US 6016476

I'll research this patent across the specified sources.

US Patent 6,016,476 — Analyst Summary

Source of record used: the full text of US6016476A supplied in the task (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6016476/en), cross-checked against live web results. Where live searches turned up nothing, I say so rather than filling gaps.

1. Bibliographic data (confirmed)

Supporting links: https://uspto.report/patent/grant/6016476; https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/1nmx6dgsn/united-states-patent-and-trademark-office/portable-information-and-transaction-processing-system-and-method-utilizing-biometric-authorizat/ (confirms application 09008122, first-named inventor Maes, Stephane, Danbury CT, filed January 16, 1998, "Patented Case," Class/Sub-Class 705/1).

Note the assignment chain as recorded: IBM CORPORATION assignment dated 1998-05-01 (assignors Sedivy, Jan; Maes, Stephane H.), then the 2012 assignment to Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions Holdings.

2. Abstract (verbatim from the record)

"The present invention is a portable client PDA with a touch screen or other equivalent user interface and having a microphone and local central processing unit (CPU) for processing voice commands and for processing biometric data to provide user verification. The PDA also includes a memory for storing financial and personal information of the user and I/O capability for reading and writing information to various cards such as smartcards, magnetic cards, optical cards or EAROM cards. The PDA includes a Universal Card, which is common generic smartcard with a unique imprint provided by a service provider, on which selected financial or personal information stored in the PDA can be downloaded to perform certain consumer transactions. The PDA includes a modem, a serial port and/or a parallel port so as to provide direct communication capability with peripheral devices (such as POS and ATM terminals) and is capable of transmitting or receiving information through wireless communications such as radio frequency (RF) and infrared (IR) communication. The present invention is preferably operated in two modes, i.e., a client/server mode and a local mode. The client/server mode is periodically performed to download a temporary digital certificate (which is necessary to access selected information stored in the PDA and to write such information to the Universal Card) from a central server of the service provider of the PDA and Universal Card. Next, the local mode of operation is performed by providing the PDA with biometric data and selecting one of the pre-enrolled credit cards that are stored in the PDA. Upon biometric verification, the Universal Card is written with the selected card information, which is then used to initiate a consumer transaction. In the absence of an unexpired digital certificate, however, the selected card information will not be written to the Universal Card, notwithstanding that the user may have passed local biometric verification."

3. Independent claims — plain-language overview

Important honesty caveat first: the authoritative text supplied to me (the Google Patents rendering) is truncated before the claims section — it runs from the Abstract through the specification and cuts off mid-sentence at "…a PC having built in the." I therefore do not have the verbatim claim set for this patent and will not fabricate claim numbering. What I can do reliably is read the independent-claim scope off the specification's "Summary of the Invention," which in this patent reproduces the independent apparatus claim essentially verbatim.

Independent apparatus claim (as mirrored in the Summary / Definitions section)

The claim as recited is a portable information and transaction processing device comprising, in substance:

1. A central processing unit that controls device functioning and processes the operations.
2. Memory means (coupled to the CPU) storing both financial/personal information and a temporary digital certificate.
3. Communication means (coupled to the CPU) for establishing a link to a central server at a remote location in order to obtain the temporary digital certificate.
4. User interface means (coupled to the CPU) for initiating a device operation and selecting a portion of the stored financial/personal information.
5. A universal card, detachably coupled to the CPU, for receiving the selected information.
6. Programming means, coupled to the CPU and responsive to the temporary digital certificate, for writing the selected information to the universal card — with the express negative limitation that "the programming means is prevented from writing the selected portion … to the universal card when the temporary digital certificate is invalid."

Plain-language gist: a handheld wallet-device that holds your card data and a short-lived server-issued certificate; it will only burn card data onto a generic "Universal Card" smartcard/magstripe card when (a) the local user has been biometrically/PIN verified and (b) a currently-valid certificate downloaded from the service provider's server is present. Stale certificate ⇒ no write ⇒ card is useless.

Drafting note for claim-construction purposes: the claim is drafted in means-plus-function form ("memory means," "communication means," "programming means"), so 35 U.S.C. § 112 ¶ 6 presumptively governs those limitations, and infringement would require corresponding structure in the specification (CPU 12, memory 14, modem 58 / telephone line interface 46 / RF 48-50 / IR 52-54, smartcard reader/writer 30, digital certificate processor module 20) performing the recited functions. This is an observation about the claim language, not a court holding.

Other independent claims

I cannot confirm — from the record available to me — how many independent claims the patent contains, whether there is a separate independent method claim (e.g., a method of processing a transaction / a method of writing card data to a universal card), or the precise claim count. The "Definitions" list on the Google Patents page (user, digital certificate, transaction, information, card) hints at multiple claim categories, but that is inference, not verified fact. Treat any claim-by-claim infringement or validity analysis as requiring the actual issued claim set from USPTO PatentCenter / the granted PDF.

Notable dependent-claim subject matter visible in the spec (likely claimed, but not verified)

• Voice-activated card selection and text-independent speaker verification (expressly incorporated by reference to Ser. Nos. 08/871,784 and 08/788,471).
• Alternative biometrics: finger/thumb/palm print, handwriting, retinal vascular pattern; PIN or password in lieu of biometrics.
• Digital certificate constraints: per-card spending limits, lifetime spend cap, and certificate validity period.
• Direct terminal transmission bypassing the Universal Card (serial 42, parallel 44, modem, IR 54, RF 50), i.e., the PDA itself functioning as the card.
• Display of an authorization number tied to the current valid certificate for telephone/mechanical-sweeper transactions.

4. CAFC 2026 docket check — what I found and what I did not

I found no Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit 2026 docket activity involving U.S. Patent 6,016,476. Searches returned only: (a) a general CAFC scheduled-cases document for June 2026 (no mention of this patent), and (b) an unrelated 2026 Federal Circuit matter, Linfo IP, LLC v. Trustpilot, Inc., concerning U.S. Patent 9,092,428 and dismissed as moot on settlement. That case has nothing to do with 6,016,476 and I flag it only to be transparent that it surfaced in the same result set and is not relevant.

Similarly, I found no live 2026 district-court or PTAB proceeding naming 6,016,476 as a patent-in-suit. The third-party hits for "6016476" in my searches are all prior-art citations in other parties' prosecution and IPR papers — e.g., a WO 02/013151 international search report citing "US 6 016 476 A (SEDIVY JAN ET AL), 18 janvier 2000" as an X-reference against claims 1–3, 6, 8, 9, 13; an EPO search report on EP 1 134 705A3; and file-history search-string exhibits in PTAB IPR2016-01109 (U.S. 8,706,627) and IPR2024-00234 (U.S. 9,298,905). Those are citations to this patent, not litigation over it.

Practical analyst note: because the patent's term expired 2018-01-16, no damages-eligible infringement action for this patent could realistically be pending in 2026; any asserted claim would run into the expiration date and the § 286 six-year damages look-back. That is consistent with the absence of docket activity, but I state it as a legal-status inference, not as a docket verification.

Limitation disclosure: I was unable to query USPTO PatentCenter or the CAFC docket directly (no live docket API returned results for this number), and my searches reached a step limit. My CAFC/2026 "no activity" finding is therefore a negative finding from available search results, not a certified docket clearance.

5. Number-confusion warning (per the strict no-auto-correction rule)

A literal search for the string "6016476" also returns JP 6016476 B2 — a Japanese patent (特許第6016476号, Canon KK, "レンズ鏡筒及び撮像装置" / lens barrel and image pickup apparatus, registered 2016-10-07, issued 2016-10-26, application 特願2012-144342). This is an entirely different, unrelated document with a coincidentally identical numeric string. It must not be conflated with US 6,016,476. I have kept them separated and did not "correct" either number.

Also note the patent family members of US 6,016,476 (from the WO 02/013151 search report and the Google Patents family list): EP 1004099 (B1), WO 99/08238, JP 3476189 B2 / JP 2001512876 T, KR 100471508 B1, PL 338353 A1, HU P0004470 A3, CZ 2000470 A3, IL 130068 A, DE 69828291 T2, TW 385400 B.

6. Confidence summary

If you need the issued claim set verbatim (for a § 112 ¶ 6 mapping, a claim chart, or an Alice/§ 101 or § 103 analysis), pull the granted PDF or PatentCenter DOCX for application 09/008,122 — that is the only authoritative source, and it is the gap in my present record.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 6016476 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me try more specific queries with proper formatting and check patent litigation portals.

Litigation search results for US Patent 6,016,476

No litigation involving US Patent 6,016,476 was found. Based on my searches, I could not identify any district court case, ITC Section 337 investigation, CAFC appeal, or PTAB proceeding in which US 6,016,476 was the asserted/ challenged patent.

What I searched and what came back

I ran multiple queries targeting patent litigation databases and general web indexes ("6016476" patent infringement case, "6,016,476" patent infringement lawsuit, US patent 6016476 litigation lawsuit, Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions patent 6016476 lawsuit, unifiedpatents.com litigation 6016476, Maes Sedivy patent 6016476 asserted litigation, etc.). Every hit containing the string "6016476" was a false positive, not litigation against this patent:

The one lead worth flagging (unverified)

The only item that even remotely touched a patent-family owner was the litigate.com page titled Robert Simon v Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions Holdings Corporation, described as "Counsel to Toshiba in a software licensing dispute involving point-of-sale systems." This is a copyright/licensing-type matter (not a patent infringement action), the source is a law-firm bio page rather than a docket, and I could not confirm any case number, filing date, or connection to US 6,016,476. I do not treat it as litigation involving '476.

Important context that bears on the absence of litigation

• Status: US 6,016,476 is Expired – Lifetime; its anticipated expiration date is 2018-01-16 (20 years from the 1998-01-16 filing of US 09/008,122). A patent that expired in 2018 is unlikely to be the subject of current infringement suits, which is consistent with there being no active docket.
• Ownership history: Originally assigned to International Business Machines Corp. (1998); reassigned to Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions Holdings Corporation (2012). No reissue, no terminal disclaimer issues noted, and no litigation or PTAB (IPR/PGR/CBM) activity appears on the record provided from Google Patents for this patent.
• Priority: Based on provisional US 60/055,418 (filed 1997-08-11); foreign family includes EP 1004099, WO 9908238, JP 3476189, KR 100471508, etc. — none of which surfaced as litigation either.

Caveats / honesty about coverage limits

• My accessible tools here are general web search plus the patent's own Google Patents record (which included no "Litigation" section for '476). I could not directly query PACER, the Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist), Docket Alarm, or Lex Machina full dockets in this session, so a comprehensive clearance-grade search was not possible.
• Because patent-number strings are frequently quoted inside prior-art lists and search strings (as seen above), keyword-only searching is prone to both false positives (which I filtered) and false negatives.
• Conclusion: On the evidence available, I have no high-confidence record of any litigation involving US 6,016,476. If you need a definitive answer for a legal opinion or clearance, I recommend a targeted PACER/Docket Alarm/Lex Machina query on 6,016,476 and a CAFC docket check, plus a PTAB proceeding search — I can outline the exact queries to run, but I cannot assert a confident "none exists" beyond the sources above.

I'll start by checking the canonical structured feed and then corroborate with web searches for any PTAB or Federal Circuit activity.

The '476 patent surfaced in a search only as an exhibit (prior art cited in an IPR against a different patent). Let me dig deeper to see whether anyone actually challenged '476 itself.

Let me run a few more targeted checks (CBM, reexamination, and litigation campaigns) before concluding.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 6016476: 0. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" feed (USPTO Open Data Portal, AIA trial proceedings) returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM involving 6,016,476 as the challenged patent — no active proceedings, no claim cancellations, no settlements, no institution denials, and no PTAB appeals. I ran independent web searches (PTAB/Docket Alarm, Google Patents/Justia, PTAB E2E/PTACTS full-text) and found no evidence contradicting that default, i.e., no older or recently-filed proceeding the ODP may not have ingested.

The bottom-line defensive posture is therefore unusual and, for a defendant, exceptionally good: the patent was never tested at the PTAB and it is now expired. Google Patents lists an anticipated expiration of 2018-01-16 (20 years from the 1998-01-16 filing date; priority is the 1997-08-11 provisional, which does not extend term), and the current assignee is Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions Holdings Corp. (assigned from IBM on 2012-09-04). Since AIA trials are forward-looking validity reviews and infringement liability attaches only to pre-expiration conduct, this is not a "hardened patent" story and not a "claims canceled" story — it is a no-longer-assertable patent story. Anyone today claiming otherwise should be asked for the reissue, continuation, or later-family patent they are actually asserting, because it is not '476.

Proceedings against US 6016476

None — no AIA trial proceeding has ever been filed against this patent

• Type: N/A
• Filed: N/A
• Status: No proceeding on file (USPTO ODP AIA-trial feed; corroborated by web search)
• Judge panel: N/A
• Petition grounds: N/A
• Institution decision: N/A
• Final Written Decision: N/A — no claim of '476 has been canceled or sustained in an AIA trial
• Settlement / termination: N/A
• Appeal: N/A — no FWD to appeal
• Defensive value: There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel against any party, and no claim-level PTAB record to leverage. Conversely, there is also no IPR to run: the patent expired on or about 2018-01-16, so an IPR petition today would be academic (the Board can review an expired patent, but there is no injunctive or forward-looking relief to defeat). The real defensive move is a damages/standing argument, not a validity argument.

Caveat on search limits: my searches hit PTAB/Docket Alarm, Justia/Google Patents, and PTACTS full-text, but I could not exhaustively query PTAB E2E's case index or the Federal Circuit docket in this session. If a proceeding existed, it would almost certainly surface in the Docket Alarm PTAB index, which returned nothing for '476 as the challenged patent. Treat "zero" as high-confidence but verify in PTAB E2E before filing anything.

Non-proceedings worth knowing about (the '476 as prior art, not as target)

These are IPRs against other patents in which 6,016,476 was cited as an exhibit/reference. They are not proceedings against '476 and produce no estoppel or claim-level findings on it, but they show the patent's art value.

• IPR2016-01109 — Unified Patents (petitioner) re U.S. Pat. 8,706,627. The '476 patent appears as Exhibit 1004 (Petitioner, 2016-05-27) and again inside Exhibit 1007 (Unified's prior-art search history). This is a defensive-aggregator IPR; the '476 is ammunition, not the target. Example record: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2016-01109/Inter_Partes_Review_of_U.S._Pat._8706627/docs/05-27-2016-Petitioner/Exhibit-1004-Exhibit_1004.pdf
• IPR2022-00251 — Samsung Electronics v. RightQuestion LLC, prosecution-history exhibit listing "6016476" among art searched.
• Foreign parallels are also cited as X-category prior art (e.g., WO 2002/013151 A1 search report; EP 1134705 A3), consistent with the patent's technical significance.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Because no AIA trial was ever instituted, every claim of '476 is "untested" rather than canceled or sustained. There is no surviving-claims list to give you, because no claim was narrowed, amended, or invalidated at the PTAB. The patent issued with claims directed to a portable device comprising a CPU, memory storing financial/personal information and a temporary digital certificate, communication means to a central server, user-interface selection means, a detachable "universal card," and programming means that refuse to write selected information to the card when the digital certificate is invalid — plus the client/server vs. local-mode method claims. None of that has been adjudicated by the Board.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel in existence — no petitioner ever reached an FWD, so no party is barred from raising anything at the PTAB or in district court. That cuts both ways: a defendant has a completely clean slate to file an IPR (subject to § 315(b) timing and § 325(d), and subject to the practical mootness of the expired term), but also has no free kill-shot from a prior PTAB ruling. The more important estoppel-type point for 2026 is temporal: because the patent expired on/about 2018-01-16, a complaint filed now can only reach damages for pre-expiration infringement, and the § 286 six-year lookback from a 2026 filing reaches back only to ~2020 — entirely within the post-expiration period. On those facts, the damages case is empty, regardless of validity.

Pattern signals. (1) No serial petitioner: nobody filed even one IPR against '476, let alone multiple. (2) No PTAB appeals by the owner — there is no Validity/Appeal docket for this patent. (3) No defensive-aggregator challenge to '476 itself, though Unified Patents did use it as art against third-party patents (IPR2016-01109), which suggests the art community regarded it as a reference rather than a threat. (4) Ownership transfer IBM → Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions Holdings Corp. (2012-09-04), landing it in a retail/POS operating company's portfolio rather than a classic NPE's. I could not confirm in this session that TGCS ran an assertion campaign on '476 specifically; TGCS has appeared in POS-related litigation (e.g., Robert Simon v. Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions Holdings Corp.), but I have no verified record of '476 being asserted in a district court or ITC complaint — flag that as unresolved rather than assume it.

Recommended next steps

1. Demand the asserted patent number and the accused acts with dates. If a demand letter cites 6,016,476, the response is short: the patent is expired (anticipated expiration 2018-01-16 per Google Patents — https://patents.google.com/patent/US6016476/en). Any accused conduct on or after expiration is non-infringing; pre-expiration conduct is outside the § 286 damages window for a complaint filed today. Ask the sender to identify the reissue, continuation, or family member they actually meant.
2. If they pivot to a later family member, that patent will not inherit '476's clean PTAB record. Run a fresh PTAB/court check on the new number: there is no estoppel carried over from '476 (there was never a trial), so you can file your own IPR on the new patent free of § 315(e)(2) constraints.
3. Verify the "no proceedings" default yourself in the primary sources before you rely on it in a filing: PTAB E2E (https://ptab.uspto.gov) and USPTO PatentCenter for US 09/008,122 (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov), plus a Federal Circuit docket/CourtListener check (https://www.courtlistener.com) for any appeal of a '476 FWD — none was found here.
4. Confirm expiration mechanics. Check the file wrapper for any patent term adjustment, terminal disclaimer, or later-filed continuation that could change the effective term; Google Patents' "anticipated expiration" is an assumption, not a legal conclusion (as its own disclaimer states). This is the one fact that most changes the defensive analysis, so nail it down from the file history.
5. Escalation flag. If the patent owner asserts '476 with aggressive language (willful infringement, injunction), treat it as a red flag for a mis-identified patent and preserve the demand letter; an expired-patent assertion is a strong candidate for Rule 11 / § 285 exposure.
6. Set a re-check. My web search capacity is incomplete relative to the PTAB E2E index. Re-run the ODP "PTAB proceedings on file" feed and PTAB E2E periodically; if a petition ever appears against a family member, the 6-month institution-decision deadline and the statutory 1-year FWD clock from institution are the milestones to calendar.

What I could not verify (stated rather than guessed): whether TGCS or any predecessor ever asserted '476 in district court or the ITC; whether any ex parte reexamination or reissue was filed on '476 (nothing surfaced, but I did not run a Reexam Control Number search); and any EP opposition outcome for the EP 1004099 counterpart (the EP family exists, but that is EPO, not PTAB, and outside this scope).

I'll research the assignment record for US 6016476 before drafting. Let me pull from multiple sources.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 6016476

Analyst's note on primary-source coverage: I was able to retrieve the patent's full text and the Google Patents legal-events record, but I could not pull live USPTO Assignment Center records in this session, so I have no reel/frame numbers to report. I will not invent them. Everything below is grounded in (a) the Google Patents legal-events list, (b) the assignment/priority events embedded in the patent record, (c) Toshiba Tec / IBM closing press releases, and (d) the French INPI national-register entry for the EP counterpart. Where a reel/frame would normally appear, I have written [reel/frame not retrieved]. Verify against the Assignment Center before relying on this for any filing: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (patent number search) and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html.

Also note: the patent listing you supplied is the family representative. The same chain of title recorded in the US also appears on the European counterpart EP1004099 (see the INPI entry cited below), which is useful corroboration.

Inventors

• Both named inventors show a recorded assignment of interest to IBM, which is direct evidence of IBM employment (or at least an obligation to assign) at filing. No co-owners, no institutional co-assignees, and no third-party (e.g., university) inventor appear.
• Departure pattern: I could not determine when either inventor left IBM, and I found no evidence of the "all inventors gone within 12 months of filing" pattern that often precedes a portfolio fire-sale. Mark this unclear / not determinable rather than inferring.

Original assignee

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Armonk, NY — named on the face of the issued patent (application 09/008,122; filed 1998-01-16; priority to provisional 60/055,418 filed 1997-08-11; issued 2000-01-18).

• Primary line of business: IBM was, and remains, a diversified enterprise IT company (hardware, software, services). The claims here sit closest to IBM's then-Retail Store Solutions (RSS) business (POS terminals, store systems) plus IBM Research's speech/speaker-recognition program — the patent itself cites IBM-internal speech/speaker applications Ser. Nos. 08/871,784, 08/788,471 and 08/873,079.
• Product embodiment: IBM's RSS division was a real, shipping, revenue-generating POS business (the unit that introduced widely deployed POS hardware; Toshiba Tec later described 50 years of joint POS heritage including the magnetic stripe and UPC scanner). Whether these specific claims read on a shipped IBM product is not something I can confirm — treat "ships a product embodying the claims" as unclear for the IBM era.
• Current status of the original assignee: IBM is an operating company, solvent, publicly traded (NYSE: IBM), never in bankruptcy. It divested the relevant business line in 2012 (see below) rather than failing. This is a corporate carve-out, not a fire-sale.

Assignment timeline

Two recorded transfers of title are visible in the legal-events record. Reel/frame values were not retrievable in this session.

• **execution date not retrieved / recorded 1998-05-01 — Reel [reel/frame not retrieved]

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: SEDIVY, JAN and MAES, STEPHANE H. (individual inventors)
  • Assignee: IBM CORPORATION (International Business Machines Corporation)
  • Correspondent: [not retrieved] — note the EP counterpart shows IBM's own IP department (IBM United Kingdom Limited, Intellectual Property Department, MP 110, Hursley Park, Winchester SO21 2JN, GB) as the prosecution agent of record; that is not necessarily the assignment-record correspondent, so do not conflate the two.
  • Context: Initial inventor-to-employer assignment; standard corporate in-house capture of title, not an NPE event.

• 2012-09-04 (recorded; deal announced 2012-04-17, initial closing 2012-08-01) — Reel [reel/frame not retrieved]

  • Conveyance: "PATENT ASSIGNMENT AND RESERVATION" — i.e., an assignment in which the assignor expressly reserves rights (consistent with IBM retaining a 19.9% equity stake, a supplier/business-partner relationship, and license-back arrangements). Not a clean-out sale.
  • Assignor: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION
  • Assignee: TOSHIBA GLOBAL COMMERCE SOLUTIONS HOLDINGS CORPORATION (Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, JP)
  • Correspondent: [not retrieved]
  • Context: Corporate divestiture / carve-out. Toshiba Tec acquired IBM's Retail Store Solutions business for ~US$850M; Toshiba Tec took 80.1% of the new holding company and IBM 19.9%, with IBM's stake to be bought out on the third anniversary; operating subsidiary Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, Inc. (Research Triangle Park, NC) began operations in the US/Canada/Mexico/Australia on 2012-08-01. (Sources: Toshiba Tec/IBM press releases, 2012-04-17 and 2012-08-01.)

• Corroborating non-US record (same chain): French national register (INPI) for EP1004099 — "14/06/2013 – N°0195589 – TO: Inscription d'une transmission totale de propriété (BOPI 2013-29)", i.e., a record of total transfer of ownership from IBM to Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions Holdings Corporation. Same transferee, ~9 months after the US-recorded date. This is a national-register entry, not a USPTO reel/frame.

• Termination: Google Patents records legal status "Expired – Lifetime" with anticipated expiration 2018-01-16 (20 years from the 1998-01-16 filing). The FR/EP counterpart lapsed earlier (national déchéance recorded 2017). No post-2012 transfers, and no post-expiry assertion record, surfaced.

Bottom line for this section: title moved exactly twice — inventors → IBM (1998), IBM → Toshiba GCS Holdings (2012). There are no chains of intermediate LLCs.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6016476
    1997 : Provisional filed by inventors
    1998 : Nonprovisional filed by IBM
         : Inventors assign rights to IBM
    2000 : Patent issued to IBM
    2012 : IBM retail unit sold to Toshiba Tec
         : Assigned to Toshiba GCS Holdings
    2018 : Patent reaches end of term

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. The only transferee is Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions Holdings Corporation, a Tokyo-based holding company that is 80.1% Toshiba Tec / 19.9% IBM and sits above operating subsidiary Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, Inc. (RTP, NC). It is a corporate holding structure for a real POS business, not a licensing-only LLC, and there is no registered-agent-service address or single-member Delaware/Texas LLC in the chain.

2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present. Neither IBM nor Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions Holdings / Toshiba Tec appears on the standard NPE rosters (Acacia, Marathon, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, etc.). IBM is a prolific patent seller/assignor, which is a business-model fact, not an NPE designation. Caveat: I found no litigation asserting US 6016476 against any party, so "operating-company assertion" is not affirmatively evidenced either.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Unclear / not determinable. I could not retrieve the correspondent-of-record for either recording, so I cannot test for a recurring filing attorney or firm. This is the single biggest evidentiary gap in this report; if a future analyst can pull reel/frame, check whether one attorney appears on both the 1998 and 2012 recordings (a repeat correspondent across a 14-year gap would be unusual here and would raise suspicion rather than lower it).

4. Cascading transfers — Not present. One post-issuance transfer (2012), twelve years after issue, with no chained LLCs, no shared correspondent addresses detectable, and no sub-24-month cascade.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present. The 2012 transfer was a business carve-out tied to a public M&A closing, not a suit. No infringement action naming this patent surfaced in my searches, so there is no suit date within 6 months of which to anchor a transfer.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. IBM was highly solvent; there was no Chapter 7/11 and no court-supervised sale (contrast Kodak/Nortel-style transactions). Toshiba Tec paid ~US$850M in a negotiated deal.

7. Privateering — Not present on the evidence available. IBM transferred the RSS business to a direct competitor/partner in the same market (Toshiba Tec) while retaining a minority equity stake and a Premier Business Partner agreement. That resembles a divestiture with retained commercial ties, not an NPE asserting on IBM's behalf. No SEC-filing or Patent Progress/EFF coverage of privateering was found.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — Not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. (Unified Patents appears in search results only as a petitioner citing US 6016476 as prior art in an unrelated IPR — not as an owner.)

Verdict

Operating-company assertion — with the explicit caveat that the assertion prong is unevidenced; the defensible core finding is operating-company ownership, zero NPE signals.

Reasoning: Title entered IBM via an inventor assignment recorded 1998-05-01 and left IBM exactly once, on 2012-09-04, to Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions Holdings Corporation under a conveyance expressly styled "PATENT ASSIGNMENT AND RESERVATION" — a diversion of IBM's Retail Store Solutions business to Toshiba Tec (80.1%/19.9% JV, ~US$850M, press releases 2012-04-17 and 2012-08-01). The transferee is an operating POS vendor, not a licensing shell, and the same transferee appears in the French national register for EP1004099 (14/06/2013, N°0195589). There are no intermediate LLCs, no NPE-list names, no bankruptcies, and no pre-litigation transfer; the patent simply expired 2018-01-16. Reel/frame numbers and assignment correspondents were not retrievable in this session, so signals #3 (repeat correspondent) and the assertion prong are flagged unclear rather than cleared — confirm via the USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (mirror: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html).

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 6,016,476. Let me start with several targeted searches.

The Docket Alarm exhibit gave me the start of the "[56] References Cited" list. Let me retrieve the complete front-page citation list.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 6,016,476 (Maes et al.)

0. What I was able to retrieve, and the key limitation

Patent confirmed, literally: US 6,016,476 A — "Portable information and transaction processing system and method utilizing biometric authorization and digital certificate security," Appl. No. 09/008,122, filed 1998-01-16, issued 2000-01-18, inventors Maes & Sedivy, original assignee IBM. (Not JP 6016476 B2 — the unrelated Canon lens-barrel patent flagged in the earlier section; I have kept them separate.)

Source of the citation list: I could not reach USPTO PatentCenter directly within this session, so I retrieved the granted front page itself via the full-text of the printed patent filed as Exhibit 1004 in PTAB IPR2016-01109 (Unified Patents, re US 8,706,627):
https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2016-01109/Inter_Partes_Review_of_U.S._Pat._8706627/docs/05-27-2016-Petitioner/Exhibit-1004-Exhibit_1004.pdf

Two honesty flags before the list:

1. The [56] References Cited block returned to me is OCR and appears partially truncated — it cuts off mid-title in the second non-patent item ("…Even Eyes are The New Keys to Protecting"). So the list below is substantially complete for the U.S. patent documents, but I cannot certify that no further entries (additional U.S. patents or NPL) follow. Treat the tail as uncertain.
2. I was not able to verify the individual title/subject of each cited reference in this session (step limit reached). I will not fabricate titles. Where I can only infer subject matter from a classification code or an inventor's known field, I say so explicitly.

1. The [56] References Cited list as retrieved (verbatim, as OCR'd)

U.S. Patent Documents

Non-Patent Literature (NPL)

(The trailing "…709/203 / 704/272 / 379/88.02 / 379/93.03" codes on items 1–4 read like U.S. classification codes — 704/272 = speech signal processing; 379/88.02 = telephony/voice-message storage; 379/93.03 = telephony data transmission; 709/xx = inter-computer data transfer. I present them as printed; I cannot confirm their meaning from the record.)

2. Statutory posture — why every entry is § 102(b) art (pre-AIA)

US 6,016,476 was filed 1998-01-16 (priority 1997-08-11 via provisional Ser. No. 60/055,418), so pre-AIA § 102 governs. Applying the one-year bar (filing − 1 year = 1997-01-16):

• Items 1–10 (issued/published 1981 → Feb. 1994) all predate 1997-01-16 by years → each qualifies as § 102(b) prior art. So each is citable against every claim, without regard to the invention date.
• Item 11 is the interesting one: an Information Week item dated 1997-08-18 — seven days after the 1997-08-11 provisional priority date. So it is not § 102(b) art (not >1 yr before filing), and it would only be § 102(a) art measured against the 1998-01-16 actual filing date — not against a claim entitled to the Aug. 11, 1997 provisional date. If the examiner cited it, it functioned as general background, not as a § 102(b) knockout. (Flagging as a factual observation from the retrieved date, not a priority determination — that requires the provisional and the § 112 support analysis.)

Practical consequence for the "anticipation" question: these are the references the examiner considered and allowed over. Since the patent issued, the examiner necessarily concluded that none of them anticipated any claim (nor rendered it obvious). They are, at most, the closest-considered background art — not anticipatory art. That is the honest answer to "which claim does it anticipate": on the face of the record, none.

3. Reference-by-reference: what each is, and what it bears on

Because the issued claim set is not in my authoritative record (the supplied full text is truncated before the claims — see the earlier "Patent summary" section, which flagged this same gap), I cannot give a claim-number-by-claim-number § 102 chart. What I can do reliably is map each reference to the claim elements reproduced in the Summary of the Invention, which mirrors the independent apparatus claim: (i) CPU; (ii) memory storing financial/personal info and a temporary digital certificate; (iii) communication means to a central server; (iv) user interface; (v) a Universal Card detachably coupled; (vi) programming means responsive to the certificate with the negative limitation ("prevented from writing… when the temporary digital certificate is invalid").

Bottom line on anticipation: no cited reference is a candidate to anticipate (i.e., disclose every element of) the independent claim — none of them, on their face, contains the claimed temporary digital certificate from a remote central server gating the write to a detachable Universal Card. That element appears to be the novelty the examiner relied on. The voice/telephony references go to sub-elements that could support § 103 combinations, not § 102 anticipation.

4. Useful cross-check: '476 as prior art against others (not prior art to '476)

Do not confuse the two directions. US 6,016,476 is itself repeatedly cited as an X-reference against later filings, which shows which portions of its disclosure third parties treat as its core:

• WO 02/013151 international search report cites "US 6 016 476 A (Sedivy Jan et al.)… claims 1-3, 6, 8, 9, 13; Figures 1, 3, 5, 6; column 4, line 65 – column 6, line 55; column 10, line 18 – column 13, line 38."
• EP 1134705 A3 (NCR, self-service terminal): [X] US 6016476 A.
• EP 1280112 A1: [XY] US 6016476 A.
• EP 1380019 B1: cited in "Citation (examination)."
• Cited as applicant art in EP 1093097 A2.

These are citations to '476, not prior art for '476, and they are not § 102 art against this patent.

5. What I could not verify (stated plainly rather than guessed)

• Direct USPTO PatentCenter / PAIR query for 09/008,122 — not reachable in this session; the front page was obtained indirectly via a PTAB exhibit.
• Whether the [56] list is complete — it is OCR and truncated at the second NPL entry; additional U.S. or foreign references may exist beneath the cutoff.
• Titles and exact disclosures of items 1–9 — I did not verify any reference's title. Any description I give beyond the class code or the inventor's known field is inference, and I have labeled it as such.
• The issued claim set — required for a defensible § 102 claim chart; it is absent from my authoritative record. Get the granted PDF or PatentCenter DOCX for application 09/008,122 before relying on any claim-level conclusion.

Suggested next queries if you need certainty: USPTO PatentCenter → application 09/008,122 → "References Cited"; and a PatentCenter full-text search on each of the nine U.S. numbers above to pull their titles/abstracts for the description column.

If you can supply the issued claim text (or grant me a retrieval pass on the granted PDF), I will convert the topical mapping in § 3 into a proper element-by-element § 102/§ 103 claim chart against the Hunt/Naik/Watanabe voice references plus the "VoicePrint Security for Credit Cards" TDB item.

I'll ground this § 103 analysis in real prior-art references rather than reasoning in the abstract. Let me verify the key candidate references and their dates.

Good — Pitroda and Hennige are confirmed with dates. Let me verify the biometric-smartcard and short-lived-credential references.

Strong set so far. Let me ground the two remaining claim elements — the temporary/short-lived credential and the server-authenticated portable wallet.

Obviousness Analysis — US 6,016,476 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Scope, sources, and one unavoidable caveat

Which "prior art" I am using. The record supplied for this patent contains a "Prior art keywords" field (user, digital certificate, transaction, information, card) and, more usefully, a set of references the specification itself identifies as prior art or as material incorporated by reference:

The Google Patents rendering supplied is truncated before the "Claims" section (it cuts off mid-sentence at "…a PC having built in the"). The citation/Cited By lists that normally populate the "Prior Art" panel are therefore not in my record. Consistent with the earlier summary, I will not invent claim numbering. Two consequences:

1. I analyse claim 1 as its text is reproduced verbatim in the specification's "Summary of the Invention" (the standard locus where a US grant mirrors its independent apparatus claim). Where I discuss dependent-claim subject matter, I describe it as specification-visible subject matter, not as a verified claim.
2. Because the "Prior Art" panel is absent, I supplement the record's own references with analogous art I verified live this session, with dates. I flag each as verified.

Priority/legal regime. Priority is 1997‑08‑11 (provisional 60/055,418); filed 1998‑01‑16. Pre‑AIA §§ 102/103 govern. Any reference with a publication or filing date before 1997‑08‑11 is available; references published more than one year earlier (i.e., before 1996‑08‑11) are § 102(b) art.

1. Legal framework applied

Under Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), I ask whether the differences between the claim and the prior art would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) at the 1997 priority date, and I must articulate a reason why the references would have been combined. KSR endorses the MPEP § 2143 rationales: (A) known elements combined according to known methods yielding predictable results; (B) simple substitution; (C) use of a known technique to improve a similar device; (D) applying a known technique to a known device ready for improvement; (F) design incentives and market forces. The references here are all in the same field of endeavor (portable payment/identification instruments and their security), so the analogous-art threshold is easily met.

POSITA profile I assume: a software/embedded-systems engineer with ~2–3 years in payment-card or chip-card systems, familiar with ISO 7816 smartcards, magnetic-stripe encoding, public-key cryptography as taught in Schneier, and network authentication as taught in Kerberos.

2. Claim 1, element by element

Claim 1 (as mirrored in the Summary) requires:

3. Prior-art references mapped to the limitations

4. The obviousness combinations

Combination A (primary): Hennige + Lane + Kerberos

What each supplies. Hennige supplies the device: a handheld, detachable multi-card instrument in which the user selects which card-account the physical card should "assume the form of," communicating with a master unit. Lane supplies the security mechanism: a biometric that must match before account information is written onto the card's programmable stripe, with automatic clearing after a predetermined time. Kerberos supplies the temporal credential: a server-issued token that is valid only for a bounded interval and that must be re-obtained.

The one element none of them supplies in isolation is limitation 6's exact coupling: writing gated on a server-issued, expiring credential. That is obtained by the substitution of Kerberos's time-bounded ticket for the mere local secret code/PIN of Hennige and Lane (MPEP § 2143(B)), and by applying Berson '846's server-downloaded, periodically changed key to gate the write (MPEP § 2143(C)).

Articulated motivation.

1. Common problem, common field. All three address unauthorized use of a portable payment/ID instrument. Lane's own background states its goal is that "only a rightful holder uses the card" and that "the same card protects valuable account information." Hennige's purpose is eliminating the burden of carrying many cards — the identical problem the '476 patent recites as its first stated object. Kerberos exists to bound the damage when a credential is compromised or a user is deregistered. Combining them is the combination of known elements to address a known problem (KSR).
2. Berson '846 supplies the express design incentive. It teaches downloading an encryption key from a remote center, changing the key from time to time, and limiting operations until "recharged" by the center. A POSITA reading Berson '846 in 1997 had an explicit reason to make the local, write-enabling authorization server-issued and refreshable, rather than static.
3. Kerberos supplies the express rationale for making it temporary. The Kerberos literature states the lifetime rationale word-for-word: short enough that a de-registered user loses access "for more than a short period." That is precisely the purpose the '476 patent assigns to its expiring certificate ("the user must periodically connect the PDA device 10 with the central server 60 … in order to obtain a valid digital certificate").
4. Predictable result. Nothing in the combination produces an unexpected property: a device that (a) holds many accounts, (b) requires a live biometric, and (c) requires an unexpired server credential to write the card, behaves exactly as each reference predicts.

Combination B (alternative, and arguably stronger for the "wallet" framing): Pitroda '038 (+ '271) + Berson '846 / Lane

What each supplies. Pitroda '038 supplies nearly the entire device claim: the pocket-sized processor with memory holding personal and multi-account financial data, a touchscreen for selecting among accounts, communications means to service institutions via a host, an on-card unique account number, and transaction/receipt storage. Pitroda '271 supplies the biometric gate on that very card (fingerprint, voice print). Lane supplies the conditional write onto a programmable stripe and its timed clearing. Berson '846 supplies the server-issued, refreshable authorization that gates the write.

Motivation. Pitroda and the '476 patent share the same stated problem — eliminating the burden of carrying multiple cards and stopping unauthorized use of a lost card; a POSITA had every reason to harden Pitroda's card with the biometric and credential art already published by Lane and Berson (MPEP § 2143(C): use of a known technique to improve a similar device). The single difference — gating the write on a temporary credential — is a predictable, incremental variation of the security means Pitroda '271 already claimed and of Berson '846's recharge-gated write.

The "why not just fix the claim to the reference" counterpoint

The most defensible reading of the '476 patent's own point of novelty is the negative limitation taken with the transient character of the written data: the card holds nothing valuable at rest; card data is written only for the duration of a fresh credential, so the physical card is inert to a thief. Lane's timed clearing and Berson '846's recharge gate together teach exactly that self-neutralizing behaviour. Once both are in the combination, the "prevented from writing when the certificate is invalid" clause is the structural converse of "writes only while the certificate is valid" — the same limitation viewed from the failure state.

5. Dependent / specification-visible subject matter

6. Rebuttals the patent owner would raise, and how they fare

6.1 "Hindsight — the combination is only visible in the rear-view mirror."
Assessment: moderate concern, but not fatal. Post-KSR, the question is whether the problem and the solution's components were both known. They were: the fraud/burden problem is recited in Lane's and Hennige's own backgrounds, and Lane, Berson '846 and Kerberos each expressly state the rationale. The strongest hindsight concern is that no single reference points to "a certificate that gates a card write" — the combination requires, at minimum, three references. That is a genuine litigation risk but not a validity bar.

6.2 "Teaching away."
Assessment: weak. Pitroda and Hennige keep account data resident on the instrument, whereas '476 writes it transiently. Neither reference disparages writing data on demand; on the contrary Hennige expressly contemplates the card being loaded to "assume the form" of a selected card, and Lane expressly contemplates loading account information into a programmable stripe only upon authentication, then clearing it. No teaching away.

6.3 "Kerberos is non-analogous art (network authentication, not payment cards)."
Assessment: weak, and the patent undercuts it. The analogous-art test (In re Clay/In re Bigio) looks to field of endeavor and the problem to be solved. Both Kerberos and '476 solve the problem of bounding the window of unauthorized credential use. More decisively, the '476 specification itself reaches into the general cryptography literature for its enabling technology (Schneier, 1996), which concedes that the crypto art is the pertinent art.

6.4 Common ownership — a real limitation on which art an examiner could use.
If the IBM applications Ser. Nos. 08/788,471, 08/871,784 and 08/873,079 were relied on as § 102(e) art, pre-AIA § 103(c) would disqualify them, because they were commonly owned by IBM (with a common inventor, Maes) at the time the '476 invention was made. They remain fully available as background for the state of the art and as the patent's own enabling disclosure, but they are poor validity references. This is a point an examiner would have had to get right, and I cannot verify from the truncated record whether it was litigated during prosecution. Note the confirmation number (5840) indicates substantive back-and-forth before allowance.

6.5 The "digital certificate" is not a Kerberos ticket.
Assessment: fair, but survivable. Kerberos tickets are symmetric-key artifacts, while a "digital certificate" is conventionally an asymmetric/X.509-style document with a validity window. The gap is closed by Schneier (cited in the patent) and by Berson '846/Berson '506, which are asymmetric-key systems with server-downloaded keys and validity/limit controls. A POSITA would not treat the symmetric/asymmetric distinction as an inventive barrier.

6.6 Secondary considerations.
I found no evidence of commercial success, industry praise, copying, or failure of others that could be tied by nexus to the claimed subject matter. The 2012 assignment to Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions Holdings was a corporate divestiture of IBM's POS business, not evidence of the invention's merits. Note also that the earlier sections of this analysis found no litigation or PTAB proceeding involving '476; its term expired 2018‑01‑16, so there is no present damages exposure and no court has tested these claims. Its practical role today is as prior art — e.g., WO 02/013151's ISR cited "US 6 016 476 A (SEDIVY JAN ET AL), 18 janvier 2000" as an X-reference against claims 1–3, 6, 8, 9, 13 of another application, and EPO search report EP 1 134 705 A3 likewise. That is an indication that the art regards the '476 disclosure as broad, which cuts against narrowing claim construction but is not itself a § 103 holding.

6.7 Separate (§ 101) note — outside this request but material.
Even where a § 103 case is strong, these claims would also face an Alice step-two challenge (a generic computer implementing a fundamental economic practice with conventional technology). I do not fold that into the § 103 analysis, but any validity opinion should address it. This is the ground on which many comparable claims were actually invalidated post‑2014.

7. Bottom line and confidence

Honest bottom line. On the record's own prior art plus the analogous art I verified, the independent apparatus claim reads on a combination of references that all predate the 1997‑08‑11 priority date, and each combination has a motivation that the references state in their own words (Lane: fraud protection via biometric-gated card writing with timed clearing; Berson '846: server-downloaded, periodically refreshed write authorization with metering; Kerberos: deliberately short credential lifetimes so that de-registered users lose access quickly). The most litigation-resistant feature of claim 1 is the negative limitation tying the write to a server-issued expiring credential — and even that is squarely met by Lane's conditional write plus Kerberos/Berson '846's expiry-as-enforcement. Accordingly, my assessment is that claim 1 would likely be held obvious under § 103, subject to the caveats above.

The single thing that would change this conclusion is the actual issued claim text. If claim 1 as granted recites something narrower than the Summary's language — for example, requiring the credential to be downloaded and stored while the device is off-line, or requiring the negative limitation to hold "notwithstanding that the user may have passed local verification" as a positive claim element — the analysis shifts, because the Pitroda/Hennige devices keep data resident and the "local verification succeeded but write still refused" behaviour is a more specific architectural choice that the references teach only by implication. I recommend pulling the granted PDF or PatentCenter DOCX for application 09/008,122 before relying on this opinion for any purpose, and running a targeted PATENTCENTER/EPO/Global Dossier citation check to see the examiner's actual art of record and any § 103(c) disqualifications that were applied.