Invalidity dossier
US 5627549
Dual channel advertising referencing vehicle location
Current assignee: Seiko Instruments Inc
Added 9/23/2026, 4:00:41 PM
Active provider: DeepSeek · deepseek-flash
Patent summary
Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.
Patent Overview — US 5,627,549 A
Title: Dual channel advertising referencing vehicle location
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5627549/en (fetched 2026-09-23)
Bibliographic data (as supplied): Application US08/585,604; filed 1996-01-16; granted and published 1997-05-06; prior-art date and priority date 1994-07-29; inventor Michael C. Park; original assignee Seiko Communications Holding NV; current assignee listed as Seiko Instruments Inc and Cufer Asset Ltd LLC; status "Expired – Lifetime," with anticipated expiration 2014-07-29. Classifications include G08G1/0968 and G08G1/09 (traffic control; in-vehicle variable instructions) and various H04N21/… categories covering cached advertisements and client data involving geographical location.
Purpose (per the text): Prior systems required a massive digital map database keyed to longitude and latitude. The patent states such databases are expensive, license-encumbered, memory-intensive and rarely comprehensive, making them impractical for inexpensive consumer products. A traveler needs to know position relative to a place of interest, not raw coordinates.
Plain-language scope as described: A travel information device in a vehicle carries a position detector (e.g., GPS) and receives two channels — a voice broadcast, such as advertising, and a companion data broadcast carrying precise location information for geographic points of interest. The user interrogates the device to collect detail on an advertisement heard, and the device graphically displays the relative position between that point of interest and the current vehicle location, without needing an on-board street map. Collected data builds a personal electronic reference for later selective display. The excerpt names seven figures: system/road network; a block diagram; front-panel controls and display; two collection flow charts (user-initiated and criteria-based automatic collection); broadcaster-side programming associating voice with data broadcasts; and a stored-information review flow chart.
What the excerpt does not establish: It contains no claims, no detailed description body, and no drawing content; it does not set out the specific data format, interrogation protocol, storage method, or exact display design. It gives no litigation, validity, ownership-transfer, or prior-art analysis beyond the classification and date fields shown, and the assignee listing is expressly noted as possibly inaccurate.
Generated 10/1/2026, 9:51:14 PM
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Litigation summary
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Proceedings on file (0)
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PTAB challenges
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Assignment history
Inventors, original assignee, and the chain of ownership recorded with the USPTO — including the correspondent attorney who recorded each assignment, since shell-LLC chains often share one repeat-player attorney even when the entity names look unrelated. Surfaces NPE / patent-troll patterns: shell-entity transfers, known asserters in the chain, repeat correspondent fingerprints, pre-litigation assignments, and bankruptcy fire-sales.
Prior art
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Obviousness
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Extensions
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Derivative works
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