Invalidity dossier
US 6128279
System for balancing loads among network servers
Current assignee: Tumbleweed Holdings LLC
Added 9/23/2026, 8:05:52 PM
Active provider: DeepSeek · deepseek-flash
Patent summary
Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.
Patent Overview — US6128279A
Title: System for balancing loads among network servers
Patent number: US6128279A (application US09/164,499)
Inventors: Kevin M. O'Neil, Robert F. Nerz, Robert R. Aubin
Original assignee: Web Balance Inc. The supplied page also lists a current assignee, Tumbleweed Holdings LLC, but does not describe how that status was reached.
Key dates (as listed): Priority date 1997-10-06; filing date 1998-10-01; publication/grant 2000-10-03; anticipated expiration 2018-10-01. Legal status: "Expired - Lifetime."
Purpose. The patent addresses overload in network servers: an overloaded server may be unable to accept new requests, may slow down, and may return errors. Load balancing distributes requests among several servers so no single server is unduly burdened. The text reviews existing approaches and their shortcomings: round-robin DNS (defeated by caching in remote DNS servers or requesters, and unable to reroute around a failed server in real time), proxy gateways (add request- and response-direction latency, can bottleneck site capacity, and are a single point of failure), and IP redirectors (similar drawbacks).
Plain-language scope. Per the supplied definitions, the invention is "a peer-to-peer load balancing system which is implemented in plural network servers," and "a computer-executable module for use in network servers which enables each server to distribute loads among its peers based on a load currently being processed in each server and/or contents of the network requests." Stated utility is chiefly World Wide Web servers, with other servers also contemplated (CORBA, ORB, FTP, SMTP, and Java servers). Classifications include H04L67/1004, /1008, /1012, /1014, and /1017, covering server selection for load balancing based on server parameters, resource compliance, request content, and round-robin mechanisms.
What the excerpt does not establish. The supplied text is explicitly marked as an excerpt with omitted material; it does not provide the full description or claims, so the complete claimed scope cannot be verified. It also does not establish embodiments beyond the definitions quoted above, or any further detail on implementation.
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6128279](/patent/US6128279)/en
Generated 10/1/2026, 9:41:35 PM
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Litigation summary
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Proceedings on file (0)
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PTAB challenges
AIA trial proceedings at the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board — IPR, PGR, and CBM. Petitioners, judge panels, claim-level invalidation outcomes from Final Written Decisions, and Federal Circuit appeals. The single most important defensive datapoint after litigation history.
Assignment history
Inventors, original assignee, and the chain of ownership recorded with the USPTO — including the correspondent attorney who recorded each assignment, since shell-LLC chains often share one repeat-player attorney even when the entity names look unrelated. Surfaces NPE / patent-troll patterns: shell-entity transfers, known asserters in the chain, repeat correspondent fingerprints, pre-litigation assignments, and bankruptcy fire-sales.
Prior art
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Obviousness
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Extensions
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Derivative works
Defensive disclosure: derivative variations of each claim designed to render future incremental improvements obvious or non-novel.