subject matter of U.S. 5,418,713. In other words, the "'871" in those PTAB documents is a truncated citation that most likely denotes a different patent in the E-Watch imaging family. Per your instruction to interpret identifiers literally rather than auto-correct them, I am not merging those proceedings into U.S. 5,418,713's litigation history — but I am also not certifying they are unrelated. This needs docket-level confirmation before it is treated as either.

4. What I could NOT establish

• No patent infringement lawsuit naming a plaintiff/defendant and asserting U.S. 5,418,713 was surfaced with verifiable party names, filing dates, or outcomes in the searches I ran.
• No CAFC appeal involving U.S. 5,418,713 was identified.
• No ITC Section 337 investigation involving U.S. 5,418,713 was identified.
• The E.D. Cal. 3:04-cv-02155 matter's parties, claims, and disposition are unconfirmed.

Given the patent expired August 5, 2013, any enforcement activity would necessarily predate that date, which is consistent with the 2004 case number but does not confirm it.

5. Recommended verification steps (to close the gaps)

1. PACER: pull E.D. Cal. 3:04-cv-02155 docket directly for caption, filing date, claims asserted, and disposition.
2. Unified Patents litigation portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) — query the exact patent number and confirm the family-level entry.
3. Darts-ip family 22289723 for non-U.S. (EP 0716795, CA 2192814, AU 714334, WO 95/05050) litigation.
4. Separately verify the E-Watch "'871" PTAB matters to confirm they are a different patent before excluding or including them.

Bottom line: On the record available to me, U.S. 5,418,713 has one litigation entry in its family data — E.D. Cal. 3:04-cv-02155 — with parties and outcome unverified, plus a related (non-patent) case, Muze, Inc. v. Digital On-Demand, Inc., involving its assignee. I found no confirmable patent infringement suit, CAFC appeal, or ITC action squarely asserting U.S. 5,418,713, and I am flagging that the "'871" IPR hits are likely a different patent rather than silently attributing them to this one.

I'll start by verifying the structured block's "no proceedings" signal against public sources.

Let me run more targeted checks on the patent owner's litigation history and any PTAB filings.

Let me check for reexaminations and the noted district court litigation, plus any CBM activity (this patent is a 1993 software/electronic-shopping patent that would have been CBM-eligible pre-2018).

PTAB proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal returned no AIA trial records for US 5,418,713 as of the most recent ingest, and my independent web checks (PTAB/PTACTS document searches, Docket Alarm, CourtListener, and general web queries pairing the patent number and the patent owner's name with "IPR," "CBM," "PGR," and "PTAB") surfaced nothing that contradicts that. Breakdown by status: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0 — i.e., the patent has never been the subject of an AIA trial. That is a null-result, not a clean bill of health: there is no PTAB ruling narrowing or killing these claims, but also no PTAB ruling that hardened them. The defensive posture for a defendant is therefore not "the patent survived two IPRs," and it is not "the claims are canceled." The real posture is driven by two non-PTAB facts: the patent's anticipated expiration was 2013-08-05, and the patent family carries a litigation flag (a 2004 case in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, Case No. 3:04-cv-02155, per the Google Patents litigation data). A demand letter citing US 5,418,713 in 2026 is a letter about conduct that ended at the latest in 2013.

No proceeding to profile

Per the operating instruction to interpret the structured data literally, I am not inventing proceeding numbers to fill this section. To be explicit about the limits of what I verified:

• No IPR. No IPR20xx-xxxxx naming US 5,418,713 as the challenged patent appeared in any of my searches. IPR remains statutorily available for this patent (IPR has no sunset and applies to pre-AIA patents), but none has ever been filed on this record.
• No PGR. Foreclosed as a matter of law — PGR is limited to patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. This patent's priority date is 1993-08-05.
• No CBM. The AIA § 18 transitional CBM program accepted petitions only through 2018-09-15. It has sunset; no new CBM petition is possible. I found no historical CBM on this patent (it appears in the record only as cited prior art in unrelated proceedings, e.g. CBM2013-00021 involving US 5,966,440).
• No ex parte reexamination or reissue located. I cannot state affirmatively that none occurred — reexam file histories are not always surfaced by web search. I flag this as a residual uncertainty and a verification item below, rather than asserting a negative.
• Family note: US 5,794,217 (continuation, priority 1996-12-03) shares this specification. If a defendant is being asserted on this family, the '217 patent deserves its own PTAB check; the absence of proceedings on '713 does not tell you anything about '217.

Confidence: high that no AIA trial decision on '713 exists (an FWD would be a public, indexed document and would have surfaced). Moderate-to-high that no petition was ever filed. Lower confidence on the reexam question, and I could not retrieve the parties or outcome of E.D. Cal. 3:04-cv-02155 from the record available to me — I am not going to guess who sued whom.

Strategic summary

Claim status: UNTESTED across the board. Because no AIA trial ever reached a Final Written Decision, every claim of US 5,418,713 stands exactly as issued — none canceled, none confirmed. There is no PTAB claim-level disposition to cite, no canceled independent claim to point at, and no reissued or amended claim set. I am deliberately not quoting claim numbers as "canceled" or "sustained," because no adjudicative body has said anything about any of them at the PTAB. What that means practically: you cannot build a § 315(e)(2) estoppel narrative, but you also inherit no adverse PTAB finding. The invalidity case, if you need one, is entirely yours to build in district court or to raise in a first-instance IPR.

Estoppel landscape: empty. With zero IPRs, zero CBMs, and zero PGRs, there is no petitioner, no privy, and no IPR estoppel under § 315(e)(2). No prior-art ground has been "raised or reasonably could have been raised" before the Board, so every § 102/§ 103 ground remains fully available — in a district court invalidity case, in an IPR petition, or both. The corollary is that no one has done the invalidity work for you: you get no free PTAB record, no Board-construed claim terms, and no institution decision to cite. Note also that the Board's § 325(d) discretion will not be a hazard here, since there is no prior PTAB art to be "substantially the same" as yours — though prosecution-history art cited on the face of the patent (and this patent appears in a lot of examiner search histories as a cited reference) could still trigger § 325(d) or Advanced Bionics discretion if you recycle it.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner (nobody has filed even once). No patent-owner PTAB appeal history. No defensive aggregator appears in the chain — the recorded assignees run individual → BV Technology → Newleaf Entertainment → Digital On-Demand → (secured lender filings). Google Patents records a 2004 assertion in E.D. Cal. and a Darts-IP "first worldwide family litigation" flag, so the family has been enforced, at least historically; the absence of IPRs is more consistent with a 2004-era assertion (outside the AIA window, which opened 2012-09-16) than with the patent being unassailable. In other words, the null PTAB result looks like a timing artifact, not a validation.

The fact that dominates everything. The structured data gives legal status "Expired - Lifetime" with anticipated expiration 2013-08-05. On 2026-10-01 that means: (a) no prospective infringement is possible; (b) no injunctive relief is available; (c) damages are limited to past infringement, and § 286 bars recovery for any infringement more than six years before a complaint is filed — so even the tail of the patent term (2007–2013) fell outside the lookback years ago. Any live claim on this patent would have to rest on conduct in roughly 2004–2013 asserted in a suit filed before 2019. That is the defense to lead with, ahead of any invalidity theory.

Recommended next steps

1. Lead with expiration, not invalidity. Before spending a dollar on prior art, confirm the expiration date and the maintenance-fee history via the USPTO Patent Center / Global Dossier links on the patent page, and confirm no terminal disclaimer or PTA extended the term past 2013-08-05. If the patent is expired as the record indicates, demand letters citing it are directed at time-barred conduct, and § 286 plus the expiration itself likely disposes of the matter without a PTAB filing.
2. Do not plan around a PTAB win that does not exist. If a plaintiff is nonetheless asserting the patent, your invalidity options are (i) a first-instance IPR — available, and the patent owner's inability to amend an expired patent makes that forum unusually favorable — or (ii) district court § 102/§ 103. There is no prior FWD to lean on and no estoppel to worry about. Watch the § 315(b) one-year clock from service of the complaint if you go the IPR route.
3. Verify the reexam gap manually. My search did not confirm the absence of an ex parte reexamination or reissue. Check the '713 file wrapper in Patent Center for reexam certificates; a reexam that amended the claims would change the analysis materially (and reexam certificates issue as separately numbered patents).
4. If sued on the family, check '217 independently. US 5,794,217 is a separate patent with a separate PTAB history. Run its number through the PTAB E2E proceeding search and Patent Center before assuming the '713 null result carries over.
5. Treat third-party "no PTAB activity" claims skeptically. Absence of AIA trials is a real signal that well-funded defendants never saw value in challenging this patent — which, given the 2013 expiration, is what you would expect. It is not evidence of validity.

Sources: Patent record and litigation/assignment data from the authoritative full text at https://patents.google.com/patent/US5418713/en (expiration, status, E.D. Cal. Case No. 3:04-cv-02155, assignee chain). No PTAB FWD, institution decision, or CAFC opinion exists to link for this patent; if one is later identified, the correct citations are the PTAB E2E portal (https://ptacts.uspto.gov) for the Board paper and CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com) for any appeal.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent. Let me search multiple sources.

Let me search for the specific assignment records and the litigation/company history.

Good context emerging. Let me dig into the parties, the litigation, and the assignment records.

I was able to retrieve the assignment chain from Google Patents' legal-events mirror, but I was not able to retrieve reel/frame numbers or correspondent-of-record names — my searches did not surface the Assignment Center record detail fields for this patent, and I will not invent them. That gap is flagged throughout.

Inventors

Pattern notes: With a single inventor, the classic "all inventors departed the original assignee within 12 months" fire-sale precursor is not applicable. What is observable is the inverse pattern — a near-immediate inventor→company assignment (2.5 months after filing), which is routine for a startup-backed filing and is not a distress signal.

A continuation in the same family, application 08/758,944 (priority 1996-12-03, issuing as US 5,794,217), carries the same inventor lineage. The earlier-generated summary already flagged the priority-date discrepancy (Google Patents 1993-08-05 vs. Unified Patents 1993-08-04); that discrepancy persists in the Unified Patents assignee listing for this patent.

Flag / inherited uncertainty: The prior section stated Allen's residence as Tempe, AZ. My searches did not corroborate the city. Treat "Tempe, AZ" as unverified inherited detail.

Original assignee

The issued patent's original assignee is listed as "Individual" — i.e., Richard Allen personally. This is distinct from the first recorded assignee, BV Technology, Inc., which took the patent by assignment dated 1993-10-15. Both statements should be read together: Allen filed as an individual and promptly conveyed to his company.

BV Technology, Inc. (original assignee / first recorded owner)

• Line of business: undetermined. The entity also filed the PCT counterpart WO 1995/005050 A1 (1994-08-02), so it functioned as the patent-holding vehicle for the family.
• Shipped a product? No evidence of one. I found no product, no SEC filing, and no commercial activity for BV Technology.
• Current status: undetermined (no dissolution, bankruptcy, or merger record surfaced).
• Caution: opaque does not equal shell. Per the task constraints, a suggestive name is not a finding absent concrete evidence (registered-agent address, single-purpose LLC formation, no products plus assertion activity). None of that concrete evidence was retrievable here.

NewLeaf Entertainment Corporation (intermediate owner, 1997) — a music-industry-named entity that appears via a Justia assignee index page. I could not verify its corporate parentage, business, or current status in the searches available to me; I am declining to assert a BMG/Bertelsmann or other parent relationship without a source.

Digital On-Demand, Inc. (current listed assignee) — this is the most consequential entry:

• It was an operating company that deployed the claimed subject matter. Court findings recited in Muze Inc. v. Digital On-Demand, Inc., 123 F. Supp. 2d 118 (S.D.N.Y. 2000), aff'd 356 F.3d 492 (2d Cir. 2004), describe DOD's "RedDotNet" Digital Distribution Network (DDN) — retail-store terminals letting customers select music for "burning" into custom CDs and special-order CDs, with equipment that would "burn" CDs and print liner notes and graphics onsite. That is a direct commercial embodiment of the claimed preview/selection/retrieval/reproduction-and-packaging system.
• Corporate history: per the same findings, DOD entered a letter of intent with Alliance Entertainment Corp. ("AEC") in October 1999 and "subsequently became a wholly-owned subsidiary of AEC."
• Capital structure: lien recordings to GE Capital (2003) and Union Bank of California (2005).
• Current status: undetermined. Google Patents still lists DIGITAL ON-DEMAND, Inc. as current assignee, but I could not verify whether the entity still exists in any operating form.

Sector context (not part of this chain): the Freeny reference, US 4,528,643, shows how this on-demand-retail patent space churned through entities — its listed assignees include Advanced Service Development Corp., Mediabay Com Inc., ABC-COA Acquisition Corp., and Interactive Gift Express Inc. That is a different patent and must not be conflated with 5,418,713's chain; I mention it only because it is the sector's best-known example of post-issuance entity churn.

Assignment timeline

Reel/frame numbers and correspondents: NOT RETRIEVABLE. Despite searching the Assignment Center, uspto.report, Justia, and Unified Patents mirrors, I could not surface the reel/frame or correspondent fields for this patent. Every entry below is grounded in the Google Patents legal-events record (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5418713](/patent/US5418713)/en), which mirrors the recorded assignment events. I am reporting the dates as Google Patents lists them and cannot distinguish execution date from recording date without the underlying Assignment Center record.

• 1993-10-15 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors interest ("SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS")
  • Assignor: Richard Allen
  • Assignee: BV TECHNOLOGY, INC.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — no recurrence analysis possible
  • Context: inventor's initial conveyancing of the application to his own holding vehicle ~10 weeks after filing.

• 1997-04-14 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors interest
  • Assignor: BV TECHNOLOGY, INC.
  • Assignee: NEWLEAF ENTERTAINMENT CORPORATION
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: transfer from the inventor's vehicle to a music-industry entity — a sale/transfer of the asset, not an internal reorg.

• 1998-04-08 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors interest
  • Assignor: NEWLEAF ENTERTAINMENT CORPORATION
  • Assignee: DIGITAL ON-DEMAND, INC.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: transfer to the operating company that actually built and deployed the claimed retail on-demand CD system (RedDotNet / DDN).

• 2003-02-03 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Counterpart and acknowledgement (patent security agreement)
  • Assignor: DIGITAL ON-DEMAND, INC.
  • Assignee: GENERAL ELECTRIC CAPITAL CORPORATION
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: securitization — patent pledged as collateral to a lender; not an ownership transfer.

• 2003-03-25 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Security agreement
  • Assignor: DIGITAL ON-DENMAND, INC. [spelled exactly as recorded on the Google Patents page — reported literally, not corrected]
  • Assignee: GENERAL ELECTRIC CAPITAL CORPORATION
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: second 2003 securitization filing, likely executing/perfecting the same collateral package.

• 2005-03-01 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Release of security interest in patents
  • Assignor: GENERAL ELECTRIC CAPITAL CORPORATION
  • Assignee: DIGITAL ON-DEMAND, INC.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: satisfaction/discharge of the 2003 GE Capital liens — ownership title reverts to DOD unencumbered.

• 2005-10-18 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Security agreement
  • Assignor: DIGITAL ON-DEMAND, INC.
  • Assignee: UNION BANK OF CALIFORNIA, N.A.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: re-collateralization — a new lender takes a security interest, consistent with a refinancing, not a transfer of ownership.

Net chain of actual ownership (ignoring liens): Richard Allen → BV Technology, Inc. (1993) → NewLeaf Entertainment Corp. (1997) → Digital On-Demand, Inc. (1998) → present.

Non-assignment family event: priority to US 08/758,944 filed 1996-12-03 (continuation, → US 5,794,217).

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5418713
    1993 : Filed by Richard Allen
         : Assigned to BV Technology Inc
    1995 : Patent issued
    1997 : Assigned to NewLeaf Entertainment
    1998 : Assigned to Digital On-Demand Inc
    2003 : GE Capital security agreement
    2005 : GE Capital lien released
         : Union Bank security agreement
    2013 : Patent expired

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present.
No assignee in the chain carries an "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" suffix. The chain runs inventor → his own company → music-industry entity → operating company. BV Technology, Inc. is opaque, but opacity alone is not a finding and I found no registered-agent address, no single-purpose LLC formation, and no assertion activity tied to it. Digital On-Demand's operation of a physical, installed retail system (RedDotNet DDN, per the Muze findings) is affirmative evidence against the shell characterization. Reel/frame evidence unavailable.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present.
None of BV Technology, NewLeaf Entertainment, Digital On-Demand, GE Capital, or Union Bank of California appears on the named lists (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities). Unified Patents' page lists Digital On-demand Inc as assignee without an NPE designation I could confirm. Caveat: I could not exhaustively check RPX/Unified high-frequency-plaintiff directories.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / unverifiable.
This is the signal the task weights most heavily, and it is the one I could not test. Zero correspondent-of-record names were retrievable for any of the seven recorded events. No recurrence finding can be made either way. I am flagging this as a data failure, not as a negative result.

4. Cascading transfers — not present.
True ownership moved twice: 1997-04-14 then 1998-04-08 (~12 months apart), then never again. Everything after 1998 is lien activity (2003, 2005, 2005). There is no chained-LLC staircase, no shared correspondent address, and no common-principal pattern detectable. Cascade windows of <24 months through multiple LLCs are absent.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — unclear.
The last genuine ownership transfer (1998-04-08) predates the only litigation reference (California Eastern District Court, 3:04-cv-02155) by roughly six years — well outside the 6-month window. However, I could not verify the parties or the exact filing date in that case, so I cannot confirm whether DOD was plaintiff or defendant, nor whether the case even substantively involved 5,418,713. Both branches of this signal remain unresolved.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — unclear.
Two lender security agreements (2003-02-03, 2003-03-25) with a 2005 release, and a fresh Union Bank lien (2005-10-18), are consistent with a leveraged or distressed operating company repeatedly pledging IP as collateral. But consistent-with is not evidence of: no Chapter 7/11 record, no §363 sale order, and no bill of sale from a bankruptcy estate was surfaced. Marking unclear rather than inferring.

7. Privateering — not present (no evidence).
No recorded transfer from an operating company to a licensing-only NPE asserting on the transferor's behalf. The 1998 transfer went to an operating company, not away from one.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present.
The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at a commercial operating company (Digital On-Demand, Inc.) and expired on its own terms in 2013.

Cross-check worth noting: this patent is cited by 1,040+ later patents (TouchTunes, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) — it is foundational prior art in the retail on-demand music space rather than a thinly-asserted paper patent.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

The chain is a straight-line operating-company lineage: Richard Allen → BV Technology, Inc. (1993-10-15) → NewLeaf Entertainment Corp. (1997-04-14) → Digital On-Demand, Inc. (1998-04-08, still the listed assignee). The current assignee demonstrably built and ran the claimed invention — DOD's RedDotNet Digital Distribution Network burned custom CDs and printed liner notes and graphics onsite in retail music stores, as recited in the court findings in Muze Inc. v. Digital On-Demand, Inc., 356 F.3d 492 (2d Cir. 2004) — and the only post-1998 recorded events are lender liens (GE Capital 2003-02-03 and 2003-03-25; release 2005-03-01; Union Bank of California 2005-10-18), which are securitization, not NPE conveyancing. Zero of the eight NPE signals is affirmatively present.

Residual uncertainty, stated plainly: (a) the 2004 E.D. Cal. case (3:04-cv-02155) party alignment and its involvement of this patent are unverified — if DOD was a defendant there rather than an enforcer, the assertion prong weakens and the correct call would be "operating-company ownership, no confirmed assertion"; (b) no reel/frame or correspondent data was retrievable, so signal #3 — the highest-value tell in the task — is untested rather than cleared; and (c) the current corporate status of Digital On-Demand, Inc. is undetermined. Anyone relying on this analysis should pull the reel/frame and correspondent fields directly before treating signal #3 as resolved.

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5418713/en — verify at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 5418713).

I'll search for the specific patent and its cited prior art references.

Let me get the actual "References Cited" section from the front page of the patent.

Let me get the actual front-page "References Cited" list from the patent's PDF and the Google Patents citation table.

Prior-Art Analysis for U.S. Patent No. 5,418,713 — with an important data-availability caveat

Bottom line first

Two things must be stated up front, honestly:

1. My searches did not return the actual front-page "(56) References Cited" list for U.S. 5,418,713. The USPTO/Google Patents record is confirmed, but what I retrieved were the forward citations ("Cited By") and the patent family — not the examiner's backward prior-art citations printed on the face of the '713 patent. I will not fabricate that list. Below I give what is verifiable and flag precisely what is not.

2. One prior-art reference is explicitly identified and addressed in the patent's own text: Freeny, U.S. Pat. No. 4,528,643. That is the only backwards reference I can cite with high confidence from the authoritative full text. I analyze it fully below.

Source for the patent text and record: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5418713](/patent/US5418713)/en

1. USPTO record confirmation for 5,418,713 (no similar numbers substituted)

Per the authoritative full text and the prior section's verification:

Note the one discrepancy already flagged in the earlier section: Unified Patents renders the priority date as 1993-08-04 while Google Patents/USTPO show 1993-08-05. Reported literally, not corrected.

2. The one prior-art reference I can verify from the patent's own text

U.S. Pat. No. 4,528,643 — Charles C. Freeny, Jr. ("the Freeny device")

• Full citation: U.S. Patent No. 4,528,643 to Charles C. Freeny, Jr., titled "System for Reproducing Information in Material Objects at a Point of Sale Location."
• Publication (issue) date: July 2, 1985. (Confident on the issue date; the exact application filing date I cannot re-verify in this session and I am not going to guess it.)
• Brief description (as characterized by the '713 patent itself and by the Federal Circuit record): A remote Information Control Machine (ICM) updates data stored in Information Manufacturing Machines (IMMs) located at point-of-sale locations. Each IMM contains a local memory/file unit that must hold the data for the titles it manufactures; the IMM receives an authorization code from the remote ICM before reproducing a music title; the material object (e.g., eight-track tape) is duplicated at the point of sale from locally stored data; the stored data carries an encoding/security scheme against unauthorized reception. Freeny also contemplates electronic sale/credit charging (credit-card-based approval and billing). See Freeny claim 1 and claim 37 as reproduced in Interactive Gift Express, Inc. v. Compuserve Inc., 256 F.3d 1323 (Fed. Cir. 2001).

§ 102 mapping to the '713 claims

The '713 patent's Background section expressly distinguishes Freeny, listing four "drawbacks" that "make the system impractical for commercial implementation":

(1) the data file for each title requires a large memory storage capacity, (2) each remote location must have on site data storage for every title to be manufactured, (3) data delivery to point of sale locations for anything beyond a short authorization code and other sale tracking data is impractical..., and (4) manufacturing time for titles not stored on site... is slow (and commercially impractical...).

Net: Freeny is the single most relevant prior-art reference on the face of this patent and the natural primary reference for a § 102/§ 103 challenge, but on element-by-element analysis it does not anticipate either independent claim (1 or 5). Its strongest single-reference exposure is to the authorization and accounting concepts that appear in dependent claims 3 and 4 — and those claims are only reachable through the broader claim 1 that Freeny does not meet.

3. What the search returned that is NOT prior art (important distinction)

The task says "look at each patent citation for 5418713." Search results surfaced many forward citations — patents that cite 5,418,713 — and family members. These postdate the '713 filing (1993-08-05) and are therefore not prior art to it. I list them here only to prevent the common error of miscategorizing them, and because they are relevant to the continuation US 5,794,217 and to litigation value:

• US 5,794,217 A — Allen; continuation of the '713 family (priority 1996-12-03). Family member, not prior art.
• US 5,919,213 (MCI Communications, 1999) — "automated remote previewing and purchasing."
• US 5,910,987 / 5,949,876 / 5,982,891 (Intertrust, 1999) — rights-management systems.
• US 5,412,413-era forward cites such as US 5,912,413-area assets, US 6,732,369 (Starsight), US 5,734,823 / US 5,734,891 (Microtome/Saigh), US 5,636,276 (Brugger).

These are evidence of the '713 patent's influence and of what later systems had to design around, not § 102 prior art against it.

Family members (not prior art): EP 0716795 B1; WO 9505050 A1; CA 2192814 C; AU 714334 B2; DE 69429725 T2; ES 2171460 T3; JP 8274670 A; and US 5,794,217.

4. Explicit uncertainties and limitations (do not treat as complete)

• I could not retrieve the complete "(56) References Cited" U.S./foreign patent-document list printed on the face of U.S. 5,418,713. Several searches for that exact list returned the cited-by tables and the patent family instead. Consequently, the analysis above covers only the reference the patent itself names (Freeny) and does not claim to be an exhaustive examination of every examiner-cited reference. The full § 102 prior-art set may include additional references I have not verified.
• Freeny's exact application filing date is not something I can re-verify in this session; the July 2, 1985 issue date is reliable, and Freeny comfortably predates the 1993-08-05 priority date in any event.
• I did not find any 2026 CAFC docket or appellate activity involving 5,418,713 (consistent with the earlier section's finding), and I reiterate that this is an unverified absence, not a confirmation.
• The claim scope used here (independents 1 and 5; dependents 2–4) comes from the claims text in the authoritative full patent text; I have not re-verified against the USPTO printed copy beyond that.

Recommended next step to close the gap: pull the actual front-page image / Patent Center "References Cited" for 5,418,713 (e.g., the patentimages PDF front page at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../US5418713.pdf) to obtain the examiner's complete backward-citation list, then run the same element-by-element § 102 mapping I applied to Freeny against each listed reference. If you can supply that list or the front-page image, I will complete the full citation-by-citation table.

I'll research the prior art cited against US 5,418,713 to ground the obviousness analysis.

Let me pull the actual face-of-patent citation list and the litigation invalidity record.

Let me get the exact face-of-patent citation list from the patent PDF/citation databases.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent 5,418,713 (35 U.S.C. § 103)

Analysis date: April 26, 2026 (per task header). Flag: the system clock for this session reads 2026‑10‑01; the discrepancy does not affect the pre‑AIA analysis below, since the relevant critical date (1992‑08‑05) is fixed by the statute, not by today's date.

0. Scope, grounding, and an important limitation

The task directs me to "use the results from the Prior Art section of this page." I must flag a retrieval gap: the fetch of the Google Patents page in my working text omitted the "Patent Citations" table (the page's citation tables did not survive the fetch), and my attempts to retrieve the face‑of‑patent reference list for US 5,418,713 were cut off at the search step limit. Accordingly:

• Fully grounded prior art = the references the patent itself cites or admits (the specification's Background discusses U.S. 4,528,643 to Freeny, Jr. — the "Freeny device" — in detail), plus the specification's own admissions of known algorithms and hardware.
• Partially grounded art = references that surfaced in citation listings in my searches but whose assignment to this patent I could not verify (I explain below why at least one such list almost certainly belongs to a different patent).
• Not available as § 102 art = anything whose public date post‑dates the 1992‑08‑05 critical date (pre‑AIA § 102(b)) or the 1993‑08‑05 filing date (§ 102(a)/(e)).

An authoritative § 103 opinion requires the actual IDS/examiner citation list; where I could not obtain it, I say so rather than fill the gap.

Evidence of a provenance problem I did detect: search results returned a "Patent Citations (30)" list containing US 4,674,055 (Brother, "Software vending system," 1987), JP H01‑105656 (Fuji Photo, "Software selling device," 1989), WO 92/02888 (Ross, "System and method of manufacturing a single book copy," 1992), EP 0 569 816 A2 (Ainoya, "Aggregation system for sales of immaterials in the form of signals") and JP H06‑019933. That same list also contains EP 0 649 121 A2 (IBM, published 1995‑04‑19) — which post‑dates the '713 filing. The list therefore belongs to a later patent page (the URL resolved to US 7,080,042), not to US 5,418,713. I treat those five references as candidate art only, and I do not attribute them to the '713 file wrapper.
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7080042#5

1. Governing law and the Graham framework

Pre‑AIA § 103 applies (filed 1993‑08‑05). The four Graham v. John Deere inquiries control, as refined by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007). KSR supplies the enumerated rationales I rely on below (MPEP 2143.01): (A) combining known elements per known methods to yield predictable results; (B) substitution of a known element for another to obtain a predictable result; (C) use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way; (D) application of a known technique to a known device ready for improvement; (E) "obvious to try"; (F) design incentives and market forces.

Level of ordinary skill (PHOSITA): a B.S. in EE/CS (or equivalent) with ~3–5 years in digital audio/video systems and networked data storage, including familiarity with perceptual audio coding, compressed video, POS/retail computing, and hierarchical storage. This is a systems-integration patent; essentially every component it names was commercially catalogued in the specification itself.

2. Grounded prior art

3. The differences to be bridged (Graham step 2)

Comparing claim 1 and claim 5 (as characterized in the earlier section) against Freeny alone, the surviving differences are:

1. Central mass storage of the per‑title item data file, with on‑demand retrieval and transmission over a network, instead of storing every title at every point‑of‑sale machine (Freeny's arrangement, which the '713 specification itself calls the reason the art was "impractical for commercial implementation").
2. Data compression/resampling of the audio (and video/graphics) to make the transmission fit a realistic retail time budget.
3. Manufacturing the packaging (graphics/text artwork) as part of the remote duplication, including a "materials manufacturing data portion" in the item data file (claim 1) and a "packaging manufacturing facility" (claim 5).
4. Blank media + user‑selected format ("a plurality of formatting codes" per title; "high‑speed recording" onto blank media) (claim 5).
5. Claim 2: a "likelihood of remote use indicator" driving local caching.
6. Claim 3: a central index of authorized remote servers; transmission gated on a valid authorization code.
7. Claim 4: a central accounting file updated upon receipt of a request command and authorization code.

4. Grounds of rejection

Ground 1 — Freeny + Ross (+ Brother) ⇒ claims 1 and 5

Freeny supplies: the central "information control machine"; the remote reproducing machine at the retail site; the request/authorization handshake; the digital data capture and format conversion; the sale‑tracking/accounting layer. Ross, if its disclosure is as its title and family indicate, supplies the paradigm of central digital masters transmitted to a retail site for on‑demand manufacture of a compete physical article including its cover/binding — i.e., elements (1), (3), and the retail‑site selection of a specific title. Brother '055 / Fuji JP H01‑105656, if their disclosures are as titled, supply vending‑site writing of a user‑selected title onto a blank medium.

Motivation (KSR (A), (C), (D), (F)): the two references are in the same field (retail on‑demand reproduction of media from stored digital masters), address the same problem (inventory cost, stockouts/overstock), and the result of combining them — central masters + remote manufacture — is exactly the predictable consequence each reference independently seeks. There is a strong market‑force/design‑incentive motivation recited in the '713 specification itself: Freeny's four admitted drawbacks (large per‑title memory at each remote location, on‑site storage of every title, impractical data delivery cost/time, and slow manufacture for non‑cached titles) are precisely the problems the ordinary artisan was motivated to solve, and the '713 Background frames the invention as the obvious response to them. An applicant's statement in the specification that the prior solution was impractical "for commercial implementation" is an admission that the field was actively seeking the change.

Note on packaging: if Rossi‑type on‑demand book manufacture is confirmed, the "materials manufacturing data portion" / "packaging manufacturing facility" limitations are met or at minimum rendered obvious; printing a CD booklet/j‑card and cassette label from stored graphic data using the specification's admitted Canon 550/Xerox 5750 binary‑input color copiers (KSR (B), substitution of one known output device for another) is routine.

Ground 2 — Ground 1 + admitted compression art ⇒ the data‑size limitations

Even if a tribunal reads a compression/resampling step into the claims (they are not clearly separately recited in claim 1 or 5 as characterized, but they permeate the specification and the written description), the case is stronger: the specification itself names DCC, Dolby AC‑2, MPEG‑1 and JPEG as known, commercially available algorithms, and specifies 16‑bit sampling at ≥40,000 samples/sec. KSR (C)/(E): applying a known perceptual‑audio coder to reduce transmission bandwidth and storage cost is the predictable use of a known technique for its known purpose; the asserted "up to 90%" reduction is an expected result of discarding sub‑band content outside 20 Hz–20 kHz, not an unexpected one. A 45 Mbit/s packet network carried no patentable weight in 1993 (DS‑3/ATM rates were standard).

Ground 3 — Ground 1 or 2 + conventional cache/storage management ⇒ claim 2

Claim 2's "likelihood of remote use indicator" plus local storage when the indicator falls in a predetermined range is frequency‑of‑use cache management — the ordinary, well‑known technique in hierarchical storage (LFU/LRU replacement, HSM migration). The '713 specification admits the "statistical counter data base" and "dynamic caching control algorithm" as implementation choices, not as the invention. KSR (A), (C); plus the 1994 UC Regents filings as contemporaneous confirmation that server caching keyed on transmission/storage factors was conventional. Motivation: reduce telecommunications cost and latency (recited in the Background).

Ground 4 — Freeny + conventional access control ⇒ claim 3

Claim 3's "index of authorized remote servers" with transmission gated on a valid authorization code is a computerized automation of Freeny's express authorization step (reproduction only "upon authorization from the remote information control machine," backed by Freeny's "encoding scheme which serves as a security system for the unauthorized reception of the data"). A list of authorized node IDs is a predictable, routine implementation of a known authorization function with no new result — KSR (A), (B); cf. In re Venner‑style "automation of a known manual step" reasoning (the specific case is cited from memory; I flag it as such).

Ground 5 — Freeny + Ross/Ross‑type accounting ⇒ claim 4

Claim 4's "central accounting file on non‑volatile memory, updated by the central host server on receipt of a request command and authorization code" is Freeny's sale‑tracking data centralized, or the royalty/accounting ledger that any on‑demand manufacture system requires (and that the '713 Background and Summary treat as an ancillary, admitted business‑records function). Keeping accounting records on non‑volatile (disk) storage is not an inventive act.

5. Claim‑by‑claim conclusion

6. Secondary considerations and counter‑arguments

• No evidence of unexpected results. The only asserted advantage (≈90% audio size reduction) is the expected output of an admitted commercial algorithm applied to an admitted amplitude/frequency band.
• No teaching away. Nothing in Freeny dissuades central storage; the '713 specification says Freeny's local‑storage model was impractical, which is a motivation to change, not a teaching away from the combination.
• Commercial success / long‑felt need could be argued (the patent became the basis of a real business, and there is a recorded district‑court case, E.D. Cal. 3:04‑cv‑02155), but no evidence of a nexus between the success and the specific claim limitations was presented in the prior section, and the earlier section already flagged that no 2026 CAFC activity for this patent was found. Absent nexus, commercial success carries little weight under KSR/Graham.
• Alternative § 112 challenge worth noting: the previously generated section flagged the issued claim 5 text as containing an apparent drafting redundancy ("receiving the stream of content data … receiving a stream of content data"). That is a Nautilus indefiniteness candidate, independent of § 103.
• What would change the result: (i) a verified showing that Ross's disclosure is limited to text and lacks any audio‑media or format‑selection teaching; (ii) evidence that the '713 inventors' specific caching‑indicator arithmetic produced an unexpected result; (iii) a verified priority date earlier than 1993‑08‑05 (the earlier section noted Unified Patents renders it 1993‑08‑04, which is immaterial to the 1992‑08‑05 § 102(b) line).

7. Uncertainty log (do not treat as findings)

1. Face‑of‑patent citation list for US 5,418,713 not retrieved. The "Patent Citations" table was absent from my page fetch and my search budget expired. Any § 103 opinion must be re‑run against the actual examiner/IDS citation list, which may contain art I have not identified here.
2. Reference attribution risk. US 4,674,055, JP H01‑105656, WO 92/02888, EP 0 569 816 A2 and JP H06‑019933 appeared in a citation list that also contains post‑1993 material and resolved to patent US 7,080,042 — so I cannot assert they are on the '713 face. If EP 0 569 816 (published 1993‑11‑18) and JP H06‑019933 (1994‑01‑28) were cited on '713, they are after‑arising art for a 1993‑08‑05 filing and are not available under pre‑AIA § 102(a)/(b) (their earlier foreign priority does not create § 102(e) art in the US for publications of this vintage).
3. Substantive disclosures of Ross, Brother and Fuji are described only from their titles; I did not read their specifications in this session. Treat any element‑mapping above that depends on them as provisional.
4. "Nyquist rate" misstatement in the specification (originally identified in the fetched text): the specification says 40,000 samples/sec "corresponding to the Nyquist rate." It corresponds to the Nyquist rate for a 20 kHz band; the "rate" is properly 2× the highest frequency. This is a § 112 descriptive quibble, not a § 103 point, but it is another route by which the compression limitation could be attacked.
5. Litigation record unexamined. The E.D. Cal. case listed on the patent page (3:04‑cv‑02155) may contain invalidity contentions, claim constructions, or § 103 rulings directly on point; my searches did not surface any of those documents, and I make no representation about their content.
6. Date/source conflicts carried forward from the earlier section: priority rendered 1993‑08‑05 (Google Patents) vs. 1993‑08‑04 (Unified Patents); current‑date discrepancy noted in the header.