US 5478989

I'll search for authoritative records on this patent number before summarizing.

Summary — U.S. Patent No. 5,478,989

Important caveat up front: My searches of Google Patents, USPTO/PTAB records, and general web sources returned no Federal Circuit 2026 docket entries referencing 5,478,989. The only enforcement activity I found involving a Kenneth J. Shepley nutrition patent is a 2015 case asserting US 5,841,115 (a different patent in the same family) — not 5,478,989. I also have no direct USPTO PatentCenter access, so the bibliographic data below is drawn from Google Patents and uspto.report rather than a live USPTO query. Treat any "current docket" claim as unverified.

Bibliographic data

Related family patents (same inventor/priority): US 5,841,115 (issued 1998-11-24) and US 6,024,281 (issued 2000-02-15), both titled "Nutritional information system for shoppers."

Abstract (verbatim)

A method for providing personalized nutrition information to an individual comprising the following steps: (a) inputting personal data relating to an individual; (b) inputting data identifying at least one food product which the individual intends to purchase or consume; (c) accessing prestored information relating to the at least one food product which the individual intends to purchase or consume; (d) generating and outputting information about the at least one food product which the individual intends to purchase or consume pertinent to the input personal data.

Independent claims — plain language

Claim 1 (apparatus, means-plus-function style): A device for generating personalized nutritional information with five elements:

• (a) an input for personal data about an individual;
• (b) a barcode input for identifying at least one food product the individual intends to buy or consume;
• (c) a processor running a stored program that correlates the personal data against prestored nutritional data — expressly including a barcode address — for that food product;
• (d) an output that presents information to the individual about the food product in light of their personal data; and
• (e) a mobile base supported by a plurality of wheels, where the mobile base is a shopping cart.

The wheeled-shopping-cart limitation in element (e) is what gives this claim its narrow scope — the disclosure describes kiosk, checkout-counter, home-PC, and 900-number embodiments, but the claim is tied to a cart.

Claim 2 (method): A method of generating personalized nutritional information while shopping:

• (a) input personal data about an individual;
• (b) select a food product while shopping the individual intends to purchase, and input data identifying it;
• (c) correlate the personal data with prestored nutritional data — again expressly including a barcode address — for that food product;
• (d) output information about the food product and the personal data to assist the individual in deciding whether to actually purchase the food product.

The "while shopping" / "deciding to actually purchase" language frames this as a point-of-selection (pre-purchase) method rather than a post-purchase receipt or reporting method.

Notable prosecution history and prior art

• 23 references cited, including US 4,780,599 (Baus, "Apparatus for retrieving stored information about various items"), US 4,180,204 (J.C. Penney inventorying), US 4,686,624 (Blum, portable dietetics data apparatus), US 4,855,945 (Sakai), US 4,891,756 (Williams, "Nutritional microcomputer and method"), and US 5,233,520 (USDA, measurement of food/nutrient intake).
• Non-patent citations include Squires, "Improving Diet, Byte by Byte," Washington Post Health (Jan. 30, 1985), and Kretsch et al. on the Nutrition Evaluation Scale System (NESSY).
• Forward citations: ~175–288 (e.g., Symbol Technologies portable shopping/portable data terminal patents, NCR checkout-system patents), indicating this patent is frequently cited as prior art in retail-scanning and nutrition-information art.

Enforcement / proceedings — what I actually found

1. Better Food Choices, LLC v. MyNetDiary, MyFitnessPal, Weight Watchers, WeightWatchers.com, Amazon.com, Apple, Google (N.D. Cal., filed ~Jan. 13, 2015) — asserted US 5,841,115, not 5,478,989. Better Food Choices was described as an NPE holding patents licensed from Kenneth J. Shepley.
2. A PTAB petition file includes a "Declaration of Kenneth J. Shepley" addressing patent-eligibility (Bilski/Alice) arguments. That declaration repeatedly refers to "the '115 patent," not the '989 patent. I could not confirm the specific proceeding number tying the declaration to 5,478,989.
3. CBM2015-00047 was a covered-business-method review of US 5,664,110 — unrelated to this number. 5,478,989 appears there only as a cited exhibit.

Uncertainty statement: I did not locate any 2026 CAFC docket, notice of appeal, or live litigation naming 5,478,989. Given its confirmed expiration on 2012-12-26, the patent could no longer be asserted after that date, so 2026 appellate activity specifically about 5,478,989 is unlikely — but I cannot state that as certain from a live USPTO/CAFC query, only as the absence of any results in my searches.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 5478989. Let me search multiple sources.

Let me search more targeted litigation sources.

Let me check litigation-specific databases directly.

Summary of Findings — U.S. Patent No. 5,478,989

Bottom line: I found no evidence of any litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 5,478,989 ("Nutritional information system for shoppers," Shepley, issued Dec. 26, 1995). Based on the searches I was able to run, I could not identify a single district court case, CAFC appeal, ITC action, or PTAB proceeding in which this patent was asserted or challenged. I want to be explicit that this is a negative finding limited by search access, not a certified "no litigation exists" conclusion — see the caveats below.

What I confirmed about the patent (context for why it was rarely asserted)

• Patent: US 5,478,989 A, "Nutritional information system for shoppers"
• Inventor / Assignee: Kenneth J. Shepley (individual — no corporate assignee)
• Priority date: Sept. 27, 1989 (CIP of Ser. No. 07/413,275 and 07/701,678)
• Filing date: Apr. 13, 1993 (App. No. 08/046,976)
• Issue date: Dec. 26, 1995
• Expiration: ~Dec. 26, 2012; status "Expired – Lifetime"
• Claims: Only 2 (a shopping-cart apparatus claim and a method claim)
• Family continuations by same inventor: US 5,841,115 (issued Nov. 24, 1998) and US 6,024,281 (issued Feb. 15, 2000) — both titled "Nutritional information system for shoppers."

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5478989/en

Litigation search results

No litigation hits were returned. The searches on the patent number produced:

• The Google Patents page and family/continuation patents.
• Forward citations (175 "Cited By"/288 "Cited By" entries) — e.g., later patents by Symbol Technologies, NCR, Minvielle/Iceberg Luxembourg, etc., citing '989 as prior art. Being cited as prior art is not litigation.
• Backward citations (23 U.S./foreign references, including US 4,780,599 Baus; US 4,891,756 Williams; US 5,233,520 to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture; JPS576962/63; etc.).
• Non-patent literature (e.g., Kretsch "Nutrition Evaluation Scale" papers), which appear in the prosecution file, not in litigation.
• Unrelated documents matching the digits "898" or "989" in other patents (e.g., Motorola's '898 patent in Apple v. Motorola, and the Transonic v. NMT '989 patent) — these are different patents, not US 5,478,989, and I have not conflated them.

Notably, none of the returned Unified Patents, PTAB, or Docket Alarm materials referenced US 5,478,989 as a patent-in-suit.

Caveats / limits on this finding

1. Search tooling limits. I was not able to fully query PACER, CourtListener's RECAP docket database, or the Unified Patents litigation portal directly for this specific patent. My negative result rests on general web searches rather than a complete docket-database sweep.
2. Why litigation is unlikely but not impossible. The patent: (a) issued to an individual inventor with no commercial entity that I could identify as an enforcement vehicle (i.e., no obvious patent-assertion entity in the chain); (b) expired around Dec. 26, 2012; and (c) has only two narrow claims. These factors make sustained assertion campaigns improbable, though a single suit against a defendant could theoretically have occurred and left little public footprint.
3. Data integrity. Per your instruction, I have treated "5478989" literally and did not substitute any similar number (e.g., the unrelated '989, '898, or '990 patents that surfaced incidentally).

What I would check to reach a fully grounded answer

• PACER / CourtListener RECAP: search docket text for "5,478,989" and "Shepley" as plaintiff.
• Docket Navigator / Unified Patents Litigation portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation) for the patent number as patent-in-suit.
• USPTO Patent Center / Assignment records for the '989, '115, and '281 patents, to see whether any assignment to a litigating entity ever occurred (relevant to whether an assertion campaign was even possible).
• PTAB (IPR/CBM/PGR) dockets for the patent number as "patent owner."

Direct answer to your question

Plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, outcome/status: none identified. On the record available to me, no litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 5,478,989 is known. If you need a litigation-clear opinion, I'd recommend running the PACER/RECAP and Unified Patents portal queries listed above, since I could not fully execute those searches here and cannot rule out a case that exists outside the sources I was able to reach.

I'll verify the canonical "no proceedings" result against live web sources before writing up.

Let me check related-family PTAB activity and any CBM/IPR involving the Shepley family, since those could be conflated with '989.

One more check: the CBM outcome and whether any proceeding ever named the '989 patent itself.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 5,478,989: 0. Zero IPRs, zero PGRs, zero CBMs. There is no proceeding in which claims 1 or 2 of the '989 patent were challenged, instituted, invalidated, sustained, settled, or denied institution. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns an empty AIA-trial set for this patent, and independent web searches of PTAB records, Docket Alarm, Patexia, and the PTAB Decisions blog surface no petition, decision, or appeal naming patent 5,478,989 (confirmed against Google Patents US5478989A).

The only AIA trial ever brought in this patent family was CBM2015-00071, Google Inc. v. Better Food Choices, LLC, and it challenged US 5,841,115 — the sibling CIP, not the '989 patent. A defendant who is handed a demand letter referencing "the Shepley nutrition patent" must therefore determine which patent number is actually asserted; the PTAB history that exists belongs to the '115 patent, and the '989 patent has no PTAB history at all.

Bottom-line defensive posture: there is nothing to cite as "claims already canceled." However, the absence of PTAB activity on the '989 patent is explained by its expiration on 2012-12-26 — it was assertable only for past damages well before the AIA trial regime matured, and its two claims are narrow (claim 1 is tied to a shopping cart). The practical defensive value here is not a canceled-claim kill shot, but the CBM2015-00071 final written decision, which held the materially broader sibling claims unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 101 — a directly usable § 101 roadmap against the '989 claims if anyone revives an assertion. Flagging an explicit correction to the previously generated summary: the "Declaration of Kenneth J. Shepley" you identified is now positively tied to a proceeding — it is Exhibit 2005 in CBM2015-00071, and as the summary correctly noted, it addresses the '115 patent, not the '989 patent.

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CBM2015-00071 — Google Inc. v. Better Food Choices, LLC ⚠️ NOT a proceeding on 5,478,989

This proceeding is on US 5,841,115, not US 5,478,989. It is included because it is the only AIA trial in the Shepley family and is the single most likely source of confusion in any assertion chart. Do not represent it as a proceeding on the '989 patent.

• Type: Covered Business Method review (AIA § 18; post-issuance, pre-AIA patent)
• Patent at issue: US 5,841,115 (app. 08/484,794; filed 1995-06-07; issued 1998-11-24; priority 1989-09-27; same specification family as the '989 patent). Independent claims 1, 4, and 11; 20 claims total.
• Filed: 2015-02-04 (Docket Alarm: CBM2015-00071)
• Status: Final Written Decision (proceeding terminated 2016-08-18)
• Judge panel: Glenn J. Perry, Michael P. Tierney, and Minn Chung (Chung authored the Final Written Decision)
• Petition grounds: § 101 (Alice/Mayo — claims 1–20 drawn to personalizing food shopping using routine nutritional analyses, performable mentally with pencil and paper; no inventive concept because the hardware is conventional); § 112(2) (claims 1–10 recited generic computer functional limitations backed by inadequate algorithmic support); and the CBM threshold questions under AIA § 18(d)(1) (whether the patent claims a "financial product or service" and whether it is excluded as a "technological invention")
• Institution decision: Instituted 2015-08-20 (Paper 10). The panel held Google had standing under AIA § 18(a)(1)(B) because it had been sued for infringement of the '115 patent in Better Food Choices, LLC v. MyNetDiary, Inc., No. 14-cv-00204-CWD (D. Idaho), and that the '115 patent qualified as a covered business method patent (shopper food purchasing is a financial transaction; not a technological invention).
• Final Written Decision: Issued 2016-08-18 (Paper 35). The Board found the challenged claims unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 101, reasoning that the claims are not focused on a specific improvement in the functioning of a barcode reader or a nutritional database, but rather "on collecting and correlating information, a process that qualifies as an 'abstract idea' for which conventional components, such as a barcode reader, data input devices, a processor, and a nutritional database, are merely invoked as tools used in their ordinary and conventional manner" (Docket Report summary of the FWD). Caveat: I confirmed the FWD's § 101 holding and its key reasoning from the public summary; I could not verify the claim-by-claim disposition line (i.e., exactly whether all of claims 1–20 were canceled) from a primary copy of the FWD. Do not state "claims 1–20 were canceled" without pulling the FWD itself.
• Settlement / termination: No settlement; the proceeding ran to a Final Written Decision. (The patent owner's separate appeal in the district court case, Better Food Choices LLC v. MyNetDiary, Inc., CAFC No. 15-1304, was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction on 2015-09-30 — Nystrom/Pause Technology — because no final judgment had entered below. That is a district-court appeal, not an appeal of this CBM.)
• Appeal: Not confirmed. I found no Federal Circuit appeal of the CBM2015-00071 Final Written Decision in my searches. Treat any claim that the FWD was affirmed as unverified.
• Defensive value: The FWD is a full merits § 101 win against broader claims than the '989 patent carries — '115 claim 1 has no wheeled-cart limitation, whereas '989 claim 1 requires "a mobile base supported by a plurality of wheels, wherein said mobile base comprises a shopping cart." If you face a demand letter citing '989, this FWD is your starting template for a § 101 challenge, and it also demonstrates the Board will reach the merits on an expired Shepley-family patent, defeating any "the patent already expired so the PTAB won't hear it" argument.

CBM2015-00047 ⚠️ NOT a proceeding on 5,478,989

• Type: Covered Business Method review
• Status: Terminated; the '989 patent appears in that record only as a cited exhibit, not as the challenged patent. Your prior summary states the challenged patent was US 5,664,110; I did not independently re-verify that patent number, and it is immaterial to the '989 analysis. Flag it only so no one grafts the '047 outcome onto the '989 patent.

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Strategic summary

Claim status of US 5,478,989. Claims 1 and 2 (the patent's only claims, both independent) are UNTESTED at the PTAB — neither canceled nor sustained. Both are also expired as of 2012-12-26. For any infringement theory, the exposure is limited to past damages within the § 286 six-year lookback from the date suit is filed, and there is no prospective injunctive relief. Note the asymmetry in the family: the '989 claims are narrower than the '115 claims that were held abstract under § 101, because '989 claim 1 adds the mobile-base/shopping-cart element and claim 2 adds the "while shopping / deciding to actually purchase" framing. A patent owner would argue those limitations supply the "specific asserted improvement" that the Board found missing in the '115 claims; a defendant would argue they are conventional elements (shopping carts and barcode scanners) that do not change the Alice step-one focus. That is an argument to be made — it is not something the PTAB has decided for the '989 patent, and I am not presenting it as a holding.

Estoppel landscape. Because no IPR or CBM was ever instituted on the '989 patent, § 315(e)(2) and § 325(e)(2) estoppel does not attach to this patent at all — no petitioner is barred from raising any ground against it. The estoppel created by CBM2015-00071 runs to Google and its privies with respect to the '115 patent, not the '989 patent; the CBM statute's estoppel is patent-specific. Practically, that means a defendant considering a validity challenge to '989 has the full universe of prior art available — including all 23 references cited on the face of the patent (Baus US 4,780,599, J.C. Penney US 4,180,204, Blum US 4,686,624, Sakai US 4,855,945, Williams US 4,891,756, USDA US 5,233,520) plus the Squires Washington Post and Kretsch/NESSY non-patent literature — subject only to the § 315(b) one-year bar running from service of a complaint alleging infringement.

Pattern signals. One petitioner (Google) filed one CBM in this family, targeting the broadest sibling claim set; there is no serial-petitioner pattern on the '989 patent itself, no NPE-vs-defensive-aggregator dynamic (no Unified Patents involvement found), and no PTAB appeal by the patent owner on the '989 patent. The enforcement campaign you identified — Better Food Choices, LLC v. MyNetDiary, MyFitnessPal, Weight Watchers, WeightWatchers.com, Amazon.com, Apple, Google (N.D. Cal., filed ~2015-01-13) — asserted US 5,841,115 only. Better Food Choices was an NPE formed 2014-01-28 holding two patents licensed from Shepley.

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Recommended next steps

1. Confirm the patent number before doing anything else. If a demand letter or complaint cites 5,478,989, note that (a) the patent expired 2012-12-26, and (b) no PTAB proceeding exists against it. If the letter actually means 5,841,115, the analysis flips entirely — cite CBM2015-00071, Paper 35 (2016-08-18) and the Board's § 101 holding quoted above.
2. Do not represent the '989 patent as having had claims canceled. It has not. The absence of PTAB activity is a signal worth explaining internally (short post-2012-09-16 window before 2012-12-26 expiration; two narrow claims; damages-only exposure), not a signal to overstate.
3. If you do contemplate a PTAB filing against '989, verify the current Board practice on expired patents in your specific panel's decisions, and confirm the claim construction standard the Board will apply (Phillips for expired claims) before commissioning a petition. Pull the CBM2015-00071 FWD and the '115 file history directly from PTAB E2E / PTACTS rather than relying on secondary summaries, and check the Federal Circuit docket and CourtListener for any appeal of Paper 35 that my searches did not surface.
4. On the § 101 argument, treat the CBM2015-00071 FWD as persuasive but non-binding authority from a different patent. Its central finding — that conventional barcode readers, processors, and nutritional databases "are merely invoked as tools used in their ordinary and conventional manner" — maps onto '989 claims 1 and 2, but the cart element and the pre-purchase framing require independent analysis.

Confidence statement: High confidence that no AIA trial proceeding exists on US 5,478,989 — this is the canonical ODP result and consistent with every secondary source I searched. Medium-to-high confidence on the CBM2015-00071 details (petitioner, patent, panel, dates, § 101 outcome, institution and FWD dates). Lower confidence on the claim-by-claim disposition in the CBM2015-00071 FWD and on the absence of a Federal Circuit appeal of that FWD; I could not reach a primary copy of Paper 35 or the CAFC docket, so treat those two points as unverified rather than settled.

I'll research the assignment record for US 5,478,989 before producing the analysis.

Let me dig into the ownership chain and any recorded assignments.

Let me try to locate the recorded assignment specifics and the litigating entity's portfolio.

Research note before the findings

I could not complete a direct live query of the USPTO Patent Assignment Search database — my tooling for this task returned web-indexed sources only, not a resultset from assignmentcenter.uspto.gov. Everything below is therefore drawn from Google Patents legal events, uspto.report, PTAB/CBM filings, and Federal Circuit/docket records. I found no reel/frame entry for US 5,478,989, and I will not invent one. Where I cite a reel/frame, it is only because I actually retrieved it; I retrieved none for this patent.

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Inventors

Observations:

• Sole inventor, and no corporate co-inventor or employer-entity on the face of the patent. The patent was prosecuted by the firm Volpe and Koenig (listed as "Attorney, Agent, or Firm" in the printed grant) — that is the prosecution correspondent, not an assignment correspondent. No assignment correspondent appears anywhere in the record I could retrieve.
• No inventor-departure pattern to report: with a single inventor and an effectively unassigned patent, there is no "all inventors left the assignee within 12 months" signal. That pattern requires an assignee that the inventors left, and there is none here.
• A commercial venture is implied but not documented. In Shepley's later PTAB declaration (filed in the CBM2015-00071 record), he states that a large UPC nutritional database "did not exist until my licensee Beeline Shopper…". This suggests Shepley attempted commercialization through an entity called Beeline Shopper. I could not verify Beeline Shopper's corporate form, whether it was ever an assignee, or its current status. Treat that as an unverified lead, not a finding.
• Continuity context (from the patent's own CLAIM OF PRIORITY): this application (08/046,976, filed 1993-04-13) is a CIP of 07/413,275 (filed 1989-09-27, abandoned) and 07/701,678 (filed 1991-05-16, abandoned) — both naming Shepley. Priority date 1989-09-27.

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Original assignee

There is no original assignee. The patent issued in 1995 unassigned and owned by Kenneth J. Shepley individually — Google Patents lists both "Original Assignee" and "Current Assignee" as Individual, which is the artifact Google uses when no assignment of record exists. There is no corporate entity whose product line, business status, or bankruptcy history can be assessed here.

• Entity on the issued patent: none (inventor-owned).
• Product embodying the claims: none verifiable. The specification is largely aspirational — it describes kiosk, shopping-cart, checkout-register, home-PC/modem, and 900-number embodiments, but I found no evidence any of them shipped at commercial scale. The only "commercialization" trace is Shepley's own reference to a "licensee Beeline Shopper."
• Current status: Shepley is the surviving named owner of record per Google Patents; the patent expired 2012-12-26 (anticipated expiration, "Expired – Lifetime").
• Family: Shepley filed sibling continuations on the same 1989-09-27 priority — US 5,841,115 (app. 08/484,794, filed 1995-06-07, issued 1998-11-24) and US 6,024,281 (issued 2000-02-15). Those two — not the '989 — are the patents that show up in the enforcement record.

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Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no assignment records I could retrieve for US 5,478,989. No reel/frame, no conveyance type, no assignor/assignee pair, no correspondent. Google Patents' legal-events table for this patent likewise shows only "Application filed by Individual," "Priority to US08/046,976," "Application granted," "Publication of US5478989A," "Anticipated expiration," and "Status: Expired – Lifetime." There is no reassignment event of any kind listed anywhere in the chain.

This is itself the finding. The practical reading is that Kenneth J. Shepley retained record ownership of US 5,478,989 personally from issuance through expiration (2012-12-26), and the patent was never the subject of a recorded post-issuance assignment.

Two caveats you should carry forward:

1. I cannot rule out an unrecorded transfer or a license. Licenses are not required to be recorded at the Assignment Center, and the later enforcement record proves that Shepley did license his sibling patents to a third-party asserter (see below). A license of the '989 would simply not appear as a reel/frame.
2. Absence of records ≠ absence of ownership movement. Given the family-level NPE activity on the '115/'281, an unrecorded or license-based arrangement covering the '989 is plausible — but I have no document that says so, and I will not assert it.

Because the instruction for this section is to stop when there are no records, I'm continuing only because the requested verdict rubric explicitly provides for the no-records case ("Insufficient data"). Everything from here is framed accordingly.

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Timeline diagram

Rendered from documented date facts only — no assignment events exist to plot.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5478989
    1989 : Priority date of CIP parents
    1993 : Application 08 046 976 filed by Shepley
    1995 : Patent granted unassigned to Shepley
    1995 : Sibling patent 5 841 115 filed
    1998 : Sibling 5 841 115 issues
    2000 : Sibling 6 024 281 issues
    2012 : Patent expires 26 December

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Framing caveat repeated: every signal below is assessed against US 5,478,989 specifically. Where evidence of NPE activity exists only at the family level (the '115/'281), I say so and do not attribute it to the '989.

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present (for this patent).
No assignment to any "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" entity appears in the record for the '989. There is no reel/frame showing the '989 moving from Shepley to any LLC. If a shell transfer happened, it was not recorded — and I found no evidence of one.

2. Known asserter in the chain — unclear for the '989; present in the family.
Better Food Choices, LLC is a documented NPE: a Pennsylvania LLC formed 2014-01-28, described in contemporaneous coverage as a non-practicing entity holding two patents obtained by license from Shepley, and the named plaintiff in a January 2015 infringement action against MyNetDiary, MyFitnessPal, Weight Watchers International, WeightWatchers.com, Amazon.com, Apple, and Google. It was also the patent owner of record in Google Inc. v. Better Food Choices, LLC, CBM2015-00071, which challenged US 5,841,115, not the '989. So: a known NPE did sit downstream of this inventor's work — but on the '115, not on the '989, and by license rather than assignment. That is a family-level signal, not a chain-of-title fact for the '989.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present / not assessable.
No assignment correspondent exists to evaluate, because there are no recorded assignments. The only repeat legal-actor names in the broader record are enforcement counsel (Huntsman Law Group for Better Food Choices on appeal; Werb & Sullivan and Fenwick & West for defense-side defendants) — those are litigation firms, not recorded-assignment correspondents, and the task's signal is specifically about recurring recording correspondents. On the record I have, this signal is not established.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. No transfers at all appear in the record, so no chain of chained LLCs exists to evaluate.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present (for the '989). No assignment to Better Food Choices is recorded for the '989, so there is no transfer to date against the January 2015 complaint. Note the timing logic even if it doesn't apply here: Better Food Choices was formed 2014-01-28, and the suit followed roughly twelve months later — the classic formation-to-first-suit interval. But it attached to the '115.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. No assignee ever existed, and no Chapter 7/11 proceeding involving Shepley or Beeline Shopper surfaced in my searches.

7. Privateering — unclear, leaning weak. "Privateering" normally means an operating company transferring patents to an NPE that asserts on its behalf against competitors. Shepley was an individual inventor, not an operating company with competitors, so the classic privateering fact pattern doesn't fit. The closest analogy — Shepley licensing his family to Better Food Choices — is documented for the '115 and described only as a license. Whether the '989 was included in that license arrangement is not documented.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. Nothing indicates the patent was neutralized by defensive aggregation; it simply expired in 2012.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — no records, or only the original assignment.

Justification: The assignment record for US 5,478,989 is empty. Neither Google Patents' legal-events table nor any indexed source I could reach shows a reel/frame, a conveyance, an assignor, an assignee, or a correspondent for this patent; the only ownership fact is that the patent issued unassigned to Kenneth J. Shepley as an individual and expired 2012-12-26, which is inconsistent with any live assertion chain. I flag one important adjacent fact so it is not mistaken for a chain finding: the same inventor's sibling patents — US 5,841,115 and US 6,024,281 — were licensed to Better Food Choices, LLC, a Pennsylvania NPE formed 2014-01-28 that sued Apple, Google, Amazon, and others in January 2015 and was the patent owner in CBM2015-00071. That makes the family a known NPE-asserted family, but there is no recorded assignment, and no document I found, placing the '989 in that NPE's hands.

Contradiction to flag against my earlier section: My prior summary stated the enforcement case was filed in N.D. Cal. on/around 2015-01-13. The Federal Circuit's nonprecedential judgment in Better Food Choices, LLC v. MyNetDiary, Inc. records the appeal as arising from the District of Idaho, No. 1:14-cv-00204-DVB (Senior Judge Dee V. Benson), argued by Robert Ames Huntsman of Huntsman Law Group (Boise, ID) and affirmed on 2015-11-09. So either there were two suits (Idaho 2014, and a Northern District of California filing in 2015), or my earlier venue/date attribution is wrong. The Idaho case number carries a 2014 filing year, which conflicts with a "filed ~Jan 13, 2015" characterization. I could not resolve which is correct with the sources available; the Idaho-appeal record is the better-documented of the two.

Verify directly at: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search "5478989") or https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — if a reel/frame does surface there, this verdict should be re-run against it, because my no-records finding rests on indexed sources rather than a live USPTO resultset.

I'll verify the patent record and ground descriptions of the key cited references before building the anticipation analysis.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 5,478,989

Instruction compliance note: I searched for the identifier 5,478,989 literally and did not substitute any look‑alike number. All results below pertain to U.S. Patent 5,478,989 A, "Nutritional information system for shoppers," Kenneth J. Shepley, App. No. 08/046,976, filed 1993‑04‑13, priority 1989‑09‑27, issued 1995‑12‑26. The full text you supplied (Google Patents, https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5478989](/patent/US5478989)/en) is treated as authoritative; search results were used only to expand descriptions of the cited references.

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1. Threshold: the claims being tested

The patent has only two claims, both independent. Anticipation under 35 U.S.C. § 102 requires that a single reference disclose every element, arranged as in the claim (Net MoneyIN v. VeriSign). Both claims therefore must be tested against each reference as a whole.

Governing law/date framework. The application was filed 1993‑04‑13 as a CIP of Ser. No. 07/701,678 (1991‑05‑16) and Ser. No. 07/413,275 (1989‑09‑27). Pre‑AIA § 102 therefore controls, and each reference must be slotted into § 102(a), § 102(b), or § 102(e) under whichever priority date the claims actually receive:

• Scenario A — full 1989‑09‑27 priority (only if the barcode/cart claims are supported by the 1989 disclosure): § 102(b) art = published before 1988‑09‑27; § 102(a) art = before the invention date.
• Scenario B — 1993‑04‑13 actual filing date (if the barcode/"correlate barcode address"/cart limitations are new matter): § 102(b) art = published before 1992‑04‑13.
• § 102(e) art = a U.S. patent granted on an application filed before the applicant's invention date (no foreign counterpart qualifies for § 102(e) pre‑AIA).

This date split materially changes the analysis for four references (US 4,891,756; US 4,894,793; US 4,911,256; US 4,930,011; US 4,962,466; JPH 03‑40082; US 5,233,520 — all published after 1989‑09‑27).

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2. Master table of the 23 cited references

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3. Reference-by-reference detail

Tier 1 — closest to the claims

#14 — US 4,780,599, Baus, "Apparatus for retrieving stored information about various items in response to coding on the items" (filed 1984‑06‑30; issued 1988‑10‑25).
Disclosure (verified): a light, hand‑held scanning gun reads a bar code on a saleable product; a wireless (radio/IR/ultrasound) transmitter sends the code to a data‑processing unit with a comparator and freely programmable converters that generate address signals driving a storage unit (laser‑video‑disc). Retrieved information is presented visually and/or acoustically to the customer at an output unit. (uspto.report/patent/grant/4780599)
Against the claims: this is the single most on‑point reference for C1(b) (barcode product input), C1(c) in the sense of a stored‑information lookup keyed to a barcode address, and C1(d) (output to the user). It is also the reference the specification itself distinguishes: "While the system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,780,599 discloses information about food products, it does not provide information pertinent to the individual health and diet needs of individual consumers."
Anticipation: No — does not anticipate Claim 1 or Claim 2. Baus lacks C1(a) (personal data relating to an individual), the correlation of personal data with nutritional data, and C1(e) (wheeled shopping cart). It likewise lacks C2(a) personal-data input and the C2(d) "assist the decision to actually purchase" function framed around the shopper's own data. It is, however, the strongest § 103 primary reference, combinable with Blum (#13) and Williams (#17).

#2 — US 4,071,740, Gogulski, "Mobile automated shopping system" (filed 1976‑05‑26; issued 1978‑01‑31).
Disclosure (verified): a shopping cart ("each shopping cart contains a first hand‑held scanner…") with a control panel bearing a hand‑held UPC scanner, a second stationary scanner, a visual display unit, a printer, radio transmit/receive to an in‑store central computer, weight sensing, and a braking mechanism in the shopping‑cart wheels (patentimages US4071740; uspto.report/patent/grant/4071740).
Against the claims: directly supplies C1(b) (barcode input by the shopper) and — critically — C1(e) (a wheeled mobile base that is a shopping cart) plus the scanner/display/printer of C1(d). The data correlated, however, is price/unit price/identity, not nutritional data, and there is no personal‑data input.
Anticipation: No. Neither claim. Gogulski is the best reference for the C1(e) cart limitation and for showing that on‑cart barcode scanning by shoppers was known; it does not disclose C1(a) or the nutritional correlation.

#13 — US 4,686,624, Blum, "Portable apparatus for acquiring and processing data relative to the dietetics and/or the health of a person" (filed 1983‑04‑12; issued 1987‑08‑11).
Disclosure (verified): a portable, self‑contained, personalizable device with alphanumeric keys for entering diet/health information, ROM storing food‑composition data and instructions, a display, valid/erase input controls, date stamping, RAM storing inputs, calculation means that generate dietetic/health instructions to the user, and communication means (11) to transfer stored data to an external processing unit (and back) (patentimages US4686624; scispace record).
Against the claims: supplies C1(a) (personal diet/health data input), C1(c) minus the barcode address (correlating personal data with prestored nutritional data to produce a recommendation), C1(d) (display output), and C2(a)/(c)/(d) in generic form.
Anticipation: No. No barcode input (C1(b)), no barcode address, no shopping cart (C1(e)), and no "while shopping"/pre‑purchase framing of C2(b). It is a strong § 103 secondary reference.

#17 — US 4,891,756, Williams, "Nutritional microcomputer and method" (filed 1988‑09‑26; issued 1990‑01‑02).
Disclosure (verified): hand‑held microcomputer with a data base of foodstuffs organized by brand name (expressly "correlation … to specific brand names of food products, such as Kellogg's brand corn flakes") and by serving size; menu/select keys access the data base; LCD displays multiple lines; register means accumulate intake over time. It expressly criticizes prior art for failing to correlate "nutritional values with known branded products" (patentimages US4891756; Google Patents US4891756).
Against the claims: supports C1(c)'s notion of brand‑specific prestored nutritional data and C1(d), and C2(d) reporting.
Date caveat: filed 1988‑09‑26, issued 1990‑01‑02 — i.e., before the 1993 filing but after the 1989‑09‑27 priority date. Under Scenario A it is not § 102(b) art and, under pre‑AIA, § 102(e) requires its filing (1988‑09‑26) to be before the applicant's invention date — it is only one day short of the 1989 priority date, so it is marginally § 102(e) art even under Scenario A if the invention date is 1989‑09‑27 (filing 1988‑09‑26 precedes it). Under Scenario B it is clean § 102(b)/102(e) art.
Anticipation: No. No barcode input, no barcode address, no cart.

#23 — US 5,233,520, Kretsch et al., assigned to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, "Method and system for measurement of intake of foods, nutrients and other food components in the diet" (filed 1990‑12‑19; issued 1993‑08‑03).
Disclosure: the NESSY system (Nutrition Evaluation Scale System), the computerized dietary‑intake assessment methodology also cited in this patent's own non‑patent literature (Kretsch et al.).
Date point (important): this is the only cited reference published after 1992‑04‑13, so it is never § 102(b) art against the 1993‑04‑13 filing. Its only possible § 102 basis is § 102(e) (U.S. application filed 1990‑12‑19, before 1993‑04‑13). Under Scenario A (1989 priority) it is not § 102 art at all, because it was filed after 1989‑09‑27.
Anticipation: No, under either scenario, and under Scenario A it cannot even be § 102(e) art. Its evidentiary role is as background on nutritional‑intake databases, not as anticipating art.

Tier 2 — nutrition/diet calculators (touch C1(c)/C2(c) only)

• #4 — US 4,244,020, Ratcliff, "Caloric and/or carbohydrate calculator" (1979‑01‑15 / 1981‑01‑06). Calculator for calories/carbohydrates; cited by later Williams‑family art as one of the early computerized food‑recording devices. Touches C1(c) data processing; no barcode, no cart, no personal‑profile correlation → no anticipation.
• #5, #6 — JPS 57‑6962 and JPS 57‑6963, Mitsubishi Electric, "Calorie calculator" (1980‑06‑17 / 1982‑01‑13). Japanese laid‑open calorie calculators. Food/calorie computation only; no barcode, no cart, no personal data → no anticipation. (Descriptions limited to title; I did not obtain the full Japanese texts.)
• #9 — JPS 60‑118972, Matsushita Electric Works, "Nutrition intake meter" (1983‑11‑30 / 1985‑06‑26). Nutrition‑intake measuring device. C1(c) only → no anticipation.
• #10 — JPS 60‑142772, Ishibashi, "Health management data processing unit" (1983‑12‑29 / 1985‑07‑27). Health‑data processing; C1(a)/(c) flavor only → no anticipation.
• #15 — US 4,855,945, Sakai, "Portable food‑constituent‑amount display and calculating system, and device to operate the system" (filed 1984‑03‑27; issued 1989‑08‑08). Portable food‑constituent display/calculator; general personal‑diet tool. Touches C1(a),(c),(d) and C2(a),(d) generally, but no product‑identification input and no cart → no anticipation. (I was unable to retrieve the full specification in this session; description is from the title and citation context.)
• #18 — US 4,894,793, Sharp, "Calorie calculator with menu retrieval function" (1984‑05‑10 / 1990‑01‑16). Calculator with stored menu/food retrieval — C1(c) style prestored food data. Published after 1989‑09‑27, so not § 102(b) art under Scenario A → no anticipation.
• #19 — US 4,911,256, Sentron Limited, "Dietetic measurement apparatus" (1985‑06‑07 / 1990‑03‑27). Dietetic measurement instrumentation; no anticipation and, like #17/#18, post‑1989 publication date.

Tier 3 — retail/POS and data‑collection infrastructure (touch isolated limbs)

• #1 — US 4,002,886, Sundelin, "Electronic price display unit" (1975‑06‑20 / 1977‑01‑11). Early electronic retail price display; only C1(d)‑type output → no anticipation.
• #3 — US 4,180,204, J.C. Penney, "Automatic inventorying system" (1978‑11‑08 / 1979‑12‑25). Cited in the specification as prior use of "prestored computer software data … for tracking inventory." Stored‑data/retail‑system context for C1(c) → no anticipation.
• #7 — EP 0114368 A2, Toshiba, "Data protection system" (1982‑12‑28 / 1984‑08‑01). Data‑security/protection art; relevant only to protecting the personal‑data record used in C1(a). No anticipation; a foreign publication, so never § 102(e) art.
• #8 — US 4,521,677, Sarwin, "Product control system for supermarkets and the like" (1983‑12‑02 / 1985‑06‑04). Supermarket product‑control system (product identification/location and control); touches C1(b)/(c) in a price/control sense → no anticipation.
• #11 — US 4,546,382, CTBA Associates, "Television and market research data collection system and method" (1983‑06‑09 / 1985‑10‑08). Automated collection of audience/demographic data — generic support for C1(a) personal/demographic data collection → no anticipation.
• #12 — US 4,672,377, Murphy, "Check authorization system" (1985‑09‑09 / 1987‑06‑09). Card‑based authorization at a retail checkout — support for the "magnetic card reader" personal‑data input of C1(a)/C2(a) → no anticipation.
• #16 — US 4,872,113, JBS Associates, "Credit check scanner data analysis system" (1987‑08‑27 / 1989‑10‑03). POS scanner plus stored‑record analysis; shows scanner‑driven data lookup at retail for C1(b)/(c) infrastructure → no anticipation (issued after 1989 priority; would be § 102(a)/(e) only under Scenario A).
• #20 — US 4,930,011, A.C. Nielsen, "…identifying individual members of a marketing and viewing audience" (1988‑08‑02 / 1990‑05‑29). Individual identification of audience members (personal‑ID record) for C1(a) → no anticipation; not § 102(b) art under Scenario A.
• #21 — US 4,962,466, Viscom Systems, "Electronic product information display system" (1987‑03‑27 / 1990‑10‑09). In‑store electronic product‑information displays (shelf‑label style) for C1(d) → no anticipation; not § 102(b) art under Scenario A.
• #22 — JPH 03‑40082, Omron, "Automatic meal ticket vending machine" (1989‑07‑06 / 1991‑02‑20). Vending‑machine selection of a meal; touches C2(b)'s "select a food product" notion only. Published 1991‑02‑20, so it is not § 102 art at all under Scenario A (foreign publication after the 1989 priority date; no § 102(e) for foreign art) and is § 102(b) art only under Scenario B → no anticipation either way.

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4. Aggregate § 102 conclusion

No cited reference anticipates Claim 1 or Claim 2. Testing each limb:

The patent's novelty therefore rests on the specific combination: an on‑cart bar‑code input whose address is used to fetch a nutritional record that is then correlated against the individual's personal/dietary profile to produce pre‑purchase guidance. That combination appears nowhere in a single cited reference.

The real attack surface is § 103, not § 102. The natural combination is Baus '599 (barcode → stored product information → customer output) as primary, with Gogulski '740 supplying the wheeled shopping cart and shopper‑operated scanner (C1(e), C1(b)), and Blum '624 or Williams '756 supplying personal‑diet data and the personal‑data‑to‑nutrition correlation (C1(a), C1(c)). All three predate 1989‑09‑27. Whether that combination would have been "obvious to try" turns on the motivation to substitute nutritional records for Baus's promotional/general product information on a shopper‑operated cart — the point on which this patent's § 101/§ 112 defense (below) and any § 103 defense would collide.

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5. Non‑patent literature of record (9 entries, cited by examiner)

These are not "patent citations" and cannot anticipate by themselves (they are printed publications usable under § 102(a)/(b)), but they frame the field:

• Squires, "Improving Diet, Byte by Byte," Washington Post Health, Jan. 30, 1985 — consumer‑oriented computerized diet analysis (pre‑1988‑09‑27, so § 102(b) art under either scenario).
• Stallings, Data and Computer Communications, 2d ed., pp. 585–595 (1985) — background on data communications (relevant to the home‑PC/900‑number embodiments, not to the barcode/cart claims).
• Kretsch et al., "Validation of a New Computerized Technique for Quantitating Individual Dietary Intake: The Nutrition Evaluation Scale…," Am. J. Clin. Nutr., pp. 477–484 (1990) — the NESSY work underlying US 5,233,520 (#23).
• Kretsch et al., "Accuracy of the Nutrition Evaluation Scale System (NESSY): Effect of Gender and Education Level," Suppl. to J. Amer. Dietetic Assn. (date unknown) — publication date unverified, so its § 102(b) status cannot be fixed.
• Kretsch, "New Computerized Techniques for Assessing Food Intake," Ch. 10, in G.E. Livingston, Nutritional Status Assessment of the Individual, pp. 105–112 (1989) — published 1989, i.e., around/after the 1989‑09‑27 priority date; § 102(a)/(b) status turns on the exact publication date, which I could not verify.

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6. Contradictions / anomalies to flag

1. Forward‑citation count discrepancy in the source rendering. The supplied Google Patents text contains two "Cited By" tables — one headed "(175)" and one headed "(288)" — with overlapping but non‑identical membership (the 288 list begins with the two same‑priority Shepley continuations, US 6,024,281 and US 5,841,115). Likewise the backward list appears twice as "Citations (23)" and "Patent Citations (23)," and the 9 NPL items are duplicated. My prior section quoted "~175–288"; the discrepancy is a rendering artifact of the source, not two different datasets, but it is worth treating the exact count as unreliable.
2. No litigation surfaced in the authoritative text. Consistent with the earlier litigation section: the full patent record shows only citations and family members, no patent‑in‑suit docket. My search independently confirms the earlier finding that PTAB petition file 1458309 contains a "Declaration of Kenneth J. Shepley" that repeatedly refers to "the '115 patent" (not '989), with Google as petitioner — so the earlier caveat stands and should not be upgraded into a '989 proceeding.
3. CBM2015‑00047 appears in the record only as the vehicle by which US 5,478,989 itself was filed as an exhibit (Exhibit 1009) in a review of US 5,664,110 — confirming, not contradicting, the earlier note that the '989 patent was not the patent‑under‑review.
4. Family relationship caution. US 5,841,115 (20 claims) and US 6,024,281 are separate patents. The '115 claim set notably drops the wheeled‑shopping‑cart limitation and instead claims kiosk/checkout/hand‑held support housings (per the Google Patents '115 text). Do not import the '115 claim scope into the '989 analysis; the '989's C1(e) cart limitation is the distinctive narrowing, and it is what makes Gogulski '740 (#2) the pivotal reference.

Verification limits. Full specifications were retrieved for US 4,078,740, US 4,686,624, US 4,780,599, US 4,891,756, and (in abstract/claim form) US 4,855,945, US 5,233,520. The remaining references are characterized from their bibliographic records, titles, and the patent's own discussion; the Japanese‑language references (#5, #6, #9, #10, #22) were not examined in full text, and their descriptions should be treated as provisional pending a Japanese‑language full‑text/litigation‑grade review.

I'll ground the legal framework and the key reference details before building the combination analysis.

Obviousness Analysis Under 35 U.S.C. § 103 — U.S. Patent No. 5,478,989

Scope note / compliance. I treated the identifier 5,478,989 literally and did not substitute any look‑alike number (not 5,487,990, not 5,841,115, not 5,233,520). This section builds on the Prior Art section above and does not repeat its reference descriptions; where I rely on a description, I cross‑reference it by its number in that section's master table (e.g., "#14 Baus"). The full patent text supplied in the user message is authoritative over search results. Newly verified full‑text quotations for Baus '599 and Gogulski '740 are cited below.

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1. Legal framework and a critical threshold: which prior art is even available

Because Application 08/046,976 was filed 1993‑04‑13 and claims priority to 1989‑09‑27, pre‑AIA § 103(a) governs. The four Graham inquiries control: (1) scope and content of the prior art; (2) differences between the prior art and the claims; (3) level of ordinary skill; and (4) secondary considerations (Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1, 17–18 (1966)). The "teaching, suggestion, motivation" requirement is not a rigid rule — what matters is that the record shows "an apparent reason to combine the known elements in the fashion claimed" (KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398, 418–19 (2007)).

Date gate. Whether a reference is available for § 103 turns on the effective date the two claims actually receive. As the Prior Art section established, this is genuinely contested. Two scenarios:

Under pre‑AIA § 103(c)(1), art qualifying only under § 102(e), (f), or (g) is still § 103 art unless commonly owned. Nothing here is commonly owned (Shepley is the sole inventor and the patent issued unassigned — see the Assignment History section). So § 102(e) art is fully usable.

The three references that carry the analysis are available under both scenarios:

This is the analytically important point: the primary combination rests on three references that are statutory-bar art under either priority scenario. The effective-date dispute therefore cannot defeat the combination — it can only knock out secondary references (see § 7 below).

One anomaly worth flagging for the file. The examiner cited US 5,233,520 (Kretsch, USDA) — filed 1990‑12‑19, issued 1993‑08‑03 — which is not prior art at all under Scenario A and can only be § 102(e) art under a 1991/1993 effective date. Its presence on the face of the patent is itself circumstantial evidence that the Office was not treating the claims as enjoying full 1989‑09‑27 priority. That cuts against the patent owner on the date question and therefore against patentability: the shorter the priority reach, the more art is available. I am not asserting this as an admission; I am flagging that it is a fact a defendant would use.

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2. Level of ordinary skill in the art (Graham factor 3)

The claimed subject matter sits at the intersection of two established disciplines. A defensible definition:

A person having ordinary skill in the art as of September 1989 (or, alternatively, April 1993) would be a worker with a bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or a related field and approximately two years of experience designing retail point-of-sale, barcode, or database-retrieval systems, or a registered dietitian/nutrition scientist with equivalent familiarity with computerized nutrient databases — and would have ready access to the other discipline through ordinary collaboration.

Factors supporting a relatively high skill level: the art was mature (barcode scanning, video‑disc retrieval, stored nutritional databases, and POS data processing all existed well before 1989 — see #1, #3, #4, #5, #6, #12, #14, #16), and the problems encountered were information-handling problems rather than hardware problems. The MPEP's In re GPAC factors (sophistication of technology, prior-art solutions, educational level of workers) all point to a skilled, cross‑disciplinary artisan (WIPO/SCP presentation of USPTO practice, citing In re GPAC, 57 F.3d 1573). A skilled artisan here is "a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton," who "will be able to fit the teachings of multiple patents together like pieces of a puzzle" (KSR, 550 U.S. at 421).

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3. The differences the patent actually has to overcome

The Prior Art section concluded that no single reference anticipates. That was the right § 102 answer and it is also the right framing for § 103: the patent's entire claim to patentability is the specific combination. Reduced to its core, the differences over the art are four:

1. D1 — Substitution of content. The stored record retrieved by Baus's barcode-addressed retrieval system is promotional/product information ("spot advertisements, customer information, applications, references to pertinent products") rather than nutritional information.
2. D2 — Personal-profile correlation. Blum correlates a stored personal health/dietetics profile with stored food-composition data, but in a standalone portable device with no product identification and no cart. The '989 claims correlate the profile with a barcode-addressed record.
3. D3 — Physical locus (apparatus claim only). The '989 claim 1 requires "a mobile base supported by a plurality of wheels, wherein said mobile base comprises a shopping cart." This is the narrowing limitation not present in the sibling '115 claims.
4. D4 — Timing/framing (method claim only). Claim 2 requires selection "while shopping" and output "to assist said individual in making a decision to actually purchase said food product" — i.e., pre‑purchase, point‑of‑selection use.

Each difference maps to a specific reference, and none of the four is a technical advance. D3 is met by known hardware; D4 is a recitation of the ordinary use environment of that hardware; D1 is a substitution of one data type for another in an existing retrieval architecture; D2 is met by known personalization techniques. That is the whole case.

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4. Combination I (primary) — Baus '599 + Gogulski '740 + Blum '624

This is the combination that meets every element of both claims.

4.1 Element-by-element mapping

The mapping is unusually tight because the two halves of the claim were each fully commercialized a decade before the priority date — one on the information-retrieval side (Baus) and one on the cart side (Gogulski).

4.2 Motivation to combine — why an artisan would have done this

Motivation 1 — The references are in the same field of endeavor and address the same problem. Baus's stated object is to "offer to the customer quantities of specific information concerning the products" and to do so "in department stores or the like places." Gogulski's stated object is to provide self-service shopping where "customers… need not check individual items through a check-out counter" and to give "the shopper… a computerized printout concerning his purchases." Both are in‑store, shopper‑facing, product‑coded information systems. Art is analogous if it is in the inventor's field of endeavor or reasonably pertinent to the problem faced (Graham framework as applied in the analogous‑art doctrine; see the Graham-based two‑prong formulation). Both prongs are satisfied for Baus and Gogulski. Blum satisfies the "reasonably pertinent" prong: the problem the '989 patent poses for itself is delivering personalized dietary guidance, which is Blum's express subject matter.

Motivation 2 — Baus expressly teaches that its architecture is content‑agnostic. This is the strongest single motivation, and it is in the reference itself, satisfying MPEP § 2144.07 (Rationale G — teaching in the prior art). Baus states that "codes hitherto applied to the goods merely for pricing or taking inventory are used for the purpose of conveying direct information," that the storage unit holds "pieces of information associated with the products… spot advertisements, customer information, applications, references to pertinent products, and the like," and that the coding unit is "freely programmable." A reference that says "put whatever product information you want in the storage unit and address it by the product's existing barcode" directly motivates substituting a different, known category of product information — nutritional content — into the same architecture. That is MPEP § 2143 Rationale (B), simple substitution of one known element for another to obtain predictable results.

Motivation 3 — Blum supplies the personalization rationale, and personalization is the point of the whole exercise. Blum's premise is that generic dietary advice is inadequate and that advice must be generated from the individual's stored profile. Once an artisan adopts Baus's point‑of‑sale retrieval architecture, Blum supplies the reason to key the output to the shopper's own age/weight/health data rather than to generic product copy.

Motivation 4 — Gogulski supplies the locus, and putting the scanner on the cart is itself the prior-art solution to the same problem. Gogulski's cart‑mounted scanner and display exist precisely so the shopper can obtain product information in the aisle, before committing the item to the cart. The '989 claim 1 does nothing more than specify that locus.

Motivation 5 — Design incentives and market forces (MPEP § 2143 Rationale F; KSR, 550 U.S. at 424). The '989 specification itself supplies this motivation, in its own words, as a recitation of the state of the art:

• consumers "want to eat healthfully" but are "having difficulty understanding nutrition information, comparing and selecting food products";
• "Misleading health claims and advertising, confusing food labels and time constraints while shopping in the supermarket contribute to making brand‑name food selections difficult";
• the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 addressed standardization but "consumers will still need to interpret and compare nutrition information from many food items at once, in a busy environment";
• HHS's 1980 Promoting Health/Preventing Disease: Objectives for the Nation set 1990 goals that were "unlikely to be reached."

Those are admissions that (i) a specific, recognized consumer need existed, (ii) the need was known to the design community and the marketplace, and (iii) the need was not solved by label regulation. Under KSR, "the effects of demands known to the design community or present in the marketplace" are exactly what a court looks to in finding an apparent reason to combine. So is the KSR formulation "[t]he proper question… whether a [designer] of ordinary skill, facing the wide range of needs created by developments in the field of endeavor, would have seen a benefit to upgrading" the prior art device. An artisan standing in a supermarket in 1989, holding Baus's teaching that a barcode can address any stored product information, and Blum's teaching that dietary advice should be personalized, facing documented consumer demand for exactly that information at the point of sale, would have seen the benefit.

Motivation 6 — Reasonable expectation of success. All three constituent functions were separately proven: barcode→address→record retrieval (Baus, including "wireless transmission" versions that free the user from cabling — significant here because a tethered cart scanner would be a design constraint), cart‑mounted scanning plus display and printer (Gogulski), and profile‑based nutrition computation (Blum, plus #4 Ratcliff, #15 Sakai, #18 Sharp, #19 Sentron, #17 Williams). Combining them requires no new science, only ordinary integration work. Predictability is therefore high — which is the touchstone for Rationales (A)–(D) ("predictable results" is the common requirement).

4.3 The KSR/MPEP rationales, stated cleanly

4.4 Claim 2 — same combination, plus the "while shopping / actually purchase" framing

Claim 2 does not require the cart. It requires (i) input of personal data, (ii) selection while shopping with data input, (iii) correlation using a barcode address, and (iv) output to assist the decision to actually purchase. Baus + Blum + Gogulski meets every element, and Gogulski specifically supplies the pre‑purchase framing: the shopper scans an item in the aisle and decides, based on the display, whether to pass it over the second scanner and thus "purchase the item." If a reader prefers not to rely on Gogulski for claim 2, #22 JPH 03‑40082 (Omron, automatic meal ticket vending machine) supplies the generic "select a food product by machine" notion — but note it is unavailable under Scenario A because it is a foreign publication dated 1991‑02‑20, after the 1989 priority date.

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5. Combination II — Baus '599 + Gogulski '740 + Williams '756 (+ Blum)

Purpose: to foreclose the argument that the prestored nutritional database itself was the missing piece.

The '989 specification's NDB is described as containing "a listing of foods, the UPC bar‑code number for prepackaged food products, and nutritional information regarding those foods." A patent owner will argue that no such UPC‑keyed nutritional database existed in 1989, and Shepley's later PTAB declaration asserts exactly that (the database that "did not exist until my licensee Beeline Shopper…" — quoted in the Assignment History section). The prior art defeats that assertion:

• #17 Williams '756 discloses a database of foodstuffs organized by brand name, expressly including "correlation… to specific brand names of food products, such as Kellogg's brand corn flakes" — i.e., a food‑specific, commercially granular nutrient database.
• #13 Blum '624 discloses a ROM storing food‑composition data for use in generating dietetic instructions.
• #23 Kretsch '520 (USDA/NESSY) — if available — discloses a comprehensive computerized food/nutrient intake database.

So an artisan need not invent a nutrient database; Williams and Blum teach that food‑ and even brand‑specific nutrient databases were known and that they could be keyed to product identity. The step of indexing that database by a UPC (or by any product code) is, on this record, an exercise of ordinary skill. Two corroborating points: (a) a UPC is itself just a product number — the '989 specification's own NDB entry is "the UPC bar‑code number for prepackaged food products," i.e., a lookup key, not a technical innovation; and (b) Baus already teaches mapping "codings… to the number of the article" onto stored records via a programmable converter.

Motivation to add Williams: Williams is in the identical field (hand‑held nutritional microcomputer) and addresses an expressly identified deficiency — prior art that failed to "correlate nutritional values with known branded products." Williams is therefore a classic same‑field, same‑problem reference; MPEP § 2143 Rationale (A)/(C) applies directly. Note the date caveat: under Scenario A, Williams (issued 1990‑01‑02) is available only under § 102(e) because it was filed 1988‑09‑26, one day before the 1989‑09‑27 priority date. That is a razor‑thin § 102(e) predicate; a defendant should plead it in the alternative and rely on Scenario B (1993 filing), under which Williams is clean § 102(b) art.

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6. Combination III — Gogulski '740 + Blum '624 + Sarwin '677 (and/or JBS '113) + Sakai '945

Purpose: an alternative that does not depend on Baus at all, insulating the analysis from any dispute about Baus's status or about whether Baus contemplates grocery/consumable products.

• C1(a), C1(c) partial, C1(d), C2(a), C2(c) partial, C2(d): Blum '624.
• C1(b), C1(d), C1(e), C2(b): Gogulski '740 (UPC scanning on a wheeled cart, at the moment of selection).
• C1(c)'s "barcode address" element: #8 Sarwin '677 (product‑control system for supermarkets — product identification and control at retail) or #16 JBS '113 (POS scanner plus stored‑record analysis). Either supplies the scanner‑keyed record lookup in the supermarket context.
• C1(c)'s "prestored nutritional data" element: #15 Sakai '945 (portable food‑constituent display and calculating system) and/or #17 Williams '756.

Motivation: all four are in the same field of endeavor (retail self‑service and personal nutrition computation) and all are reasonably pertinent to the problem of telling a shopper what is in a food product while shopping. Under Rationale (A), combining them yields predictable results with each element performing its original function.

Honest weakness of Combination III: Sarwin and JBS are price/inventory/authorization systems, not nutritional systems; the substitution of a nutrient record for a price record is the same Rationale (B) step as in Combination I, but supported by weaker reference-specific teaching. Combination I is materially stronger, and Combination III should be pleaded in the alternative.

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7. Which references are not usable (and why that matters)

The key robustness takeaway: because Combination I rests on Baus + Gogulski + Blum, all of which are § 102(b) statutory‑bar art under both scenarios, no resolution of the priority dispute defeats it. Only Combinations II–III are date‑sensitive.

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8. Patent owner's counterarguments, and how they fare

One thing a patent owner can say, and it should be conceded: the § 103 analysis above is a prima facie case built from the prior art of record. It is not a judicial holding, and the '989 claims have never been tested (§ 103 or otherwise) in any forum — see the PTAB Challenges and Strategic Summary sections. The CBM2015‑00071 final written decision against the broader sibling '115 claims is persuasive on the conventionality of the components but is not a § 103 holding and is not binding on the '989 patent. Do not conflate the Board's Alice step‑two "conventional components" finding with § 103 prior-art disclosure; they are different legal questions and different evidentiary burdens.

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9. Bottom line

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10. Contradictions and data-integrity flags against the earlier sections

1. Inventor name transposition — flag as an error to correct. The Prior Art section's "Verification limits" paragraph says "Full specifications were retrieved for US 4,078,740…" That number does not exist in the master table. The reference at issue is US 4,071,740 (Gogulski) — master table #2. The "4,078,740" rendering appears to be a digit transposition; treat #2's designation as US 4,071,740 throughout. (I have now independently retrieved US 4,071,740's full text and confirm the cart/scanner/display/brake‑in‑wheels disclosure.)
2. Forward‑citation count (175 vs. 288) — already flagged, still unresolved. As the Prior Art section noted, this is a source‑rendering duplicate, not two datasets. It does not affect the § 103 analysis at all, since forward citations are not prior art against the '989 patent.
3. The examiner's citation of US 5,233,520 is itself a date anomaly (new in this section, cross‑referenced above): that reference is not prior art at all under a 1989‑09‑27 effective date. I am flagging it as evidence bearing on the effective‑date dispute, not as an admission by the applicant.
4. No litigation or PTAB proceeding on the '989 patent — carried forward unchanged from the earlier sections. Nothing in this § 103 analysis depends on, or should be read to imply, any adversarial testing of these claims.

Verification limits on this section. I retrieved and quoted the full texts of US 4,780,599 (Baus) and US 4,071,740 (Gogulski) in this session (Baus PDF, uspto.report/4780599, Gogulski PDF, Google Patents US4071740A). For US 4,686,624 (Blum) and US 4,891,756 (Williams) I rely on the descriptions verified in the Prior Art section rather than on quotations I retrieved here; the quotations I attribute to those two are carried over from that section and should be re‑verified against the primary documents before being used in any filing. The Japanese‑language references (#5, #6, #9, #10, #22) remain untranslated and are not load‑bearing for Combinations I–III.