US 5907831

I'll search for the patent and any related litigation/docket records before summarizing.

US 5,907,831 — Summary

Important scoping note: I searched for the literal number 5,907,831 only. Where I mention continuation patents (e.g., 6,178,407, 7,203,656, 9,773,244), those are the same family, different numbers, and I flag them as such rather than as substitutes or corrections.

Bibliographic data (as listed on Google Patents, retrieved 2026-09-24)

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5907831/en

Assignment chain (listed literally, in the order Google Patents shows it): 2010-08-26 → DI-WALKOR III SERVICES LLC (assignors Nemes, Richard M. and Lotvin, Mikhail); 2015-10-20 → TAMIRAS PER PTE. LTD., LLC (merger, assignor DI-Walkor III); 2020-01-04 → HANGER SOLUTIONS, LLC (assignor Intellectual Ventures Assets 158 LLC); 2020-02-08 → INTELLECTUAL VENTURES ASSETS 158 LLC (assignor Tamiras). Note the listing's odd ordering of the two 2020 records (the Hanger entry dated 2020-01-04 precedes the IV Assets 158 entry dated 2020-02-08); I report the dates as listed rather than reconciling them.

Abstract (verbatim, from the patent)

"The computer apparatus and methods of the preferred embodiment uses computer technology in a unique way to motivate children to devote more time to educational and cultural enrichment. In the preferred embodiment, educational material is provided at a child's local computer under control of a central computer system connected to it over a computer network. On completing a particular educational task, the child is rewarded with a certain number of points. Points that the child accumulates are stored centrally, and at least some of the points can be redeemed towards the purchase of goods and services offered through the system of the preferred embodiment by its commercial participants. The purchasing transactions are also administered by the central computer. Parents, preferably, use the system to support their children's purchasing activity financially and to select content available for presentation to the child. In other embodiments, the disclosed apparatus and methods can be used for purposes unrelated to education of children, and distribution of functionality between the central and local computers may be different, including wholly local implementations."

Independent claims in plain language

The patent has 24 claims, of which the independent ones appear to be claims 1, 12, 16, 19, and 22.

• Claim 1 — central "computing facility" system. A central computer system connected over a network to users' local computers, serving two different classes of users (a "child category" and a "parent category"). It comprises three subsystems: (1) one that gives a child-category user access to selected educational/cultural content; (2) one that lets the child obtain items of value based on a measure of the child's interaction with the content and on financial information controlled by a parent-category user; and (3) one that lets the parent-category user control the financing of those items of value. (See uncertainty note below — I could not retrieve claim 1 verbatim.)

• Claim 12 — method. Electronically providing a child-category user with access to selected educational/cultural content; electronically maintaining a number of points representing that user's interaction with the content; and electronically ordering an item of value based on those points and on financial data, in electronic form, provided by a parent-category user.

• Claim 16 — system (means-plus-function style). Electronic means for providing educational materials to a child interacting with a local computer; means for awarding the child points based on performance during that interaction; means for enabling the child to redeem points for goods or services; and means for enabling a parent to control and finance the goods or services obtained by the child.

• Claim 19 — method. The method counterpart of claim 16: enabling a child to interact with educational materials; awarding points based on performance; enabling redemption of points for goods or services; and enabling a parent to control and finance what the child obtains.

• Claim 22 — article of manufacture (computer-readable medium storing a program). Software components for: presenting educational/cultural content to a child-category user; receiving responses to that content; determining scored points from the responses; controlling the awarding of an item of value based on those points; and enabling a parent-category user to control and finance the item of value.

Representative dependents: claims 2–11 (parent specification of content/items, feedback subsystem, where content is stored — system memory, third-party provider, or local computers — and Internet as the network); 13–15 (restricting child's access based on parent input; displaying advertising; downloading content to and uploading results from the child's local computer); 17–18 and 20–21 (parent selection of educational materials; parent control of advertising); 23–24 (the "item of value" being an electronic representation of money, or a certificate).

Family / related filings (same priority chain, for context only)

Per the related-application data in US 2011/0161190 A1: 08/826,550 → US 5,907,831; continuation 09/294,761 → US 6,178,407 B1; then 09/329,143 (filed 1999-06-09, abandoned, a CIP of 09/294,761) → divisional 10/790,991 (US 2004/0230495 A1) → continuation 11/045,754 (US 2005/0130112 A1) → continuation 12/953,784 (US 2011/0161190 A1) and 12/953,641 (US 8,676,619 B2); also 10/184,440 → US 7,203,656 B2; 11/784,363 → US 2007/0192171 A1; and 14/446,057 → US 9,773,244 B2. (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/37/e0/67/09cb568af54896/US20110161190A1.pdf)

Litigation / docket findings

• No CAFC 2026 docket involving 5,907,831 surfaced in my searches. I cannot confirm any 2026 Federal Circuit activity for this patent; my searches were cut short, so treat this as "not found," not "confirmed absent."
• What did surface: In re Mikhail Lotvin and Richard Michael Nemes, No. 05-1097 (Fed. Cir., Feb. 3, 2005) — dismissed by agreement (https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/[8459877](/patent/8459877).pdf). I am not certain which application/reexamination that appeal arose from, so I do not assert it concerns the '831 patent.
• District-court enforcement of the family by Hanger Solutions LLC, e.g., Hanger Solutions LLC v. Squarespace, Inc. (D. Del., motion-to-stay briefing in late 2021) and Hanger Solutions LLC v. Mediacom Communications Corp, 4:22-cv-00152 (filed 2022-09-28, patent infringement, listed as closed).

Uncertainty disclosures (per your strict rules)

1. Claim text sourcing. The authoritative full text you supplied truncates mid-way through the FIG. 4 discussion and does not include the claims. Claim language for claims 12, 16, 19, and 22 above is taken from FreePatentsOnline's page for US 5,907,831 (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/5907831.html), not from the USPTO claims section directly.
2. Claim 1 is inferred, not verified. I could not retrieve claim 1 verbatim. My description is constructed by analogy to claim 1 of the same-title continuation US 6,178,407 (which uses "first category"/"second category" phrasing), while '831's own claims use "child category"/"parent category." Do not treat the claim 1 wording above as quoted language.
3. Apparent dependency oddity. The retrieved text shows claim 13 saying "The method of claim 14" and claim 14 saying "The method of claim 13" — a circular pair. This is most likely a scraping/rendering artifact of the secondary source rather than the printed patent. I did not verify against the official printed claims.
4. Assignee. Post-issuance reassignments make "the assignee" date-dependent; the original assignee of record is listed as an individual, and the currently listed owner is Hanger Solutions LLC. Google Patents expressly disclaims accuracy of its reassignment data.
5. Status. The patent is listed as expired as of 2017-04-04, so it is not available for new infringement assertions regardless of any 2026 docket activity. Legal status listings are assumptions, not legal conclusions.

I'll research litigation involving US Patent 5907831. Let me search multiple sources.

Bottom line

I found no litigation asserting U.S. Patent No. 5,907,831. Based on the searches I was able to run (Unified Patents patent portal, Justia, RPX Insight, UniCourt, Docketbird/Justia dockets, Patexia), every case I could identify involving the '831 patent's current owner (Hanger Solutions, LLC) asserts different patents — the networking patents U.S. 6,430,623; 6,609,159; and 6,772,227 (plus, in the Mediacom case, additional networking patents). None of those complaints list U.S. 5,907,831 as a patent-in-suit.

Why this is a "no litigation found" answer rather than a "none exists" answer

Two important caveats you should weigh:

1. The patent is expired. The Google Patents/Unified record for US 5,907,831 shows an anticipated expiration of 2017-04-04 (20 years from the 1997-04-04 priority date), with legal status "Expired – Lifetime." An expired patent cannot be asserted for ongoing infringement, and even past-damages suits would have been time-barred under the six-year lookback of 35 U.S.C. § 286 by roughly April 2023.
2. My search was targeted, not an exhaustive PACER sweep. I searched for the specific number ("5907831"/"5,907,831") and by owner/campaign. I was not able to run a full per-patent docket query on Unified Patents' litigation caselist or PACER before my search steps were exhausted.

Context: the owner's litigation campaign does not include '831

The '831 patent's assignment chain (per the Google Patents record) is:

Individual → DI-WALKOR III SERVICES LLC (2010) → TAMIRAS PER PTE. LTD., LLC (2015) → INTELLECTUAL VENTURES ASSETS 158 LLC (2020) → HANGER SOLUTIONS, LLC (2020).

Hanger Solutions' asserted-patent campaign (all non-'831 patents) that I did verify:

The complaints and docket entries for these cases (e.g., the D. Del. "Report to the Commissioner" filings listing "US 6,430,623 B1; US 6,609,159 B1; US 6,772,227 B2") confirm the patents-in-suit, and U.S. 5,907,831 appears in none of them.

What I did NOT find

• No district court complaint naming U.S. 5,907,831 as a patent-in-suit.
• No CAFC appeal keyed to U.S. 5,907,831.
• No IPR, PGR, CBM, or reexamination of U.S. 5,907,831 surfaced in my searches.

Recommendation

To close the gap with certainty, a follow-up should query:

• Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) filtered by patent number 5907831;
• RPX Insight / Docket Navigator per-patent page for '831 (which aggregates PACER complaints by patent);
• USPTO Patent Assignment and Patent Trial and Appeal Board records for any post-grant challenges.

One further note, stated cautiously: the '831 patent's disclosure (rewarding users in a "child" category with points redeemable for goods, with a "parent" category controlling content and payment) was widely cited as prior art — e.g., it is listed as an X-category reference in WO2002009065A3 and appears in the "References Cited"/"Referenced By" lists of many later patents (the Unified record shows 544 "Referenced By" entries). That explains the prior-art prominence of the number, which can create false positives when searching; it is not evidence of litigation. I did not find any such evidence.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" signal against public sources before drafting.

Let me run more targeted checks for any trial proceedings tied to this patent or its pre-AIA/AIA-related family.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 5907831. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block — sourced from the USPTO Open Data Portal — returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for this patent, and my public-source checks (Google Patents / USPTO, the Unified Patents patent portal page for US-5907831-A at https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-5907831-A, and targeted searches for petitioner-side filings) surfaced no petitions, institution decisions, Final Written Decisions, or Federal Circuit appeals. Breakdown: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied.

Bottom-line defensive posture — and this is the part that matters: the absence of PTAB activity here is not a "hardened patent" signal, because the patent never had to survive the AIA gauntlet. US 5907831 issued 1999-05-25 from an application filed 1997-04-04, and the Google Patents legal-status data records "Expired – Lifetime" with an anticipated expiration of 2017-04-04 (i.e., the 20-year term from the 1997-04-04 priority/filing date). It expired before the 2012–2020 CBM wave and before the Unified Patents / RPX mass-filing era that would normally have generated a petition on a low-quality G06Q "points-for-education-redeemed-for-goods" patent. Your best defense against this patent is not the PTAB — it is the calendar and § 286.

Per-proceeding detail

The template calls for one subsection per proceeding. There are no proceedings to populate, and I will not fabricate proceeding numbers, panels, grounds, or dispositions to fill the slots. Stated plainly, the following are all NOT ON FILE for US 5907831:

• Type: n/a — no Inter Partes Review, no Post-Grant Review, no Covered Business Method review was ever instituted, and none is pending.
• Judge panel: n/a — no panel ever touched this patent.
• Petition grounds: n/a.
• Institution decision: n/a.
• Final Written Decision: n/a — no claim of US 5907831 has ever been canceled, confirmed, or construed by the Board.
• Settlement / termination: n/a.
• Appeal: n/a — no PTAB FWD exists to appeal, and my search found no Federal Circuit opinion referencing US 5907831.
• Defensive value: The value of the empty record is evidentiary, not precedential — see below.

One near-miss worth flagging so nobody mis-cites it: the Unified Patents portal maintains a page for US-5907831-A (that page is what the aggregator generates for any patent it monitors; the same page cross-references family member US-6178407-B1). A portal page is not evidence of a filed petition. I found no Unified Patents petition against this patent, and I did not confirm the page reflects anything beyond monitoring.

Strategic summary

Canceled vs. sustained vs. untested. The complete claim set of US 5907831 is UNTESTED at the PTAB — not a single claim has been canceled, and not a single claim has been affirmed either. There is no surviving-claims list to give you, because no IPR ever narrowed the patent. Do not let anyone characterize this patent as "PTAB-validated": a patent with zero challenges is simply unchallenged, and for this one there is a specific structural reason (see the expiry point below) why it never drew fire.

Estoppel landscape. Because no petitioner lost or settled an IPR, no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to anyone. There is no petitioner, no privy, no real party in interest, and therefore no art that has been "used up." That cuts both ways: it means a hypothetical challenger would face no estoppel, but it also means there is no free-riding off someone else's win. Any defense must be built from scratch — which, as noted, is moot for this specific patent given its expiry.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner (there is no petitioner at all). No PTAB appeals by the patent owner, aggressive or otherwise — the patent owner never had a Board outcome to appeal. No defensive aggregator petition in the chain (Unified Patents, RPX, or similar) despite this being textbook aggregator bait: a 1997-priority G06Q patent, classified in G06Q30/02 (marketing/price determination), G06Q20/38 (payment protocols), and G06Q50/20 (education services), with claims directed to awarding redeemable points for completing educational tasks and billing a parent's credit card — precisely the art the Board repeatedly invalidated in 2015–2019. The likely explanation is the 2017-04-04 expiry: by the time CBM/IPR filings peaked, the patent had already run out, so a challenge would have bought nothing.

The family is where the live exposure sits. The Google Patents family timeline in your source material shows later-filed continuations/divisionals claiming priority to this 1997-04-04 filing, with their own later expiry dates: US 6178407 B1 (filed 1999-04-19), US 7203656 B2 (filed 2002-06-28), US 2004/0230495 A1 (filed 2004-03-02), US 2005/0130112 A1 (filed 2005-01-28), US 2007/0192171 A1 (filed 2007-04-06), US 8676619 B2 and US 2011/0161190 A1 (filed 2010-11-24), and US 9773244 B2 (filed 2014-07-29). The chain of custody on the '831 patent — Individual → DI-WALKOR III SERVICES LLC (2010-08-26) → TAMIRAS PER PTE. LTD., LLC (2015-10-20) → INTELLECTUAL VENTURES ASSETS 158 LLC (2020-02-08) → HANGER SOLUTIONS, LLC (2020-01-04 / 2020 assignment of interest) — is the classic monetization-pipeline signature. Hanger Solutions is the current asserted-owner vehicle. If you have a demand letter, check which family member it cites: a letter citing US 5907831 itself is in materially worse shape than one citing a later-expiring continuation.

Recommended next steps

1. Confirm the expiry on the face of the patent and in USPTO Patent Center before relying on it. The "Expired – Lifetime / anticipated expiration 2017-04-04" entry is a Google Patents legal-status assumption, not a legal conclusion, and the source data itself flags that the listed assignees and dates may be inaccurate. Pull the front page of US 5907831 and any terminal disclaimer or patent term adjustment from Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) and record the exact expiration date. If it is indeed 2017-04-04, then: (a) the patent cannot be infringed by present activity, and (b) even pre-expiry infringement damages are cut off by the six-year lookback of 35 U.S.C. § 286 — meaning any recovery window (2011-04-04 to 2017-04-04) has itself now closed as of today, 2026-09-29. A demand letter asserting this patent today is, on the expiry theory, asking for money it cannot legally recover.

2. Since there is no FWD to link, link the absence instead. The two authoritative places to re-run the check and preserve the negative result are the PTAB E2E / PTAB API system (https://ptab.uspto.gov and the ODP API behind it) and CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%225907831%22) for any district-court or appellate decision referencing the number. Capture dated screenshots; "we checked and there is nothing" is a stronger exhibit when time-stamped.

3. Re-scope the search to the live family. The defensively relevant question is not whether '831 was challenged, but whether US 6178407, US 7203656, US 8676619, or US 9773244 were challenged, and by whom. Those are the patents a current demand letter is most likely to cite, and a prior petitioner on any of them would create § 315(e)(2) estoppel you can exploit. Searches on those numbers returned nothing conclusive in this pass — treat that as unverified, not as none, and pull each one's PTAB record directly.

4. No trial-stage milestones to track. There are no pending proceedings, so there is no institution deadline, no oral hearing, and no statutory one-year FWD due date to calendar. If you are a defendant, spend the budget on the § 286 / expiry defense and on invalidating the asserted family member, not on '831.

Caveat on completeness: the ODP ingest is the canonical source and it is empty; my web searches were consistent with that but were not exhaustive of every regional-art-unit filing, and the ODP can lag recently filed petitions. If you have a specific petition number in hand, I can pull its claim-level disposition — but I found no basis to assert one exists, and I have deliberately not invented a proceeding number to fit the template.

I'll verify the assignment chain and litigation history before writing this up.

Good leads. Now let me pin down whether US 5,907,831 itself was asserted and trace the IV shell entities.

Ownership Chain Reconstruction — US 5,907,831

Patent: US 5,907,831 A · "Computer apparatus and methods supporting different categories of users"
App. No.: 08/826,550 · Filed: 1997-04-04 · Granted: 1999-05-25 · Anticipated expiration: 2017-04-04
Current assignee of record (per Google Patents legal events): Hanger Solutions, LLC

Access note / evidentiary scope. The Assignment Center and Assignment Search interfaces did not return machine-readable reel/frame or correspondent fields in this session; the chain below is reconstructed from the Google Patents legal events feed, which mirrors the recorded assignments as to date, conveyance type, assignor, and assignee, but does not expose reel/frame numbers or the correspondent of record. Per the operating rules, I have not invented those fields. Where a field is unverified, it is marked [not retrieved] rather than filled in.

Inventors

Unusual pattern — flagged. The application was filed by the two inventors as individuals, with no assignment to an operating company recorded at or near filing. Google Patents lists the original assignee simply as "Individual." This is the single most consequential fact in this chain: there was never an operating-company assignee in the chain, so there is no corporate product record to check, and no employer to run a departure analysis against. The inventors held the patent personally for ~13 years (1997-04-04 filing → first recorded assignment 2010-08-26) before transferring it. A 13-year individual hold followed by transfer to a patent-holding LLC is the classic precursor to a monetization/aggregation deal, not to a product commercialization.

I cannot confirm any pre-1997 or concurrent employer for either inventor from the sources reachable here. This is a genuine gap — do not treat the absence as evidence of anything.

Original assignee

No institutional original assignee. The issued patent was held by Lotvin and Nemes as individuals; the first recorded assignment (2010) runs from the inventors to Di-Walkor III Services LLC.

• Product embodying the claims: No evidence of any. The disclosed system — a networked educational-content server awarding redeemable points, with separate parent/child credential tiers, parental content and advertising filters, and a redemption/purchasing subsystem billed to a parent's credit card — was never placed in commerce by an assignee of this patent that I can identify. The patent is a specification-rich, product-free asset, which is exactly the profile aggregators buy.
• Primary line of business at issuance: None attributable to the patent owner; the property was inventor-owned.
• Current status of original owner entity: N/A (individuals). Both inventors are named as assignors in the 2010-08-26 record, confirming they were alive and held title at that time.

Assignment timeline

Four post-issuance records exist. The chain is real and non-trivial — this is not a "no records" patent.

2010-08-26 (executed/recorded as listed) — Reel [not retrieved]

• Conveyance: Assignment
• Assignor: NEMES, RICHARD M. and LOTVIN, MIKHAIL (both inventors)
• Assignee: DI-WALKOR III SERVICES LLC
• Correspondent: [not retrieved] — cannot assess recurrence on this record
• Context: Transfer to an Intellectual Ventures-linked holding entity; ends 13 years of individual ownership and precedes a burst of continuation filings (see below), i.e., a monetization-motivated acquisition rather than an internal reorg.

2015-10-20 (executed/recorded as listed) — Reel [not retrieved]

• Conveyance: Merger (per Google Patents legal events)
• Assignor: DI-WALKOR III SERVICES LLC
• Assignee: TAMIRAS PER PTE. LTD., LLC
• Correspondent: [not retrieved]
• Context: Internal restructuring of the IV holding structure — a merger conveyance, not an arm's-length sale; title moves down the same beneficial ownership.

2017-04-04 — Anticipated expiration (legal status event, not an assignment)

• Context: the US 5,907,831 claims themselves reach end of term; any later acquisition of this specific patent is for its value as a family/priority anchor, not for assertion of this patent.

2020-02-08 (executed/recorded as listed) — Reel [not retrieved]

• Conveyance: Assignment
• Assignor: TAMIRAS PER PTE. LTD., LLC
• Assignee: INTELLECTUAL VENTURES ASSETS 158 LLC
• Correspondent: [not retrieved]
• Context: Transfer to an IV patent-sale vehicle ("Intellectual Ventures Assets N LLC" is the numbered special-purpose sale-vehicle naming convention IV uses to move packages of patents to third parties).

2020-01-04 (executed/recorded as listed) — Reel [not retrieved]

• Conveyance: Assignment
• Assignor: INTELLECTUAL VENTURES ASSETS 158 LLC
• Assignee: HANGER SOLUTIONS, LLC
• Correspondent: [not retrieved]
• Context: Transfer to an active asserting entity. Hanger Solutions, LLC is the plaintiff in a multi-defendant patent campaign (see NPE signals below).

Date anomaly — flagged, not resolved. The recorded date given for the IV Assets 158 → Hanger link (2020-01-04) precedes the recorded date for the Tamiras → IV Assets 158 link (2020-02-08), even though the second is logically dependent on the first. Google Patents' event list is not a reliable execution-date ordering across records, and one figure may be an execution date while the other is a recording date. I am not inferring a backdated chain from this. Reel/frame and execution vs. recording dates must be pulled from Assignment Center to resolve it.

Family continuation filings (context for the 2010 acquisition, not assignments of '831):

• 1999-04-19 → US 6,178,407 B1 · 2002-06-28 → US 7,203,656 B2 · 2004-03-02 → US 2004/0230495 A1 · 2005-01-28 → US 2005/0130112 A1 · 2007-04-06 → US 2007/0192171 A1 · 2010-11-24 → US 2011/0161190 A1 and US 8,676,619 B2 · 2014-07-29 → US 9,773,244 B2.
• Two later publications in this family (US 2011/0244833 and US 2014/0337244) are indexed with DI-WALKOR III SERVICES LLC as assignee — confirming the IV holding entity was actively prosecuting continuations in 2010 and as late as 2014, i.e., the 2010 purchase was followed by sustained prosecution investment.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5907831
    1997 : Filed by Lotvin and Nemes as individuals
    1999 : Patent issued
    2010 : Assigned to Di-Walkor III Services LLC
         : IV files family continuations
    2015 : Merger into Tamiras Per Pte Ltd LLC
    2017 : Anticipated expiration reached
    2020 : Assigned to IV Assets 158 LLC
         : Assigned to Hanger Solutions LLC
    2021 : Hanger asserts related portfolio patents

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT.
The patent moves from the two individual inventors to Di-Walkor III Services LLC (2010-08-26), then by merger to Tamiras Per Pte. Ltd., LLC (2015-10-20), then to Intellectual Ventures Assets 158 LLC (2020-02-08), then to Hanger Solutions, LLC (2020-01-04). Three of the four assignees carry the "Services LLC / Pte. Ltd., LLC / Assets N LLC" holding-vehicle structure. Hanger Solutions, LLC filed a Rule 7.1 corporate disclosure identifying its parent as Brainbox Innovations, LLC — a single-parent holding structure disclosed on the public docket in Hanger Solutions, LLC v. Extreme Networks, Inc., No. 1:21-cv-00040 (D. Del., filed 2021-01-14), and identically in Hanger Solutions, LLC v. Squarespace, Inc., No. 1:21-cv-00774 (D. Del., filed 2021-05-27). Caveat: I have not verified Hanger's registered-agent address, state of organization, or membership, and I have no evidence of any goods or services sold by Di-Walkor III, Tamiras Per Pte. Ltd., IV Assets 158, or Hanger. The finding rests on the entity structure plus the litigated Rule 7.1 parent disclosure, not on name-suffix inference alone.

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT.

• Hanger Solutions, LLC is the current assignee and a repeat patent plaintiff: Hanger Solutions, LLC v. Extreme Networks, Inc. (D. Del. 1:21-cv-00040, 2021-01-14); v. Squarespace, Inc. (D. Del. 1:21-cv-00774, 2021-05-27); v. Charter Communications, Inc. (W.D. Tex. 6:22-cv-00070, 2022-01-18); v. Cequel Communications, LLC (W.D. Tex. 6:22-cv-00330, 2022-03-29); v. Mediacom Communications Corp. (M.D. Ga. 4:22-cv-00152, 2022-09-28).
• Intellectual Ventures occupies two links (Di-Walkor III Services LLC; Intellectual Ventures Assets 158 LLC), and Tamiras Per Pte. Ltd., LLC is part of the same IV holding structure — IV is named expressly on the analyst list in the brief.
• Also surfaced: RPX reported (2022-06-16) that Hanger Solutions assigned IV-origin patents to an Equitable IP Corporation entity in March 2021, after which Dynadex Data LLC and Zodex Data Systems LLC sued ACD Systems, Corel, NCH Software, GE, Philips, Siemens, and Wix. That is a second downstream NPE cascade out of the same Hanger vehicle. I have not confirmed whether US 5,907,831 was among the March 2021 assets transferred to Equitable IP — treat that as a lead to check, not a finding.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR (cannot be assessed).
This is the one signal the brief identifies as the strongest tell, and the correspondent-of-record field was not retrievable here for any of the four records. No correspondent names are asserted, and I decline to substitute anything. Separately, and distinct from the assignment correspondents: Hanger's litigation counsel of record recur across its campaign — Stamatios Stamoulis and Richard Charles Weinblatt (Stamoulis & Weinblatt LLC, Delaware counsel) plus James F. McDonough, III, Jonathan R. Miller, and Travis E. Lynch as pro hac vice counsel, appearing in both the Extreme Networks and Squarespace actions. That is litigation recurrence, not proof of a repeat recording correspondent. Action item: pull reel/frame and correspondent from Assignment Center for all four records; if a single firm filed the 2010, 2015, and both 2020 recordings, this flips to a strong signal and the verdict strengthens further.

4. Cascading transfers — PRESENT.
Three title movements in under five years (2015-10-20 merger → 2020-01-04 and 2020-02-08 assignments), with two of them inside ~5 weeks of each other in Jan–Feb 2020, and all four assignees trace to a single beneficial-ownership lineage (IV). Chained LLC-to-LLC movement of this density is consistent with repackaging for sale/assertion rather than any commercial integration.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — UNCLEAR for this patent.
The IV Assets 158 → Hanger transfer (recorded Jan/Feb 2020) precedes Hanger's first campaign filings by roughly 12 months (2021-01-14), which is longer than the 6-month window in the signal definition. Critically, the complaints I located assert US 6,430,623 B1, US 6,609,159 B1, US 6,772,227 B2, and US 6,119,171 — not US 5,907,831. The motivating timeline — IV Assets 158 acquisition within months of a decadelong campaign start — is the right shape, but the pre-litigation window is not met on the dates I have.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. No Chapter 7/11 proceeding involving any assignor appears anywhere in this chain. The IV → Hanger transfer was a portfolio divestiture, not a bankruptcy sale.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT (as to any operating company). There is no operating company in this chain to be the privateer's principal. The inventors are individuals; the assignees are holding vehicles and one asserting entity. Classic privateering requires an operating company transferring to an NPE that asserts for its benefit — that structure is absent.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at Hanger Solutions, LLC, an entity that files infringement complaints. The patent has not been neutralized.

Important qualification on this specific patent: US 5,907,831 reached anticipated expiration on 2017-04-04, before the Jan/Feb 2020 transfers to IV Assets 158 and Hanger Solutions. Any assertion of these claims after 2020 would be time-barred. The commercial logic of the 2020 transfers is therefore as a family/priority anchor for the live continuations (US 6,178,407, US 7,203,656, US 8,676,619, US 9,773,244, and their descendants), which is exactly how the Hanger portfolio was operated — the campaign patents, not '831, were the ones pleaded.

Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

Two strong signals are present and mutually corroborating. Signal 1 (shell-entity transfer): the patent moves from two individual inventors (2010-08-26) through Di-Walkor III Services LLC, Tamiras Per Pte. Ltd., LLC (2015-10-20 merger), and Intellectual Ventures Assets 158 LLC (2020-02-08) to Hanger Solutions, LLC (2020-01-04), with Hanger disclosing Brainbox Innovations, LLC as its sole parent via Rule 7.1 statements filed in Hanger Solutions v. Extreme Networks (D. Del. 1:21-cv-00040) and v. Squarespace (D. Del. 1:21-cv-00774) — a holding-vehicle chain with no product evidence at any link. Signal 2 (known asserter in the chain): two links are Intellectual Ventures entities, and the terminal assignee, Hanger Solutions, LLC, was a repeat plaintiff in at least five actions in 2021–2022 (D. Del., W.D. Tex., M.D. Ga.). Signal 4 (cascading transfers, present) supplies corroboration. The two signals I could not assess — repeat correspondent (3) and pre-litigation transfer (5) — are unresolved due to missing Assignment Center fields and the fact that this particular patent, having expired 2017-04-04, appears not to have been pleaded in the Hanger suits I located. Neither gap undermines the two present signals.

Verify at: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search 5907831 / app. 08/826,550) — retrieve reel/frame and the correspondent of record for all four entries to close signal 3.

Sources consulted: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5907831A](/patent/US5907831A)/en · https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-[5907831](/patent/5907831)-A · https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/27876153/plaintiffs-v-defendants/ · https://dockets.justia.com/docket/delaware/dedce/1:2021cv00040/74292 · https://dockets.justia.com/docket/delaware/dedce/1:2021cv00774/75608 · https://dockets.justia.com/docket/texas/txwdce/6:2022cv00330/[1167358](/patent/1167358) · https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=42964260-85d7-4591-bedc-c2c43f71d1ac · https://insight.rpxcorp.com (news item, 2022-06-16, IV/Hanger/Equitable IP cascade).

I'll research the prior art citations for US Patent 5,907,831. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me get the specific "Patent Citations" (backward references) listed on the '831 patent.

Let me retrieve the backward citations ("Patent Citations") from the '831 patent's record.

I've hit a search-step limit on one call, but let me make a final targeted attempt to retrieve the backward-citation list, then I'll answer.

I need to flag a significant gap before analyzing: the "Full patent text" you supplied is authoritative for the specification but cuts off mid-sentence in the Detailed Description ("...where the child may select another function or e") and does not include the claims. I also do not have the "Prior Art section of this page" you referenced — the previously generated section in this thread is a litigation summary, not a prior-art analysis. I will not fabricate claims or prior-art references, so let me first try to retrieve the actual claim set and the cited prior art.

I have the specification but still lack the claims of US 5,907,831 itself. Let me retrieve them directly, since an obviousness analysis must track claim language.

1. Integrity flags before the analysis (read first)

I could not complete the task as framed, for two reasons that you should weigh before relying on anything below.

(a) The claim set of US 5,907,831 is not in the record I was given. The authoritative full text you supplied is the Google Patents rendering at https://patents.google.com/patent/US5907831A/en. That rendering ends mid-sentence in the Detailed Description ("…where the child may select another function or e") and contains no claims section and no front-page "References Cited" list. A §103 analysis is claim-by-claim; without the claim text I cannot chart limitations. What I was able to retrieve from the live web is only fragments (see §3), which I flag as unverified.

(b) There is no "Prior Art section of this page" in this thread. The previously generated section is a litigation summary, not prior art. So the instruction "Use the results from the Prior Art section of this page" cannot be executed — that input does not exist. I did not substitute search results for it, because doing so silently would misrepresent the record.

Contradiction flag (per your instruction to flag contradictions): the earlier litigation summary states the '831 disclosure is prior-art prominent — cited as an X-category reference in WO2002009065A3 and appearing in the "Referenced By" lists of many later patents. My searches corroborate that direction: '831 is cited as prior art by, e.g., US 2014/0337244 ("Tracking points related to a user account for redemption"), US 8,285,195 ("System of reward-based education," cited by examiner), and US 7,257,367. That is art-for-others, not art-against-'831, and nothing in the record contradicts the litigation summary. No contradiction found; just a caution that the number's prominence cuts the opposite way from an obviousness challenge.

Status caveat: the record shows US 5,907,831 with an anticipated expiration of 1997-04-04 + 20 years = 2017-04-04, legal status "Expired – Lifetime." A §103 analysis of '831 is therefore retrospective (relevant to past damages, to the family's continuing patents — US 6,178,407; 7,203,656; 8,676,619; 9,773,244 per the Google assignment/family record — and to defensive/prior-art use of '831 itself). Family members share the 1997-04-04 priority date, so the same 2017 term endpoint likely applies absent any §154(b) adjustment; I have not verified PTA.

2. Legal framework I applied

• Governing statute: 35 U.S.C. §103(a). The application's priority date is 1997-04-04 — pre-AIA, so the pre-AIA §103(a) text governs, and §102(g)/(f)(1)/(f)(2) concepts (including the "same person" proviso) apply.
• Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966): (1) scope and content of the prior art; (2) differences between the art and the claims; (3) level of ordinary skill; (4) secondary considerations.
• KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007) governs any present-day obviousness determination, but because the priority date is 1997, a challenger's motivation-to-combine showing should be tested against the pre-KSR teaching-suggestion-motivation (TSM) framework as well (In re Keller; In re O'Farrell) — this matters because the examiner allowed these claims, which is weak-but-real evidence the contemporaneous art did not suggest the combination.
• Anticipation vs. obviousness: §102 requires a single reference disclosing every limitation; §103 permits combination. Given the breadth of the claims (system and method), a challenger must build both an apparatus and a method theory, or rely on a single system reference (unlikely for a 1997 priority date).

Level of ordinary skill (my assessment): a bachelor's degree in CS/EE or equivalent plus ~2–4 years' experience in networked interactive systems, or a lower degree with more experience — consistent with the reference set contemplated by the specification (relational DBMS, TCP/IP, client-server, credit-card authorization networks).

3. Claim decomposition (from the authoritative specification + partial claim text)

Because the claims were not supplied, I reconstructed the likely limitations from (i) the specification (authoritative) and (ii) claim language I could retrieve for the '831 family. Treat (ii) as unverified fragments:

• US 5,907,831 fragment (freepatentsonline, https://www.freepatentsonline.com/5907831.html): "10. The computing facility of claim 5 wherein at least some of the content is stored at a third party provider's computer. 11. The computing facility of claim 5 wherein at least some of the content is stored in at least some of the local computers." → implies '831 contains an independent "computing facility" claim (claim 5) with dependent claims on content location.
• US 6,178,407 (same title, same 1997-04-04 priority, continuation of the '831 application; freepatentsonline.com/6178407.html, everypatent.com/comp/pat6178407.html): independent system claim 1 recites a first subsystem (access to content over a communications network), a second subsystem enabling a first-category user to obtain items of value "on the basis of a measure of the user's interaction with the content and based on financial information controlled by the user in the second category," and a third subsystem enabling the second-category user "to control financing for the items of value." Dependent claims recite second-category specification of content (claim 2), storage in (5) facility memory, (6) third-party provider, (7) local computers, (8) Internet. Independent method claim 9 recites maintaining points representative of interaction and electronically ordering an item of value based on those points and on financial data controlled by the second-category user; dependents recite restricting access (10), displaying advertising (11), download-to-local/upload-results (12), Internet (13–14).

If '831 follows this structure (very likely, being the parent of '407), the practical claim elements for §103 are:

The likely novelty hook is the integration of E3+E6+E7: a multi-category, credential-separated architecture in which a financially responsible "parent" account simultaneously governs (a) funding/budget of a "child" account's redemptions and (b) the child's content universe. No single pre-1997 reference is likely to disclose that whole architecture; the question is whether the combination is obvious.

4. Scope and content of the prior art — fields a PHOSITA would consult

I cannot responsibly chart specific U.S. patents because I could not retrieve the '831 front-page References Cited list (it was absent from the fetched text) and because you did not supply the "Prior Art section." What follows is therefore organized by field, with confidence flags. Where I name a concrete reference or system, I flag it [verify] unless I am confident of it.

5. Candidate §103 grounds (hypothesized — every specific reference is [verify])

I give these as argument architectures, not as a finished chart. Each states the elements covered, and the required motivation. Confidence = my confidence that the ground, once built on verified references, would support an obviousness rejection.

Ground 1 — Reward-based CAI system + loyalty-point redemption + networked ordering

• Coverage: E1, E2, E4 (rewarded instruction), E5 (points → goods), partial E8.
• Motivation: Expressly articulated in the references themselves and in the marketplace — a system that motivates learners by making rewards contingent on performance. Combining "reward for learning" with "points redeemable for goods" is the application of a known incentive mechanism to a known instructional medium. KSR would call this "arranging old elements" with predictable results.
• Confidence: High for elements E1/E2/E4/E5 in isolation; Moderate that these references render the whole claim obvious, because they do not supply E3/E6/E7.

Ground 2 — Ground 1 + parental-control art (V-chip / filtering software) for E7, and advertising-control art

• Coverage: adds E7 (parent selects/blocks content, e.g., category-based ad blocking) and E9.
• Motivation: Both '831 and the parental-control art address the same problem — a parent wanting to govern a minor's media diet. A PHOSITA implementing an educational service for children in 1997, facing a parent who wants age-appropriate material and no objectionable ads, would predictably bolt the known filtering/ratings scheme onto the known reward system. Category-based blocking (e.g., blocking violent-toy ads) is the natural implementation of E7.
• Confidence: Moderate-to-high. This is the strongest obviousness theory if the challenger can show the parental-control reference discloses category-level selection rather than mere on/off blocking.

Ground 3 — Ground 2 + stored-value/credit-card authorization art for E6

• Coverage: adds E6 (parent's card funds redemptions, with a periodic spending limit).
• Motivation: "Parent pays for child's purchase with parent's credit card, up to a limit" is a business/financial arrangement, and the mechanism (authorization, periodic billing, deduction from a stored allowance) was routine in 1997. Under KSR, a predictable variation in a known payment architecture is obvious; under pre-KSR TSM, one can point to a reference (card authorization with per-period limits, e.g., corporate/travel card controls) expressly teaching the limit concept.
• Confidence: High that E6 is obvious over payment/allowance art once E5 exists; the combination is a design choice.

Ground 4 — Any of the above + "distribution of functionality" art for E8

• Coverage: dependent claims (content located centrally / at a third party / locally; download-and-delete).
• Motivation: Mere allocation of a known function between a server and a client, or between the service and a third-party provider, is a design choice/obvious implementation given the client-server and CD-ROM hybrid art. This ground is weak as a primary ground but strong for taking out the dependent claims once an independent claim falls.
• Confidence: High, especially given the specification itself frames these as interchangeable embodiments ("In other embodiments…").

Ground 5 — Single-system / §102-adjacent references (low confidence)

A single pre-1997 reference disclosing all of E1–E7 would support §102 anticipation or §103 with a second reference. I cannot identify one with confidence and I will not invent one. This is precisely the search the missing "Prior Art section" or an examiner's front-page list would have answered.

6. Motivation to combine — the affirmative case, and the counter-case

Why a PHOSITA would combine (the obviousness case):

1. Common problem, common field. All the component arts address the same practical problem: directing a child's time/attention to educational content and controlling what a minor sees.
2. Predictable results. Reward-for-learning + catalog-of-goods + parental-control + card payment produces nothing more than the expected sum of its parts; no new technical effect is claimed in the apparatus.
3. Marketplace pressure. By 1997, network commerce, card-over-Internet payment, and edutainment were all commercially proven; the motivation is "market demand," an accepted KSR rationale.
4. Explicit lead in the art. The specification itself concedes the interchangeability of delivery modes (block 110: central, third-party, or CD-ROM) and the routine nature of the payment/authorization pieces — useful admissions against the dependent claims.

Why a challenger may fail (the nonobviousness case):

1. The integration is the invention. The claim 1 hook is the unified two-category control architecture (E3+E6+E7) with separate credentials and the parent's dual role as funder and content-governor. None of the isolated fields necessarily suggests unifying funding control with content control in one account structure.
2. Pre-KSR TSM bites. For a 1997 priority date, the combination needs a teaching/suggestion/motivation or a reasonable expectation of success as of April 1997. The examiner's allowance is some evidence the contemporaneous art did not suggest it.
3. Secondary considerations. The specification documents a long-felt but unmet need (parents wanting to redirect spending toward development; children wanting the commercial goods) and a solution that satisfies both. If the record shows commercial success and copying/licensing by others, those cut against obviousness.
4. Design-choice boundaries. "Different categories of users" is claimed as a category, not as biological parenthood, so a challenger cannot lean on the parent-child relationship alone — it must show the architecture.

Net assessment: on the record available to me, Grounds 1–4 together present a credible but not conclusory §103 case against the broadest system/method claims, and a strong case against the dependent claims (E7–E9, content-location). The independent claims likely survive a §103 challenge unless a verified reference set squarely discloses the two-category, credential-separated, funder-and-governor architecture.

7. What is required to finish this analysis (and why I stopped)

To convert §5 from a framework into a defensible claim chart, I need exactly what was missing:

1. The full claim set of US 5,907,831 (all claims, with dependency) — from the USPTO PatentCenter/patent full text, not the truncated Google rendering I was given.
2. The front-page "References Cited" list ("U.S. Patent Documents" and "Other Publications") for '831 — this is presumably what the "Prior Art section of this page" was meant to contain. Please supply it and I will chart it element-by-element.
3. The prosecution history (application 08/826,550) — to see which references the examiner applied and why the claims were allowed; this is the single most probative input for a §103 challenge.
4. Verified prior-art reference documents for each field in §4, with confirmed publication dates before 1997-04-04.

I deliberately did not fabricate claim text, reference numbers, or dates to fill these gaps.

Sources relied on: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5907831A/en (authoritative spec); https://www.freepatentsonline.com/5907831.html (claim fragments 10–11) and https://www.freepatentsonline.com/6178407.html + http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat6178407.html (continuation claims 1–14); https://insight.rpxcorp.com/patent/US5907831A; https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-5907831-A; citation-of-'831 evidence from https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140337244 and https://patents.google.com/patent/US8285195.