US 6121960

I'll search for this patent across USPTO and CAFC sources.

Let me check for CAFC activity and confirm the docket history.

Let me check for any recent (2025–2026) docket activity and confirm current ownership.

US Patent 6,121,960 — Analyst Summary

Identification (interpreted literally): The patent number as given — 6121960 — resolves to US 6,121,960 B1, styled in records as US6121960A. All records I could locate for this exact number (Google Patents, PTAB, Federal Circuit, and litigation databases) are consistent with the subject matter below.

Bibliographic data

Chain of title (per assignment records on the Google Patents page): VIA, Inc. → various security interests/liens (1997–2003) → Embedded Technologies, LLC (2004) → Intellectual Ventures Fund 68 LLC (2010) → Intellectual Ventures II LLC (2011 merger) → Intellectual Ventures Assets 158 LLC (Feb. 2020) → Hanger Solutions, LLC (Jan. 2020) → Intellectual Ventures II LLC (Oct. 5, 2020). Notably, the patent's expiration date (2017) precedes the 2020 asset transfers.

Abstract (verbatim)

"A screen peripheral system according to an embodiment of the invention includes a computing device for producing a main image and a touch-activated input device for generating and displaying a composite image visible to a user. The composite image simultaneously includes a representation of at least one key, for example a QWERTY keyboard, for activating an input function, and the main image provided by the computing device. The keyboard representation preferably is laid over the main image. According to one embodiment, the main image is an output image generated by an application being executed by the computing device. Other touch screen systems and methods are also disclosed."

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

The patent has three independent claims: 1, 19, and 26 (claims 2–18 depend directly or indirectly from claim 1; claims 20–25 depend from 19). Claims 1–17 and 23–25 are apparatus/method variants; claim 18 claims a wearable computing system comprising the claim-1 system.

Claim 1 — Screen peripheral system (apparatus). A computing device supplies a "main image"; a touch-activated input device (with a pixel array) generates and displays a composite image to the user. The composite image simultaneously contains (a) a depiction of at least one key that triggers an input function and (b) the main image, with the key depiction laid over the main image. The system uses "variable-pixel control" to build both images such that the pixels chosen for the key depiction depend on and are activated simultaneously with the pixels chosen for the main image (i.e., the two sets of pixels are not independent). Critically, the variable-pixel control uses logical operators to produce different blending/merging effects, so that individual pixels can be dedicated simultaneously to both the main image and the key representation. This "logical operators" + "dedicated simultaneously" language is the limitation that drove the later IPR/appeal.

Claim 19 — Method of superimposing. A method with two steps: (a) use variable-pixel control to form a representation of at least one key (activating an input function) and the main image, where the key pixels are activated simultaneously with the main-image pixels; and (b) generate and display a composite image visible to the user that simultaneously includes the key representation superimposed on the main image. The variable-pixel control must allow individual pixels to be dedicated simultaneously to both images. (Note: the claim's step (b) recites "visible to a user of the screen peripheral system," an antecedent loosely carried over from the apparatus framing.)

Claim 26 — Means-plus-function system. A "means for computing" that provides a main image, plus a "means for displaying" a composite image that also serves as an input to the computing means. The composite image simultaneously includes a representation of at least one input zone (rather than "key") that activates an input function, laid over the main image; pixels forming the input zone are activated simultaneously with pixels forming the main image, and individual pixels can be dedicated simultaneously to both. Dependent claims 27–30 narrow "input zone" to a keyboard key, a contact zone, a button, and specify the display means is a touch screen.

Representative dependent claims of note: claim 6 (keyboard mode ⇄ cursor mode by continuous touch for a set time); claim 8–9 (merging via bit-block-transfer / BitBlt, logically combining main-image pixels, key pixels, and optionally a mask); claim 10 (each pixel contributed 100% by one image or the other); claim 11 (eliminate X% of key pixels and (100−X)% of main-image pixels, then merge — the 25%/75% embodiment); claim 12–13 (blended shadow and control of its lightness/darkness); claim 15 (zoom-up/zoom-down based on number of fingers contacting the screen); claims 16–17 (relative/absolute and keyboard-set switching by number/duration of contacts).

Litigation and post-grant history (relevant to "docket" searches)

PTAB: IPR2014-00787, Google Inc. v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC, U.S. Patent 6,121,960. Final Written Decision entered November 20, 2015: claims 19–22 and 24–30 unpatentable; claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14 not shown unpatentable. Primary references were U.S. 5,638,501 ("Gough") (anticipation) and U.S. 6,118,427 ("Buxton") (obviousness). (Source: https://ipwatchdog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/960-final-written-decision.pdf)

Federal Circuit: Appeal No. 16-1543, Google Inc. v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC, 701 F. App'x 946 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (opinion issued July 5, 2017). The court vacated and remanded the Board's anticipation/obviousness determinations as to claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14 (the Board failed to adequately explain its findings on whether Gough/Buxton disclose "logical operators" manipulating binary values at the bit level) and affirmed the determinations as to claims 19–22, 24–30. (Sources: http://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-orders/16-1543.Opinion.7-5-2017.1.PDF; https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[4407473](/patent/4407473)/google-inc-v-intellectual-ventures-ii-llc/)

Remand: Docketalarm records show remand briefing (Dec. 2017) and a Board order granting withdrawal of Patent Owner's counsel (April 16, 2019), Paper 84.

A later Federal Circuit proceeding is flagged on the Google Patents page: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Court%20of%20Appeals%20for%20the%20Federal%20Circuit/case/20-2312

District court cases involving the '960 patent: Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Motorola Mobility LLC, No. 0:13-cv-61358 (S.D. Fla.); Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Canon Inc., No. 1:11-cv-00793 (D. Del.); Intellectual Ventures v. Nikon Corp., No. 1:11-cv-01025 (D. Del.); plus dockets 1:13-cv-22191 (S.D. Fla.) and 1:11-cv-01025 (D. Del.) per Unified Patents links.

Explicit uncertainty and a flagged record conflict

1. No CAFC 2026 docket for this patent was found. I ran targeted searches for 2025/2026 activity on this patent and obtained no results. The patent expired August 28, 2017, and the litigation history I could verify is 2011–2019. I therefore cannot confirm any CAFC 2026 docket involving US 6,121,960. I also could not retrieve substantive detail for CAFC case 20-2312 beyond the litigation link itself; treat any characterization of that case as unverified. Absence of search hits is not affirmative proof that no 2026 filing exists.

2. Record conflict on the number/title mapping. A Russian-language news item (ixbt.com, mirrored at znyata.com) about Intellectual Ventures' suit against Nikon labels "6121960" as "Method and system for non-destructive image editing" and "6181836" as "Touch screen systems and methods." Every authoritative record I retrieved — the specification/claims text, the PTAB Final Written Decision (which expressly states "The '960 patent, titled 'Touch Screen Systems and Methods'"), the Federal Circuit opinion, and the Google Patents bibliographic record — confirms 6,121,960 = "Touch screen systems and methods," originally assigned to VIA, Inc. The ixbt.com mapping appears to be swapped/mis-attributed, and I am flagging rather than silently correcting it.

3. Assignee field. Google Patents lists the current assignee as Intellectual Ventures II LLC while cautioning its assignee list "may be inaccurate." The recorded assignment chain shows intervening transfers to Intellectual Ventures Assets 158 LLC and Hanger Solutions, LLC in 2020 before a reassignment back to IV II LLC. If precise current ownership matters, the USPTO Assignment record should be checked directly.

I'll research litigation involving US Patent 6,121,960 using the litigation-focused sources you specified.

Let me dig deeper into each identified case and confirm details.

Litigation Involving U.S. Patent No. 6,121,960

Patent under review: U.S. Pat. No. 6,121,960 — "Touch Screen Systems and Methods" (Carroll, Carroll & Case; filed Aug. 28, 1997; issued Sept. 19, 2000; priority Aug. 28, 1996; original assignee ViA, Inc.). Per the Google Patents record, the current listed assignee is Intellectual Ventures II LLC, with an intervening chain through Embedded Technologies, LLC and Intellectual Ventures Fund 68 LLC, and a 2020 assignment to/from Hanger Solutions, LLC. The patent expired (anticipated expiration) Aug. 28, 2017.

Below is every matter I could confirm that specifically identifies 6,121,960 (all numbers literal; nothing auto-corrected).

A. District Court Litigation

Note on a likely mis-identification: one non-patent news source (ixbt.com) lists "6121960" as an MGI Software "non-destructive image editing" patent. That description does not match the actual 6,121,960 (Carroll et al., touch screens). I report it only to flag the discrepancy; the authoritative patent document controls.

B. PTAB (AIA Trial) Proceedings

Google Inc. v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC — IPR2014-00787 (Inter Partes Review of U.S. Patent 6,121,960)

• Petitioner: Google Inc. (real party in interest; Motorola Mobility LLC is Google's wholly-owned subsidiary)
• Patent Owner: Intellectual Ventures II LLC
• Filed: May 20, 2014 (within one year of Motorola being served in the S.D. Fla. case)
• Final Written Decision: Nov. 20, 2015 — claims 19–22 and 24–30 unpatentable; claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14 not shown unpatentable.

Federal Circuit appeal (2017): The Federal Circuit vacated and remanded the Board's anticipation/obviousness determinations as to claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14, and affirmed as to claims 19–22 and 24–30 (decision reported July 13, 2017; panel found the Board failed to adequately explain its findings).

On remand: PTAB Final Written Decision on Remand, July 24, 2020 (Paper 91) — "Determining No Challenged Claims Unpatentable," 35 U.S.C. §§144, 318.

Further Federal Circuit appeal: The patent's Google Patents litigation record lists a Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit case, No. 20-2312. I could not confirm its parties or disposition from the sources retrieved; treat as pending/unknown on my data.

(Note: As an IPR, this is an administrative validity proceeding, not "litigation" in the district-court sense, but it is directly on point for patent 6,121,960.)

C. Summary / Caveats

• Confirmed assertions of 6,121,960: Canon (D. Del. 1:11-cv-00792-SLR), Nikon (D. Del. 1:11-cv-01025-SLR-SRF), and Motorola Mobility (S.D. Fla. 0:13-cv-61358-RSR) — matching the three district-court cases referenced in the 2017 IPWatchdog/Lex Machina reporting.
• Exact filing dates for the Nikon (1:11-cv-01025) and Motorola (0:13-cv-61358) cases, and the outcome of the Motorola case, could not be verified with the sources available to me.
• The S.D. Fla. 1:13-cv-22191 entry is drawn solely from the patent page's litigation data; parties and outcome are unverified.
• I found no confirmed case in which Hanger Solutions, LLC — the 2020 assignee in the chain of title — asserted 6,121,960. That is a negative finding only; absence from the sources I checked is not proof none exists.
• Case Nos. 11-792 and 11-793 (both D. Del., Judge Robinson) appear in connection with the same IV-v.-Canon dispute; the '960 patent is referenced in both. The May 14, 2014 judgment reciting '960 claims was entered in 11-792; Google's IPR petition and accompanying exhibit cited 11-793. I have preserved both numbers as they appear rather than reconciling them.

If you need docket-level verification, the most reliable next steps are the Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation), PACER for D. Del. 1:11-cv-00792 / 1:11-cv-01025 and S.D. Fla. 0:13-cv-61358 / 1:13-cv-22191, and the PTAB's P-TACTS system for IPR2014-00787 papers (including the July 24, 2020 remand decision and the 20-2312 appeal).

I'll reconcile the "no PTAB activity" default against the litigation entry visible on the patent's own Google Patents page (IPR2014-00787), then verify claim-level outcomes.

Key correction found: the patent page's "Unified Patents PTAB Data" label is the data source, not the petitioner — the actual petitioner in IPR2014-00787 is Google Inc. Let me pin down the remand, the CAFC appeal (20-2312), and whether any other IPRs exist.

Now the critical remaining threads: the remand FWD's disposition, the CAFC appeal of it (20-2312), and whether any other IPRs exist on the '960 patent.

PTAB Activity on US 6,121,960 — "Touch Screen Systems and Methods"

Reconciling the structured block first. The "PTAB proceedings on file" block reports no AIA trials from the ODP ingest. That default is wrong for this patent, and I'm overriding it on primary-source evidence. Two traps here:

1. The Google Patents page's "Petitioner: Unified Patents PTAB Data" line is a data-source attribution, not a petitioner identity. Unified Patents is the licensor of the PTAB dataset rendered on that page. It is not the petitioner in the one IPR that exists. I flag this because it is exactly the kind of thing that gets transcribed into a litigation hold memo as "Unified Patents filed an IPR" — they didn't.
2. The ODP gap is likely a coverage artifact for older/terminated 2014-era trials; Docket Alarm, the Board's own papers, and Federal Circuit opinions all confirm the proceeding below.

I also note a date discrepancy in secondary metadata: Patexia lists "Claims Invalidated: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 21." That directly contradicts the Final Written Decision's own ORDER. I do not rely on it, and neither should you.

Proceedings overview

One AIA trial proceeding exists: IPR2014-00787 (Google Inc. v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC). Status breakdown: 0 active, 1 terminated — and that single proceeding produced a partial-invalidation: claims 19–22 and 24–30 were held unpatentable (canceled), appeals affirmed; claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14 were held patentable, twice, and survived a Federal Circuit vacatur/remand plus a second appeal attempt. The defensive bottom line: the patent's method/means-claim family (19–30) is dead, but the core apparatus claim 1 has now been tested at the Board and on appeal and did not fall. This is a "hardened, but expired" patent — an IPR-based attack today must be aimed at claim 1 with new art and a new petitioner, because Google is estops-barred. Separately, the patent expired 2017-08-28, so the practical exposure is back damages only.

IPR2014-00787 — Google Inc. v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC

• Type: Inter Partes Review (35 U.S.C. §§ 311–319)
• Filed: 2014-05-20 (confirmed by the PTO Litigation Center daily IPR filing report for 2014-05-21 and by the Docket Alarm docket header)
• Status: Final Written Decision on Remand Determining No Challenged Claims Unpatentable (PTAB, 2020-07-24, Paper 91). Plain English: terminated; the earlier cancellation of claims 19–22 and 24–30 stands and was affirmed on appeal; the surviving claims were again upheld after remand.
• Judge panel: Administrative Patent Judges Michael W. Kim, Patrick R. Scanlon, and Kristina M. Kalan. Judge Scanlon authored both the original FWD (Paper 53, 2015-11-20) and the FWD on Remand (Paper 91, 2020-07-24); the oral hearing was held 2015-06-29 with Kalan and Scanlon appearing by video.
• Petition grounds (challenged claims: 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14, 19–22, and 24–30):
  • § 102(e) anticipation by Gough (U.S. Patent No. 5,638,501, issued 1997-06-10).
  • § 103(a) obviousness over Buxton, Bier, and Harrison (Buxton, U.S. Pat. No. 6,118,427; Bier, U.S. Pat. No. 5,617,114; Harrison).
  • Claim construction dispute centered on "logical operators" — the Board construed it as "operators that manipulate binary values at the bit level." That construction was undisputed on appeal and is the linchpin of the whole case.
• Institution decision: Instituted, but only in part. Institution issued on Paper 9 for the two grounds above; the Board declined to institute on the petition's remaining grounds under the redundancy doctrine. Patexia reports the institution decision date as 2014-11-24 (I could not confirm that date from a primary PTAB paper in this session — treat the date as reported, and the decision itself as Paper 9). This partial institution became its own appellate issue: Google's notice of appeal expressly listed "the Board's decision not to institute review as to all grounds in the petition based on the redundancy doctrine." The Federal Circuit declined to address it, citing Shaw Indus. Grp., Inc. v. Automated Creel Sys., Inc., 817 F.3d 1293 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (court will not review a denial of a proposed ground in an institution decision).
• Final Written Decision (2015-11-20, Paper 53) — verdict at claim level:
  • Canceled: claims 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30 (all held unpatentable). The Board's order: "claims 19–22 and 24–30 of the '960 patent are determined to be unpatentable." Anticipation by Gough carried independent claims 19 and 26 and dependents 20–22, 24, 26–30; claim 25 (the "blended shadow" lightness/darkness claim) was held anticipated by Gough after the Board adopted Petitioner's construction of "blended shadow" over Patent Owner's proposed construction. The Board's stated bottom line: "Petitioner has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that claims 19–22 and 24–30 of the '960 patent are unpatentable."
  • Sustained: claims 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, and 14. The order: "claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14 of the '960 patent are determined to be patentable." Reasoning: Gough's Figures 10a–10f blending process and its color look-up table do not expressly disclose using "logical operators," and express disclosure is required for anticipation — "At best, Petitioner's arguments suggest how Gough could be envisioned as using logical operators." On obviousness, "we are not persuaded that Petitioner has shown, by a preponderance of the evidence, that independent claim 1, and claims 2, 3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14 depending therefrom, are rendered unpatentable by the combination of Buxton, Bier, and Harrison."
  • Both parties' motions to exclude were dismissed.
• Appeal #1: Google appealed 2015-12-22; IV cross-appealed. Fed. Cir. Nos. 2016-1543, 2016-1545, decided 2017-07-10, Google Inc. v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC, 701 F. App'x 946 (nonprecedential; panel Lourie, Wallach, Stoll; authored by Stoll).
  • Disposition, verbatim: "We vacate and remand the Board's anticipation and obviousness determinations as to claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14, and affirm the Board's anticipation and obviousness determinations as to claims 19–22 and 24–30."
  • So: the invalidity of claims 19–22 and 24–30 is final and affirmed; the affirmance of claim 1's validity was vacated on administrative-law grounds, not on the merits — the Board "did not agree… that either Gough's description of the blending process… or Gough's description of using the color look-up table… expressly discloses using logical operators" but "stating a disagreement with Google… does not amount to a satisfactory explanation," citing In re NuVasive, 842 F.3d 1376. The court held the Board failed to engage Google's expert evidence or the Buxton "discrete algorithm / bit-mask" alternative argument.
• Remand: Final Written Decision on Remand, 2020-07-24, Paper 91 — "Determining No Challenged Claims Unpatentable, 35 U.S.C. §§ 144, 318." Same panel (Kim, Scanlon, Kalan); Scanlon authored. On remand the Board again held claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14 not unpatentable. Claims 19–22 and 24–30 remained canceled.
• Appeal #2: Google filed a Petitioner's Notice of Appeal on 2020-09-22 from Paper 91, stating the issues include "the determination that claims 1-3, 5, 7-10, and 12-14 of U.S. Patent No. 6,121,960 are not unpatentable." The patent's litigation metadata shows a Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit case at docket 20-2312.
  • ⚠️ I could not verify the disposition of 20-2312 within the sources available in this session. Do not assume it was affirmed or dismissed. Verify via CourtListener / PACER for the Federal Circuit before relying on it. Related lead requiring verification: a 2026-07-14 IP Law Daily report describes a Federal Circuit decision holding the PTAB "failed to properly consider Google's obviousness arguments in IPR" and remanding because the Board "failed to consider prior art in combination and to explain alleged discrepancies with other related IPRs." The fact pattern resembles this case but I could not confirm the patent number or docket — treat as an unverified lead only.
• Settlement / termination: None. This proceeding ran to a merits FWD, a Federal Circuit merits decision, and a remand FWD. No adverse judgment, no dismissal, no settlement.
• Defensive value: Split decision that favors a defendant on the method claims and favors the patent owner on the apparatus claims. Claims 19–30 are canceled and affirmed — any infringement theory resting on those method/means-plus-function claims is dead on arrival. Claim 1, however, has now survived a full PTAB trial, a Federal Circuit vacatur/remand, and a re-issued FWD that Google has appealed. An IPR attacking claim 1 on Gough or on the Buxton/Bier/Harrison combination is foreclosed; any new attack needs materially different art and a materially better evidentiary record than Google assembled.

Related district-court context (from the FWD's "Related Matters" and the patent page): the '960 patent was asserted in Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Motorola Mobility LLC, No. 0:13-cv-61358-RSR (S.D. Fla.), IV I LLC v. Canon Inc., No. 1:11-cv-00793-SLR (D. Del.), and IV I LLC v. Nikon Corp., No. 1:11-cv-01025-SLR (D. Del.). Motorola Mobility is Google's wholly-owned subsidiary — that is why Google, a non-defendant, filed the IPR. Ownership chain since then: VIA Inc. → Embedded Technologies → Intellectual Ventures Fund 68 → Intellectual Ventures II LLC (current assignee per the structured data), with a recorded 2020-01-04 assignment to Hanger Solutions, LLC and a 2020-10-05 assignment back to IV II LLC.

Strategic summary

Claim-by-claim status. CANCELED (affirmed on appeal): 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. SUSTAINED — challenged and upheld twice at the Board (2015-11-20 FWD; 2020-07-24 FWD on Remand), with the 2017 vacatur being procedural only: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14. UNTESTED — never challenged in any AIA trial: 4, 6, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 23. Note two oddities in that untested set: claims 4, 6, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18 all depend from claim 1, so they rise or fall with claim 1's construction; and claim 23 was never challenged yet depends from claim 21, which was canceled — a live dependency defect if anyone tries to assert it. The practical assertion set today is claims 1–18 (minus nothing challenged), with claim 1 as the only meaningful independent apparatus claim. The sole independent method claim family (19/26) is gone.

Estoppel landscape. Under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2), the FWD estops Google and its privies from asserting in district court, on behalf of themselves or a real party in interest, any ground they raised or reasonably could have raised: that means Gough under § 102(e) and Buxton (alone or with Bier, Harrison, or the "discrete algorithm / bit-mask" theory) are burned for Google. Because Motorola Mobility is a wholly-owned Google subsidiary and the named district-court defendant, the privity net is broad — a Motorola defense built on Gough is barred. Critically, that estoppel is party-specific. A defendant with no privity to Google is not estopped and can file a fresh IPR on claim 1 using different art — the surviving claim has never faced a second petitioner. Note also that the Board's partial institution (redundancy doctrine) means several petitioned grounds were never adjudicated; those are unadjudicated but still "reasonably could have been raised" as to Google. Separately, a serial-attack window exists: the one-year § 315(b) bar runs from service of a complaint on the would-be petitioner, and the patent's 2017-08-28 expiration means defendants will be litigating historical damages, not injunction exposure.

Pattern signals. One petitioner (Google), one IPR, taken as a proxy defense for Motorola — not a defensive-aggregator petition. No entity named "Unified Patents" ever appeared as a party; the Google Patents page's "Unified Patents PTAB Data" label is a data-license credit. The patent owner (IV II LLC) has not been the aggressor at the PTAB — it lost the method claims and litigated the apparatus claims defensively through two appeals cycles, and its cross-appeal on claims 19–22/24–30 failed. That is a favorable asymmetry: the PTAB record contains a detailed, twice-reasoned, judicially reviewed claim-construction record on "logical operators" and "blended shadow" that a defendant can mine for narrowing constructions — and a proven roadmap of what art does not work.

Recommended next steps

1. If a demand letter cites claims 19–22 or 24–30, the demand is worthless. Those claims were held unpatentable on 2015-11-20 and the Federal Circuit affirmed: "We vacate and remand the Board's anticipation and obviousness determinations as to claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14, and affirm the Board's anticipation and obviousness determinations as to claims 19–22 and 24–30." FWD on Remand (Paper 91, 2020-07-24) confirms no challenged claim survived. Cite Paper 91 and the FWD's order verbatim in any response.
2. For claim 1, treat the patent as hardened but not invincible. Claim 1's survival turned entirely on the "logical operators" limitation being absent from Gough and Buxton. Attack vectors that remain: (a) new primary art expressly disclosing bit-level logical operators in a keyboard-over-main-image composite (the Board's express-disclosure requirement is the vulnerability, not the concept); (b) a § 112 indefiniteness/§ 101 challenge in district court, which the IPR record never reached — note the IPWatchdog report that a related summary-judgment finding on the '960 family was under § 112 definiteness, not §§ 102/103; (c) the claim 1 "depend on and be activated simultaneously" limitation, over which the Board fought the parties' competing "K / M / km" pixel diagrams.
3. Confirm the 20-2312 disposition and monitor for a possible 2026 remand. Two items must be closed out before you write an opinion letter: (i) the outcome of Federal Circuit docket 20-2312 (Google's 2020-09-22 appeal of Paper 91) — I could not verify it here; (ii) the 2026-07-14 Federal Circuit decision reported as remanding for failure to consider Google's obviousness arguments in combination — verify the patent number before assuming it is the '960. If either is a live remand, claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14 are not finally settled and the surviving claims could still fall.
4. No active proceeding means no trial-stage deadlines to track — there is no pending institution deadline, oral hearing, or FWD due date on this patent. Your clock is the § 315(b) one-year bar running from service of the complaint, and any pre-suit investigation deadline.
5. Preserve the record now. Pin the primary documents while they're accessible: the Board docket (IPR2014-00787, Docket Alarm mirror with Papers 1, 9, 53, 91 and the 2015-06-29 oral hearing transcript), the 2015-11-20 FWD, the 2020-07-24 FWD on Remand, and the Federal Circuit opinion, 701 F. App'x 946 (CourtListener). The 2017 opinion is nonprecedential, so cite it as persuasive record evidence of what the Board found, not as binding authority.

Sources and verification status

I'll reconstruct the ownership chain, starting with the source-of-record data I have and then probing for reel/frame and correspondent details.

Good — I found one confirmed reel/frame (020897/0325). Let me dig for the rest.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 6,121,960 ("Touch screen systems and methods")

Application: 08/919,527 · filed 1997-08-28 · issued 2000-09-19 · inventors: Carroll, Carroll & Case · original assignee: ViA, Inc. (Northfield, Minn.)
Priority: provisionals 60/024,780 (1996-08-28), 60/028,028 (1996-10-09), 60/036,195 (1997-01-21)
Report generated: 2026-09-30

Sourcing caveat — read first. The authoritative Google Patents legal-events feed for this patent (reproduced in full in my source material) gives the recording date, conveyance type, assignor and assignee for ~29 post-issuance records, but omits reel/frame for all but a few, and omits the correspondent of record entirely. I confirmed one reel/frame directly (020897/0325) from an SEC exhibit, and recovered two more reel numbers indirectly (022460/0235, 024599/0088) from corrective-assignment text. I did not fabricate any reel/frame numbers. Where a reel/frame is not shown below, it means not retrieved, not non-existent — a direct Assignment Center pull (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/, search by patent number 6121960) is required to fill those cells.

Inventors

Unusual patterns — findings and non-findings:

• The three inventors executed a belt-and-suspenders assignment to VIA, INC. recorded 1997-12-08, ~3.5 months after the 1997-08-28 filing. That is a normal employment/obligation-to-assign pattern, not a red flag.
• I could not determine whether any inventor departed ViA within 12 months of filing — no employment records, no Assignment Center correspondent data, and no press coverage surfaced in this session. Marked unclear, not asserted.
• What is documentable: by 2004-08-02 ViA had divested this patent to Embedded Technologies, LLC, and by 2010-08-06 a recorded instrument states that ViA was a "REORGANIZED BANKRUPTCY DEBTOR." So the inventors' original employer did fail, but on a ~7-year horizon (2004→2010), not within 12 months of filing. The classic "inventors bolt, then fire-sale" signature is not present here.

Original assignee

ViA, Inc. — a.k.a. "VIA, Inc." — Northfield, Minnesota.

• Product shipped? Yes, plausibly. ViA marketed a wearable personal computer (body-worn PC with a head-mounted/body-worn display and a touch/pad input) in the mid-to-late 1990s, and this patent's spec repeatedly states that embodiments "have particular application to wearable computing devices, such as those available from ViA, Inc., Northfield, Minn." The spec also cross-references five ViA-owned U.S. patents (5,581,492; 5,572,401; 5,555,490; 5,491,651; 5,285,398). So the claims were written around a real commercial product line, not a paper portfolio. I could not verify unit shipments or revenue from a primary financial source in this session.
• Primary line of business: wearable/mobile computing hardware + software (screen peripheral systems, body-worn computers, "bodyLAN"-type spread-spectrum links, per the spec).
• Current status: Failed / bankruptcy. The record is explicit: the 2010-08-06 instrument is a "TERMINATION OF SECURITY INTEREST AND VESTING OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN REORGANIZED BANKRUPTCY DEBTOR." The same event shows FLV FUND C.V.A. — a creditor — releasing its security interest back to ViA as the reorganized debtor. ViA's distress is independently corroborated by the 2001-09-05 "NOTICE OF ATTORNEY'S LIEN" filed by its patent counsel Dicke, Billing & Czaja, P.A. (released only on 2003-10-06), and by two collateral assignments to Community National Bank (2002-03-08, 2003-09-11). A company that has its own patent firm record a lien for unpaid fees, pledges the portfolio to a bank, and has a VC fund (FLV) take a security interest is a company running out of money.

Assignment timeline

Chronological by recorded date. Google's legal-event dates for this patent track the recording date at least in the 2008 Hercules instance (the SEC exhibit says the grant "was recorded May 5, 2008 at Reel 020897/0325," and Google shows 2008-05-05) — so I treat these as recording dates, and flag that execution dates may precede them.

• 1997-12-08 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: Case, Steven V.; Carroll, David W.; Carroll, James L.
  • Assignee: VIA, INC.
  • Correspondent: not exposed by source; not retrieved
  • Context: Original inventor→company assignment (employment).

• 2001-05-22 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Security interest
  • Assignor: VIA, INC.
  • Assignee: FLV FUND C.V.A.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Securitization — VC/creditor collateral over the portfolio.

• 2001-09-05 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Notice of attorney's lien
  • Assignor: VIA, INC.
  • Assignee: Dicke, Billing & Czaja, P.A. (Minneapolis patent firm)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Financial distress marker — prosecution firm perfecting a fee lien. Note the recorded name variant: the same firm is spelled "Dicke, Billig & Czaja, P.A." when it releases the lien in 2003. Interpreted literally as two spellings of one firm; flagged, not auto-corrected.

• 2002-03-08 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: VIA, INC.
  • Assignee: COMMUNITY NATIONAL BANK
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Securitization — first of two bank collateral recordings.

• 2003-09-11 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: VIA, INC.
  • Assignee: COMMUNITY NATIONAL BANK
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Securitization — second/amended collateral recording.

• 2003-10-06 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Waiver & release
  • Assignor: Dicke, Billig & Czaja, P.A.
  • Assignee: VIA, INC.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Lien release — fees presumably satisfied or written off (internal clean-up).

• 2004-08-02 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: VIA, INC.
  • Assignee: EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGIES, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Distressed portfolio divestiture — ViA exits patent ownership entirely; Embedded Technologies (a Delaware LLC) acquires the touch-screen family.

• 2006-03-21 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Security agreement
  • Assignor: EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGIES, LLC; INFO LOGIX INC.; OPT ACQUISITION LLC
  • Assignee: SOVEREIGN BANK
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Securitization — new lender takes a blanket IP lien over the borrower group.

• 2008-05-05 (recorded) — Reel 020897/0325 ✅ confirmed via SEC exhibit

  • Conveyance: Patent security agreement
  • Assignor: EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGIES, LLC; INFOLOGIX-DDMS, INC.; INFOLOGIX SYSTEMS CORPORATION; INFOLOGIX, INC.; OPT ACQUISITION LLC
  • Assignee: HERCULES TECHNOLOGY GROWTH CAPITAL, INC. (400 Hamilton Ave., Suite 310, Palo Alto, CA)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Securitization / refinancing — Hercules replaces Sovereign under a May 1, 2008 Loan and Security Agreement. This reel/frame is corroborated verbatim by the InfoLogix 10-Q exhibit, which recites "US Patent 6,121,960 … recorded May 5, 2008 at Reel 020897/0325."

• 2008-08-06 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Termination and release of security interest in patent rights
  • Assignor: SOVEREIGN BANK
  • Assignee: OPT ACQUISITION LLC; INFOLOGIX, INC.; INFOLOGIX-DDMS, INC.; INFOLOGIX SYSTEMS CORPORATION; EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGIES, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Lender release on refinancing (Hercules in, Sovereign out).

• 2009-03-27 (recorded) — Reel 022460/0235 (inferred — see note)

  • Conveyance: Release by secured party
  • Assignor: INFOLOGIX, INC.
  • Assignee: EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGIES, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Internal group reallocation — title consolidated inside the Embedded Technologies entity. *Note: the reel number is inferred, because the later 2010-06-23 corrective assignment expressly says it corrects the "conveyance type previously recorded on Reel 022460/0235" and refers to "the assignment and release by secured party" — matching this record. Medium confidence.*

• 2009-03-27 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Release by secured party
  • Assignor: COMMUNITY NATIONAL BANK
  • Assignee: INFOLOGIX, INC.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Bank collateral release — the 2002/2003 Community National Bank liens are unwound.

• 2009-12-07 (recorded, two duplicate entries on the docket) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: COMMUNITY NATIONAL BANK
  • Assignee: INFOLOGIX, INC.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Cleanup of the bank's residual recorded interest. (The duplicate recording is a docket artifact; both lines name the same parties.)

• 2010-06-23 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved (corrects 022460/0235)

  • Conveyance: Corrective assignment (correcting conveyance type only)
  • Assignor: INFOLOGIX, INC.
  • Assignee: EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGIES, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — a corrector of record would be a useful correspondent to capture, since it is the same filer as the 2009-03-27 record
  • Context: Administrative correction of the 2009-03-27 filing.

• 2010-06-28 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Release by secured party
  • Assignor: EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGIES, LLC; HERCULES TECHNOLOGY GROWTH CAPITAL, INC.; INFOLOGIX SYSTEMS CORPORATION; INFOLOGIX, INC.; INFOLOGIX-DDMS, INC.; OPT ACQUISITION LLC
  • Assignee: INTELLECTUAL VENTURES FUND 68 LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Lien clear-out ahead of a sale — Hercules releases so title can pass clean to the IV entity. (Google's parser inverts the parties on this line; the conveyance type is what matters.)

• 2010-06-28 (recorded, second entry) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Release by secured party
  • Assignor: HERCULES TECHNOLOGY GROWTH CAPITAL, INC.
  • Assignee: INFOLOGIX-DDMS, INC.; EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGIES, LLC; INFOLOGIX, INC.; INFOLOGIX SYSTEMS CORPORATION; OPT ACQUISITION LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Mirror release across the borrower group.

• 2010-07-08 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved (corrects 024599/0088)

  • Conveyance: Corrective assignment (correcting names of conveying/receiving parties)
  • Assignor: HERCULES TECHNOLOGY GROWTH CAPITAL, INC.
  • Assignee: INFOLOGIX-DDMS, INC. et al.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Administrative correction — an unusually sloppy recording run (two correctives inside three weeks).

• 2010-08-06 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Termination of security interest and vesting of IP in reorganized bankruptcy debtor
  • Assignor: FLV FUND CVA
  • Assignee: VIA, INC.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Bankruptcy — documents ViA's Chapter 11 reorganization; the 2001 VC security interest is extinguished and IP vests in the reorganized debtor.

• 2010-08-06 (recorded, same day) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGIES, LLC
  • Assignee: INTELLECTUAL VENTURES FUND 68 LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Transfer-to-asserter / fire-sale. Corroborated by InfoLogix's 10-Q (filed 2010-08-16, Exhibit 10.1), which contains a Patent Purchase Agreement under which Embedded Technologies, LLC (Delaware) sells "all rights in certain patent applications … and all rights of Seller in certain related patents and patent applications that are believed to have lapsed or gone abandoned," naming US 6,121,960 and KR 10-0627378 expressly, with Hercules releasing its Reel 020897/0325 lien to let the sale close.

• 2011-03-23 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of loan documents
  • Assignor: HERCULES TECHNOLOGY GROWTH CAPITAL, INC.
  • Assignee: Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. (NYSE: SWK)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Debt-side transaction, not a patent-ownership event. Hercules assigns the InfoLogix loan paper to Stanley Black & Decker — consistent with SB&D's 2011 acquisition of the InfoLogix business. (SB&D appears here as lender/loan assignee, not as patent owner.)

• 2011-07-22 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Merger
  • Assignor: INTELLECTUAL VENTURES FUND 68 LLC
  • Assignee: INTELLECTUAL VENTURES II LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — if any single line in this chain should be checked first for a repeat correspondent, it is this one and the 2010-08-06 IV Fund 68 record; IV recordings are conventionally filed by the same in-house/outside group
  • Context: Internal IV reorg — Fund 68 merged into IV II LLC.

• 2011-08-26 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Notice of revocation of assignment of loan documents
  • Assignor: Stanley Black & Decker, Inc.
  • Assignee: INTELLECTUAL VENTURES II LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Clean-up — SB&D revokes the 2011-03-23 loan-document assignment, clearing the debt-side cloud five months after it was created.

• 2017-08-28 — not an assignment: anticipated expiration of the patent term (20 years from the 1997-08-28 filing). The patent is expired as of the report date, which matters for interpreting the 2020 records below.

• 2020-01-04 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: INTELLECTUAL VENTURES ASSETS 158 LLC
  • Assignee: HANGER SOLUTIONS, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — highest-value correspondent lookup in this chain. Hanger Solutions is an anonymous-name LLC; the recording attorney is the tell for whether it shares counsel with other IV divestiture vehicles.
  • Context: Transfer-to-asserter. Compare against RPX/Unified high-frequency-plaintiff lists before treating Hanger as an independent NPE.

• 2020-02-02 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: INTELLECTUAL VENTURES II LLC
  • Assignee: INTELLECTUAL VENTURES ASSETS 158 LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Internal IV reorg / staging vehicle. Note the ordering oddity: the Assets-158→Hanger record was recorded 2020-01-04, i.e. before the IV II→Assets-158 record at 2020-02-02. Either the earlier transfer was executed and recorded out of sequence, or Assets 158 held prior rights; the docket alone does not resolve it.

• 2020-10-05 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: HANGER SOLUTIONS, LLC
  • Assignee: INTELLECTUAL VENTURES II LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Reacquisition / unwind — the patent returns to IV II within ~9 months. Because the patent had already expired in 2017, what moved in 2020 was the residual right to sue for past damages and any license/settlement proceeds — the classic shape of a litigation-vehicle round trip.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6121960
    1996 : Provisionals filed by ViA inventors
    1997 : Application filed
         : Inventors assign to VIA Inc
    2000 : Patent issued
    2001 : Security interest to FLV Fund
         : Attorney lien by Dicke Billing
    2002 : Collateral interest to Community National Bank
    2003 : Second bank collateral record
         : Lien waived back to VIA
    2004 : Sold to Embedded Technologies LLC
    2006 : Security agreement to Sovereign Bank
    2008 : Patent security agreement to Hercules
         : Sovereign release recorded
    2009 : Secured party releases recorded
    2010 : Sale to Intellectual Ventures Fund 68
         : VIA bankruptcy vesting entry
         : Two corrective assignments filed
    2011 : Merger into Intellectual Ventures II
         : Loan documents assigned to Stanley Black and Decker
    2017 : Patent term expires
    2020 : IV Assets 158 then Hanger Solutions
         : Hanger assigns back to IV II

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT.
   The patent leaves operating hands permanently at the 2010-08-06 record (Reel not retrieved) moving from Embedded Technologies, LLC → Intellectual Ventures Fund 68 LLC, then via the 2011-07-22 merger into Intellectual Ventures II LLC, then via the 2020-02-02 record into Intellectual Ventures Assets 158 LLC, then 2020-01-04 into Hanger Solutions, LLC. Registering entity suffixes on the chain include "Fund," "Assets," and "Solutions" — the IV divestiture/asset-holding naming convention. Critically, the 2010 sale is corroborated by a primary document (InfoLogix 10-Q Ex. 10.1) describing the patents as "believed to have lapsed or gone abandoned" — i.e. the buyer's own characterization is of an abandoned-rights acquisition, not a product-line acquisition. No evidence surfaced that IV Fund 68, IV Assets 158, or Hanger Solutions ever made or sold a product.

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT (strongest signal).
   Intellectual Ventures II LLC is the current assignee of record per the 2020-10-05 entry, and Intellectual Ventures is named on the supplied known-asserter list. The patent page additionally carries these litigation links: S.D. Fla. 1:13-cv-22191 and 0:13-cv-61358 (the latter matches Intellectual Ventures LLC v. Motorola Mobility LLC, No. 13-cv-61358-RST, S.D. Fla., which a 2014 expert declaration independently places in the IV 2013 campaign), D. Del. 1:11-cv-01025, and Fed. Cir. 20-2312. A third party (Unified Patents) petitioned for IPR at the PTAB against this patent/patent family: IPR2014-00787, which reached a Final Written Decision. I did not independently confirm which of those district-court complaints actually named US 6,121,960 as an asserted claim; treat the litigation list as family/patent-page level, and verify the specific complaint before citing it.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR / insufficient data.
   The Google Patents legal-events feed does not expose the correspondent of record, and my live lookups did not return the Assignment Center abstracts for this patent's reel/frame entries. I therefore cannot name a recurring attorney or recording firm, and I will not invent one. The one attorney-entity that does appear as a party is Dicke, Billing & Czaja, P.A. (2001-09-05 lien; released 2003-10-06 as "Dicke, Billig & Czaja, P.A.") — that is prosecution counsel on the originating side, not NPE-side recording counsel, and is not evidence of a troll pattern. Action item: pull the reel/frame abstracts at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ for the 2010-08-06 IV Fund 68 record, the 2011-07-22 merger, the two 2020 Assets-158 entries, and the 2020-01-04 Hanger entry; if one correspondent recurs across all of them, that converts this signal from unclear to present. Note also the 2010-06-23 and 2010-07-08 corrective assignments (correcting Reels 022460/0235 and 024599/0088) — correctives are filed by the same filer as the record being corrected, so those two correspondents are directly recoverable and should be captured.

4. Cascading transfers — PRESENT.
   Two dense clusters. (a) 2009-03-27 → 2010-08-06: six records in ~16 months, including two corrective assignments 15 days apart (2010-06-23 and 2010-07-08), a same-day Hercules release (2010-06-28) executed to permit a sale, and the sale itself (2010-08-06). (b) 2020-01-04 → 2020-10-05: three recorded transfers in ~9 months cycling IV II → Assets 158 → Hanger → back to IV II. The round trip out to an anonymous LLC and back within the same year, on an already-expired patent, is the strongest structural tell in the whole chain.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — UNCLEAR, leaning present.
   The 2020-01-04 transfer to Hanger Solutions, LLC occurs in the same calendar year as the Fed. Cir. appeal 20-2312 listed on the patent page. If that appeal arises from a Hanger-named district-court case, the transfer-to-vehicle would sit within months of the assertion window. I could not verify the caption or the first-complaint date for US 6,121,960 in the time available, so I am not calling this present. The older 2011/2013 suits predate the Hanger and Assets-158 records and therefore do not satisfy this signal.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — PRESENT.
   Two independent bankruptcy-adjacent events, both documented:

   • 2010-08-06 — instrument titled "TERMINATION OF SECURITY INTEREST AND VESTING OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN REORGANIZED BANKRUPTCY DEBTOR," assignor FLV FUND CVA → assignee VIA, INC. This is direct evidence that the original assignee went through a Chapter 11 reorganization, with its 2001 VC security interest (2001-05-22 record) extinguished.
   • 2010-08-06 — the same-day sale of US 6,121,960 and KR 10-0627378 by Embedded Technologies, LLC to Intellectual Ventures Fund 68 LLC under a Patent Purchase Agreement, disclosed in InfoLogix's 10-Q Ex. 10.1, conditioned on Hercules (Reel 020897/0325) releasing its lien so the sale could close "free and clear." A lender-consented, security-driven sale of an operating company's patents to a patent fund is a distressed divestiture whether or not a Chapter 11 petition is separately confirmed; I did not confirm a Chapter 11 filing by InfoLogix, Inc. itself from a primary source in this session, so I base the "present" call on the ViA reorganization record plus the Hercules-conditioned sale.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT.
   The transfers here run away from operating companies into a patent fund, not from a willing operating company to an NPE retained to sue its competitors. ViA was insolvent and divested under a fee lien, a bank collateral assignment, a VC security interest and finally a bankruptcy vesting entry; InfoLogix/Embedded divested under a Hercules lien with a lender release. Neither looks like a coordinated proxy-assertion arrangement by a healthy operating company. (Exception to keep in view: the 2011-03-23 Hercules→Stanley Black & Decker assignment of loan documents is a large public company touching this file, but it is expressly a loan-document conveyance, revoked on 2011-08-26 — debt-side, not a privateering transfer.)

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — NOT PRESENT.
   The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. Unified Patents appears only as the IPR petitioner of record (IPR2014-00787), which is a challenge to the patent, not an acquisition of it. No assignment in this docket names a defensive aggregator as assignee. The patent has not been neutralized by acquisition.

Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

Three independent strong signals converge. First, known asserter in the chain: Intellectual Ventures II LLC is the current assignee per the 2020-10-05 record, Intellectual Ventures is a listed high-frequency NPE, and the same patent page carries IV's 2011 Delaware and 2013 S.D. Fla. litigation plus a Fed. Cir. appeal (20-2312), with Unified Patents' IPR2014-00787 as third-party defensive confirmation that this is an asserted asset. Second, shell-entity transfer: the 2010-08-06 sale from Embedded Technologies, LLC to Intellectual Ventures Fund 68 LLC — documented in InfoLogix's 10-Q Ex. 10.1 as a sale of patents "believed to have lapsed or gone abandoned," negotiated around the Hercules release at Reel 020897/0325 — moved the patent out of operating hands for good; nothing in the record shows IV Fund 68, IV Assets 158, or Hanger Solutions, LLC ever making or selling a product. Third, bankruptcy fire-sale and cascading transfers: the 2010-08-06 "vesting … in reorganized bankruptcy debtor" record establishes ViA's Chapter 11, and the 2020-01-04 → 2020-10-05 cycle (IV II → Assets 158 → Hanger → back to IV II, on a patent that expired 2017-08-28) is a litigation-vehicle round trip within one year. The one signal I could not assess is the repeat correspondent, because the source feed strips correspondent data — that is the single highest-value verification step remaining, and it bears directly on whether Hanger Solutions is genuinely independent or one more IV recording of the same counsel.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search patent number 6121960 (legal-events baseline: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6121960A/en; primary document for the 2010 sale: InfoLogix, Inc. Form 10-Q filed 2010-08-16, Exhibit 10.1, Patent Purchase Agreement / Termination and Release of Security Interest, reciting Reel 020897/0325).

I'll research the patent and its prior-art citations. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me dig into the specific IPR proceedings and the cited references.

US 6,121,960 — Prior-Art Citation Analysis

0. Identification of the patent (verified against the record)

Source of bibliographic data: Google Patents record for US6121960A (fetched 2026-09-24) and the full text supplied.

1. Methodological caveat — three different categories of "citation"

The question asks me to "look at each patent citation for 6121960." Before doing that, one distinction is essential, because treating these categories as one would produce a wrong §102 analysis:

1. References cited on the face of / in the '960 patent — 19 US patent documents listed on the patent record. These are the examiner-cited references. They are candidate §102 art, but a citation on a face page is not a legal admission that the reference anticipates.
2. References cited in the '960 specification (background section and incorporation-by-reference clauses). These are more dangerous, because the specification expressly characterizes some of them as known prior art (an applicant admission, usable under §102(a)/(b) regardless of date).
3. References actually asserted in litigation/IPR (IPR2014-00787, Google Inc. v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC). These are the references a tribunal actually evaluated against the claims, and therefore the most probative set. None of Gough, Buxton, Bier, Harrison or Martin appears in category 1.

Separately: the Google Patents "Cited By (339)" list (Hinckley/Microsoft, Ulichney, Westerman, etc.) is forward citation data — later documents that cite '960. Those are not prior art to '960 at all and I have excluded them from the §102 analysis. Likewise the "Applications Claiming Priority" (the three provisionals) are the patent's own priority chain, not prior art.

I have verified the Ouellette reference in full from its own front page. For several of the 19 face-page references I have the number, inventor and date from the '960 record but have not independently pulled each reference's front page in this review; where I am not confident of a title or content, I say so rather than guess.

2. Category 1 — The 19 patent documents cited in US 6,121,960

As listed on the '960 patent record (* = I have not independently verified the title/content in this review):

Key date-driven point on Category 1

Six of these (items 13–18 and arguably 12) carry issue dates after the 1996-08-28 priority date, and two (#17, #18) after the 1997-08-28 filing date. Under pre-AIA §102 they can only be prior art as §102(e) references (i.e., only if their underlying applications were filed before the relevant date), not as §102(a)/(b) "known or used / patented or described in a printed publication." A bare citation list therefore cannot be read as a §102 chart. Only #11 (Ouellette) and the 1990 Japanese document have solid pre-priority publication dates.

3. Category 2 — Art cited/admitted in the '960 specification itself

These are the applicant's own statements about the state of the art, which are legally stronger than a face-page citation because they are admissions:

Terminology trap I am flagging deliberately: US 5,581,243 (Ouellette — the prior art) and US 5,581,492 (a ViA patent incorporated by reference) are different patents. The '960 document mentions both. I have not auto-corrected either, and any analysis that conflates them is wrong.

4. The most relevant prior art — detailed

4a. US 5,581,243 — Ouellette et al. (the single most relevant §102 reference)

Full citation. U.S. Patent No. 5,581,243, Method and apparatus for displaying simulated keyboards on touch-sensitive displays, inventors Daniel Ouellette and Sylvain D'Auteuil, assignee Microslate Inc. (Canada), App. No. 534,454, filed 1990-06-04, issued 1996-12-03.

Disclosure (verified from the patent's own front page and claim set).

• A processor executes an application program and also generates a simulated keyboard independent of the executed application program.
• A touch-sensitive display generates an output image from the processor and a simulated keyboard image.
• Control means cause the display to generate and refresh, in alternation and repeatedly, (i) the output image for a first period at a first luminous intensity having a predetermined persistence, and (ii) the simulated keyboard image for a second, shorter period at a lower intensity having the same persistence, the ratio defining a display time ratio — producing a "phantom" keyboard that the eye perceives as continuous and that does not occlude the application output.
• Independent claim 5 additionally covers toggling between full-screen and split-screen modes, with a cursor that automatically re-locates when toggled. Independent claim 6 covers user-adjustable auto-repeat delay and auto-repeat rate by continued touching of the simulated keyboard. Claim 10 recites a liquid crystal display.

Why it is the key reference.

1. It is §102-capable on its own date (issued 1996-12-03, i.e. before the 1997-08-28 actual filing date, and its 1990 application filing date makes it §102(e) art even if '960 is entitled to the 1996-08-28 provisional date).
2. The '960 specification admits it is prior art and describes its disclosure accurately.
3. The '960 patent's entire stated point of novelty is the disadvantage of Ouellette: alternating/flashing display, reduced refresh rate, need for a second frame buffer, and doubled wireless bandwidth. That is a narrow distinction.

Claim-by-claim §102 exposure.

• Claim 26 (means-plus-function, "representation of at least one input zone … laid over the main image … activated simultaneously … individual pixels … dedicated simultaneously to both"): highest exposure. Ouellette's persistence-based phantom keyboard arguably satisfies "displayed simultaneously to the user" and "individual pixels dedicated simultaneously" in the sense the '960 specification describes (the same screen area serves both images). This is the claim family that the PTAB did hold unpatentable over Gough (see §5), so the same logic maps onto Ouellette.
• Claims 19–22, 24–25 (method claims): substantial exposure to the extent they do not require bit-level logical operators. Claim 19's operative language ("pixels … activated simultaneously … individual pixels … dedicated simultaneously to both") is functionally what Ouellette's alternating-refresh-with-persistence achieves.
• Claim 6 (keyboard mode ⇄ cursor mode by continuous touching for a set time): Ouellette's claim 5 (cursor relocation on mode toggle) and claim 6 (character generated in association with a pre-selected period during which the simulated keyboard continues to be touched, with adjustable auto-repeat delay/rate) are close prior art, though Ouellette's toggle is by a user-actuator button rather than by continuous touch — a genuine, but narrow, distinction.
• Claim 1 / claims 7–13 (the "variable-pixel control … logical operators … different blending/merging effects" family): low §102 exposure. Ouellette teaches time-multiplexing, not pixel-level logical combination. The '960 specification itself draws this line: "unlike the Ouellette reference … the pixels chosen to represent the images are not independent." This is precisely the limitation the Federal Circuit and the PTAB focused on for claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14 (see §5), and on remand those claims survived. Ouellette alone does not anticipate claim 1.
• Claim 10 ("each pixel contributed 100% by either the main image or the key"): Ouellette's alternation makes each pixel alternately one or the other, not a per-frame 100% selection. Not anticipated on Ouellette alone; this is more naturally a §103 combination point.

4b. US 5,612,690 — Levy (admitted art via incorporation)

Full citation. U.S. Patent No. 5,612,690, inventor David Levy, issued 1997-03-18. Incorporated by reference in the '960 specification.

Description. Overlapping key layouts: an alphabetic sub-keyboard superimposed on numeric/function sub-keyboards, numerals printed at the interstices where four adjacent letter keys meet; four "quarter" keys operate together, with underlying sensing areas activated by the user's finger, reducing the keyboard to credit-card size.

§102 exposure. Relevant principally to claim 17 ("switching between keyboards/alphanumeric sets") and to the reduced-key embodiments described in the '960 specification (FIG. 7-8; the twelve-key, nine-letter variant). Note that Levy is about a physical/virtual key layout, not about pixel-level merging, so it does not reach claim 1. Because Levy is incorporated by reference, it also forms part of the '960 disclosure itself — which limits its usefulness as invalidating art for the disclosed embodiments, though not for any claim language that reads on it.

4c. US 5,598,523 — Fujita (flag: this is NOT cited in '960)

Full citation. U.S. Patent No. 5,598,523, inventor Yosuke Fujita, published 1997-01-28. It was cited as X-category art (relevant to claims 1–54) in the International Search Report of WO 2001/033325 A3 ("Data entry in a GUI") — a later application that also cites WO 98/09270 (the '960 family PCT). I am flagging it only so that it is not mistakenly attributed to '960: it does not appear in the '960 citation list, and with a 1997-01-28 date it postdates the 1996-08-28 priority date, so it is not §102(a)/(b) art against '960.

5. Category 3 — The art actually asserted (IPR2014-00787) — the most probative §102 references

Proceeding. Google Inc. v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC, IPR2014-00787, U.S. Patent 6,121,960. (The Google Patents litigation metadata also records PTAB case IPR2014-00787 with a Final Written Decision, plus a Federal Circuit appeal — CAFC case 20-2312 — and district court suits in D. Del. 1:11-cv-01025 and S.D. Fla. 1:13-cv-22191 / 0:13-cv-61358.) The Board's Final Written Decision is at Paper 53 (2015-11-20); the Federal Circuit decision is Google Inc. v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC, 701 F. App'x 946 (Fed. Cir. 2017); a Final Written Decision on Remand issued 2020-07-24.

Grounds instituted (per the 2020 remand decision and the 2015 FWD):

• §102 — claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14 and claims 19–22, 24–30 as anticipated by Gough.
• §103(a) — the same claim sets as obvious over Buxton + Bier + Harrison.
• Petitioner's demonstratives also show a Martin ground (see below), which was not an instituted ground.

Outcome timeline.

• FWD 2015-11-20: claims 19–22 and 24–30 anticipated by Gough under §102(e); claims 19, 20, 22 and 24–30 obvious over Buxton+Bier+Harrison. Claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14 not shown unpatentable. The Board construed "logical operators" as "operators that manipulate binary values at the bit level," which excluded Buxton's alpha-blending arithmetic.
• Fed. Cir. 2017: affirmed the anticipation/obviousness determinations as to claims 19–22 and 24–30; vacated and remanded as to claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14, on the ground that the Board failed to make requisite findings or give an adequate explanation for finding that Gough/Buxton do not teach "logical operators."
• FWD on remand, 2020-07-24: "Petitioner has not shown by a preponderance of the evidence that claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14 of the '960 patent are unpatentable." (With the patent expired 2017-08-28, the Board applied the Phillips claim-construction standard.) Net result: claims 19–22 and 24–30 cancelled/held unpatentable; claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14 survived.

5a. US 5,638,501 — Gough et al. (the operative §102 reference)

5b. US 6,118,427 — Buxton et al.

5c. "Bier" (Ex. 1010) and "Harrison" (Ex. 1011)

• Role: secondary references in the §103(a) combination with Buxton, asserted against claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14, 19–22 and 24–30.
• Full citations: I cannot confirm the patent numbers, titles or dates for "Bier" and "Harrison" from the material retrieved. I decline to guess them. What is established is that the combination Buxton+Bier+Harrison succeeded against claims 19, 20, 22 and 24–30 and failed against claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14.
• §102 exposure: none — these were §103-only references.

5d. "Martin" (Ex. 1008)

• Role: In Google's demonstratives for the supplemental oral hearing, Martin appears as art that "anticipates claims 1-3, 5, 7-10, 12-14" and renders claims 2, 3 and 12 obvious.
• Full citation: I cannot confirm the patent number, title or date for "Martin" from the material retrieved. I decline to guess.
• Caveat: Martin does not appear among the instituted grounds in the Board's final decisions (which are Gough under §102 and Buxton+Bier+Harrison under §103). Treat the Martin position as a petitioner argument, not an adjudicated §102 holding. If the user wants a definitive Martin citation I would need the IPR exhibit list (Ex. 1008) pulled directly.

5e. Prior-art/§102 summary table

Bottom line on §102: the only references that have actually been held to anticipate claims of US 6,121,960 are Gough (US 5,638,501), against claims 19–22 and 24–30. Ouellette (US 5,581,243) is the most relevant reference on the face of the patent and in its own admitted background and is the strongest §102(e) candidate against claims 19–30, but it does not anticipate the "logical operators" limitations of claim 1 and its dependents. That single limitation is what preserved claims 1–3, 5, 7–10 and 12–14 through the entire PTAB and Federal Circuit sequence.

6. What I could not verify / explicit uncertainties

To comply with the instruction not to fabricate:

1. Titles and disclosures of face-page references #1–#10, #12–#19 — I have number, inventor and date from the '960 record but have not pulled each front page. My one-line descriptions for those entries are therefore marked with an asterisk and should be treated as provisional.
2. Issue/filing dates of Gough (US 5,638,501), Buxton (US 6,118,427), Bier, Harrison and Martin — not confirmed from primary sources in this review. In particular I cannot state the date on which Gough's §102(e) application was filed.
3. Issue date of US 5,612,690 — I have 1997-03-18 from the ISR of WO 2000/044014, which I regard as reliable but which is a secondary source.
4. The "Cited By (339)" list — I have deliberately excluded it; it is forward-citation data and is not prior art to '960.
5. Reassignment history — the '960 chain of title (VIA Inc → FLV Fund C.V.A. → Community National Bank → Embedded Technologies LLC → Intellectual Ventures Fund 68 LLC → Intellectual Ventures II LLC → Intellectual Ventures Assets 158 LLC / Hanger Solutions, LLC → back to IV II LLC) is relevant to standing and real-party-in-interest questions but not to §102. I note it only because the Google Patents record is internally inconsistent about the "Current Assignee" (it lists Intellectual Ventures II LLC while also recording 2020 assignments to Hanger Solutions, LLC and a 2020-10-05 reassignment back).

If you want the §102 chart hardened, the two documents to pull next are (a) the IPR2014-00787 Petition (Paper 9) and its exhibit list, to pin down the exact citations and dates for Bier, Harrison and Martin, and (b) the front pages of Gough and Buxton.

I'll ground this analysis in the prior-art references identified in the patent record and the IPR/appeal history. Let me pull the key references.

Let me pin down the Bier and Harrison references from the IPR combination and Gough's disclosure details.

Obviousness Analysis — US 6,121,960 ("Touch screen systems and methods") under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Building on the bibliographic, claim, and litigation sections already generated. I do not repeat the claim text or the prosecution/ownership history except where needed to frame the analysis.

1. Legal framework applied

I apply the Graham v. John Deere framework as refined by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007):

1. Determine the scope and content of the prior art;
2. Ascertain the differences between the prior art and the claims;
3. Resolve the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art;
4. Consider objective (secondary) indicia of non-obviousness.

Where the record contains actual PTAB/Federal Circuit findings on these references, I rely on them rather than re-deriving them. The prior art here is unusually well documented because the same references were litigated in IPR2014-00787 and in Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Canon Inc., 104 F. Supp. 3d 629 (D. Del. 2015) (CourtListener).

2. Level of ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA)

Both the Board and the district court treated the PHOSITA as a person with a computer-science/engineering background and several years' experience in graphical user interface and raster-display programming, familiar with frame buffers, bit-block transfer (BitBlt) operations, color look-up tables, and touch/pen input drivers. This matters because the dispositive limitations ("variable-pixel control," "logical operators") are programming concepts, not hardware concepts. The '960 specification itself sets this level: it presumes "typically available operating systems" (Windows 95/NT, SCO Unix, Solaris) and "typical video graphics controllers" supporting BitBlt and DMA (US6121960A).

3. Scope and content of the prior art

Record nuance to flag: in IPR2014-00787 the exhibit actually filed as Exhibit 1010 was US 5,581,670 (Bier), not the cited US 5,617,114; the Board treated the mis-filing as an error and relied on US 5,617,114 as Ex. 3001. The two share inventors and a substantially identical disclosure, so the substitution does not change the substance — but it is a documented defect in that record.

4. The limitations that actually decide the case

Two imported-into-the-claim limitations carry the analysis:

• "Variable-pixel control." Agreed construction in Canon: "programming to determine and control which pixels of the screen will be used for displaying at least one key (or other input zone) and which pixels will be used for displaying the main image."
• "Logical operators" providing "different blending/merging effects," such that "individual pixels … can be dedicated simultaneously to both" images. Board construction (2015): a logic operator "whose operands and result are variables that can assume one of only two states," i.e., manipulation of binary values at the bit level.

Everything else in claims 1, 19, and 26 was effectively conceded or easily mapped.

5. Combination A — Gough in view of Buxton (the primary §103 combination asserted in IPR2014-00787)

This is the combination Google actually ran (FWD; Fed. Cir. 16-1543).

Element mapping (claim 1):

Buxton supplies the variably-transparent overlay teaching and the α-blending alternative, plus the Graphical Keyboard with tap / press-and-wait activation.

Motivation to combine. Strong and articulated in the record:

1. Same field and same problem. Both Gough and Buxton are directed to overlaying a translucent/variably-transparent object (Gough expressly a keyboard) on a display so underlying content remains visible. KSR recognizes that combination of references within the same field to solve the same problem is likely obvious.
2. The '960 specification itself frames the problem this way and disparages Ouellette's alternation (refresh-rate loss, second frame buffer, doubled RF bandwidth) — i.e., the art was already moving toward a single-frame blended composite, which is exactly what Gough/Buxton supply.
3. Predictable, design-choice substitution. Choosing between Gough's CLUT-based blending and Buxton's α-blending is a mere selection among known blending techniques yielding predictable results.

Why the claims nonetheless survived (the counterargument the Board accepted on remand). The PTAB originally held, and on remand confirmed, that the record did not establish that either reference discloses "logical operators" as construed (bit-level manipulation of binary values):

• The Board treated Buxton's α-blending equation as arithmetic, and found "arithmetic operations … differ from logical operations."
• IV relied largely on a single dictionary definition to make that point (Lexology summary).

But the Federal Circuit vacated that reasoning as inadequately explained, noting that the Board failed to engage Google's expert testimony that:

• Gough's CLUT "loaded with 256 entries which detail each possible combination of bits from the 4 bit screen and the 4 bit overlay" reads on bit-level binary manipulation; and
• logical operations are "[a]t the heart of any equation involving addition, subtraction, or multiplication or division."

My assessment: The §103 case is genuinely close and turns on claim construction and evidentiary weight, not on any missing structural feature. If the finder of fact credits Google's expert (as the Federal Circuit's vacatur suggests it should have), the CLUT-to-"logical operators" mapping is strong, and claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, and 12–14 are likely obvious. If the narrow reading of "logical operators" as requiring explicit boolean operators (AND/OR/XOR/NOT) survives, the claims are preserved. The CLUT argument is the single most important battleground.

6. Combination B — Buxton in view of Bier and Harrison (the second §103 combination)

Instituted against claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14, 19–22, 24–30. The Board found claims 19, 20, 22, and 24–30 unpatentable over this combination; the Federal Circuit affirmed as to 19–22 and 24–30.

• Buxton supplies the translucent-layered-object merge, the keyboard GUI, and the user-selectable transparency.
• Bier supplies the movable transparent overlay with delineated regions (the "representation of at least one key"/input zone) positioned over the working area, plus the on-demand numeric keypad — a close analogue to the claim's "laid over the main image."
• Harrison is a secondary reference (content not verified in my sources).

Motivation to combine: Bier's explicit teaching that a movable transparent overlay with disposed tool/keypad regions can be positioned "near the area where a user is working" so that "a keyboard [is] unnecessary for some operations" directly supplies the reason to combine with Buxton's transparency machinery — both optimize on-screen tool placement against background content.

7. Combination C — Ouellette in view of Gough (the "admitted prior art + blending-engine" route)

A useful alternative or supplementary ground, because it rests on references the patentee itself characterizes as known.

• Ouellette supplies every "who/what/where" limitation: computing device, touch-sensitive display, phantom keyboard superimposed on the application-output image without occluding it, full QWERTY layout.
• The only meaningful difference from claim 1 is how the two images coexist. Ouellette alternates frames; the claim requires simultaneous composite formation with pixel dependence ("variable-pixel control").
• Gough supplies precisely that missing piece: a single-frame Blending Engine producing a translucent composite in which individual pixels can be K-only, M-only, or blended.

Motivation to combine: the '960 specification itself identifies Ouellette's flashing/alternation as the deficiency and motivates the switch to a blended composite — an express, in-specification motivation that KSR treats as close to dispositive. Gough and Ouellette are analogous art (both keyboard overlays on display screens).

Vulnerability: Because the two references are directed at different compositing strategies (temporal alternation vs. spatial blending), the patentee would argue the combination changes the principle of operation of Ouellette. The counter is that Ouellette's claimed contribution (avoiding occlusion) is preserved and improved by Gough — no change in principle of operation, only a better implementation, which is exactly what KSR deems obvious.

8. Claim-specific §103 mappings (dependents)

Note on claims 6, 15, 16, 17: these are the weakest claims in the patent from the patentee's perspective. Claim 6 in particular maps unusually cleanly onto Buxton's express press-and-wait disclosure, and claim 15 (finger-count zoom) is a natural extension of well-known multi-touch sensing that Buxton itself cites.

9. Objective indicia (secondary considerations)

The record does not show compelling secondary indicia. What is documented is commercial/litigation value (IV's assertion against Canon, Nikon, Motorola; multiple 2020 asset transfers), which is not a nexus-based objective indicium. I found no evidence of long-felt need, industry praise, or unexpected results attributable to the "logical operators" limitation. Absent such evidence, the Graham factors tilt toward obviousness wherever the claim-construction dispute is resolved in the challenger's favor.

10. Record conflict / cross-reference flag

I must flag a contradiction with the earlier generated summary: the summary states that on the July 24, 2020 remand the Board "determined No Challenged Claims Unpatentable" (consistent with the Docket Alarm remand FWD). That is correct as to the unpatentability determination on this record. But it should not be read as a merits vindication of the claims: the claims in question (1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14) survived because the Board's earlier reasoning was procedurally inadequate, not because the Federal Circuit found the claims non-obvious. The CAFC 20-2312 proceeding flagged on the Google Patents page is most plausibly the appeal from that remand decision, but I could not verify that and it remains unconfirmed.

11. Bottom line

• Strongest §103 ground: Gough (primary — single-frame Blending Engine; translucent keyboard over a base image; per-pixel blendable units; 256-entry CLUT mapping bit combinations) in view of Buxton (variably-transparent layered objects; α-blending; graphical keyboard with press-and-wait). Motivation is same-field/same-problem plus the '960 specification's own motivation to escape Ouellette's alternation.
• Alternative ground: Buxton + Bier + Harrison — already held to render claims 19–22 and 24–30 unpatentable and affirmed on appeal; the same combination, correctly evaluated, reaches claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12–14 if "logical operators" is construed to cover bit-level table-lookup/Boolean combination (Gough's CLUT) rather than requiring explicit AND/OR/XOR operators.
• Decisive issue, not a structural gap: whether a 256-entry color look-up table that enumerates all bit combinations of the screen and overlay values reads on "logical operators … to provide different blending/merging effects." Google's expert evidence and the Federal Circuit's vacatur both suggest the Board under-analyzed this; a well-supported petition or infringement defense should press it.
• Weakest claims for the patentee: 6 (Buxton press-and-wait), 15 (finger-count zoom), 16–17 (touchpad mode/keyboard switching; cf. US 5,612,690).

Confidence and uncertainty: High confidence on the bibliographic, claim-text, and procedural facts (they are in the authoritative page text and the PTAB/CAFC opinions I retrieved). Moderate confidence on the substantive strength of the CLUT-to-"logical operators" theory, because it is contested and the Board's remand decision went the other way on the existing record. Low confidence on the specific disclosure of Harrison US 6,317,128, which I could not substantiate — I have not fabricated a mapping for it and recommend retrieving Exhibit 1011 directly before relying on it.