US 6141611

I'll search for the specific patent identifier as instructed.

Let me run additional targeted searches to check for any litigation or CAFC activity involving this specific number.

Search scope and confidence notes

• Identifier as given: "6141611". Taken literally, this corresponds to the granted US patent publication US6141611A (i.e., US 6,141,611), titled Mobile vehicle accident data system. I have not silently renumbered anything; all IDs below are reproduced as they appear in the sources.
• Sources actually reached: the live US-patent full text at Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6141611/en, fetched 2026-09-24T05:49:01Z), EveryPatent's record (http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat6141611.html), and citation/archival hits. I did not obtain a direct hit on a USPTO PatentCenter record or on any CAFC docket, so those two legs of your request rest on negative/inferential evidence, not on an authoritative database query.
• Date conflict: your message states the current date is April 26, 2026, while my operating context states 2026-10-01. I flag this rather than resolve it; it matters only for the recency of the CAFC check.

Bibliographic summary

Uncertainty flags on the bibliographic record:

• The filing date (1998-12-01) and the "1998-11-06" figure that appears in the family/priority tables are inconsistent in the fetched text. I cannot authoritatively resolve whether 1998-11-06 is a true earlier priority date for the '611 application or an artifact of the related foreign filings. Treat 1998-12-01 as the filing date and 1998-11-06 as an unresolved priority-date question.
• The assignee string "PHOENEX GROUP INC" appears verbatim in the source; I have not corrected it to "Phoenix." A third-party company listing (Manta) describes Safety Intelligence Systems Corporation as the creator of the "MACBOX (Mobile Accident Camera BOX), US Patent #: 6141611," consistent with the later assignment/name-change chain.
• There is a divisional US 09/698,131 (filed 2000-10-30) and a later continuation US 10/164,708 (filed 2002-06-10) in the family; these are separate filings, not the '611 patent itself.

Abstract

One or more video cameras on the vehicle continuously record the scene around it. Images covering the current time and the recent past are stored on-board, preferably digitally in compressed form. Operating parameters (speed, GPS, engine, brake data) from the vehicle's on-board embedded computers are preferably stored on-board as well. An accident detector, e.g. a biaxial accelerometer, generates a trigger signal when the vehicle strikes or is struck. In response to the trigger, the stored on-board data is automatically transmitted over a wireless link (e.g., CDPD, satellite, "Iredium," or a private link) to a central database. The central database is reachable over a network such as the Internet or a secured intranet, and the data is accessible via a terminal by an authorized party such as an insurance adjuster, self-insured entity, or loss-management facility.

Independent claim — plain language

Claim 1 is the sole independent claim. It is a method claim for capturing vehicular accident data and automatically making it available to authorized parties, comprising:

1. Recording and storing data significant to the operation of the vehicle in a memory on-board the vehicle, where that data includes video data of a scene external to the vehicle;
2. Sensing the vehicle's involvement in an accident;
3. In response to the sensed accident: automatically encrypting the data, and automatically transmitting that encrypted data to a data-storage server remote from the vehicle over a wireless transmission link; and
4. Wherein the encrypted data is recorded and stored to cover an interval preceding and following an accident (i.e., a pre-crash/post-crash buffer window).

Plainly: put a camera plus on-board data logging in a vehicle; detect a crash automatically; then both encrypt and wirelessly push the on-board record — including footage from before and after the impact — to a remote server, without a human having to act.

Dependent claims (for completeness):

• Claim 2 — adds coupling the encrypted data from the wireless link to a central database connected to a network and accessible by terminals.
• Claim 3 — after post-accident encryption, the encrypted data is re-recorded in encrypted form in the on-board memory (supporting the tamper-protection/memory-lock disclosure).
• Claim 4 — the data includes inputs from the vehicle's on-board computers.

CAFC 2026 docket and USPTO litigation check

• No CAFC 2026 docket involving 6141611 was found. Multiple targeted searches for Federal Circuit 2026 activity tied to "6141611" / "6,141,611" returned only unrelated 2026 CAFC and appellate materials (e.g., Spero v. Mercedes-Benz USA, No. 2025-1470, concerning US 10,894,503; Constellation Designs v. LG; a Court of International Trade appeal). None references this patent.
• No district-court or PTAB proceeding against the '611 patent itself was found. The one PTAB proceeding that surfaced — IPR2017-00245, Inter Partes Review of U.S. Pat. 6,950,013 — merely used US 6,141,611 (Mackey et al.) as Exhibit 1005, i.e., the '611 patent was cited as prior art inside a challenge to a different patent. That is not a validity challenge to the '611 patent.
• Consistent with an expired patent: the record lists the '611 patent as Expired – Lifetime with anticipated expiration 2018-12-01, which makes a 2026 CAFC appeal on this patent improbable. The '611 patent does appear in the prior-art citation chains of later patents (e.g., WO2006052080A1 lists "US 6141611 A (JOHN J. MACKEY, PHOENIX GROUP, INC.) 31 OCTOBER 2000" as a cited Y-category document; CN102024279B cites "US 6141611 A, 2000.10.31").

Explicit uncertainty: I could not directly query the USPTO PatentCenter or the Federal Circuit's own docket system with the tools available. The absence of a 2026 CAFC matter is based on negative/inferential search results, not on an authoritative docket lookup. If a 2026 appeal involving this number exists, it is not reflected in the reachable public web results — do not treat my "none found" as definitive.

Grounding links

• Full text: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6141611/en
• Record summary: http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat6141611.html
• Exhibit 1005 (the '611 patent as prior art in IPR2017-00245): docketalarm.com record PDF
• Assignee/company reference ("MACBOX … US Patent #: 6141611"): https://www.manta.com/c/mm0r23m/safety-intelligence-systems-corporation
• Later-patent citation of US 6141611A: WO2006052080A1 search report; CN102024279B

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 6141611 across patent litigation sources.

Let me search litigation-specific sources directly.

Litigation Search Results for U.S. Patent No. 6,141,611

Bottom line: I found no litigation — no district court infringement suits, no CAFC appeals, and no PTAB proceedings — involving U.S. Patent No. 6,141,611 ("Mobile vehicle accident data system").

What I searched

• Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com) — surfaced the '611 patent only as cited prior art in other patents' pages (e.g., US-9,349,112-B2; US-10,121,204-B1; US-11,107,303-B2), not as an asserted patent in any case list.
• General litigation/PACER-style queries for "6141611" and "6,141,611" combined with litigation terms.
• Assignee-based searches (Phoenix Group Inc.; Loss Management Services, Inc.; Safety Intelligence Systems Corp.).

What the searches actually returned (and why it is not '611 litigation)

1. Prior-art citations only. The most frequent hits are examiner/third-party citations of US 6,141,611 A in later patents, e.g., the WO 2006/052080 A1 search report and CN 102024279 B — these are citations against other patents, not lawsuits.
2. DriveCam, Inc. v. SmartDrive Systems, Inc. (Case No. 3:11-cv-00997-H-RBB, S.D. Cal.) — This is the closest thing the search surfaced, but the asserted patents were U.S. 6,389,340; 7,659,827; and 7,804,426 — not the '611 patent. The '611 number appears in those Justia pages only as an unrelated cited reference. Do not confuse the '611 patent with the '340 patent in that case.
3. A false-positive docket number. A Connecticut Superior Court citation, Tomanelli, Docket No. NNH-CV-24-6141611-S (New Haven, Jan. 22, 2025), contains the digit string "6141611" but is a state civil matter unrelated to the patent.

Why no litigation is plausible (consistent with the record)

The authoritative patent record you supplied shows U.S. 6,141,611 as:

• Status: Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration 2018-12-01 (filed/priority 1998-12-01).
• Current assignees of record: Phoenix Group Inc.; Loss Management Services, Inc.; Safety Intelligence Systems Corp. (name changes/assignments 2001, 2005).
• It is a method patent with only 4 claims, and the patent has been expired for roughly seven years as of today (April 26, 2026), which greatly reduces the likelihood of recent assertion.

Important caveats

• I was unable to complete exhaustive docket-by-docket verification (unified portal case-list drill-down, full PACER/CAFC docket queries, and litigation databases such as RPX/Docket Navigator/Lex Machina). My tool run was capped before I could exhaustively page through those sources.
• Therefore, this should be read as "no litigation found," not a definitive negative. If you need a certified negative, the authoritative steps would be: (a) the patent's full USPTO PatentCenter "Litigation" / assignment tab, (b) Unified Patents patent page case list for US-6141611-A, and (c) PACER/CAFC docket queries on the assignee names above.

If you'd like, I can run additional targeted queries (e.g., by each assignee name against PACER/Unified, or by the four individual inventors) to try to close the remaining verification gap.

Proceedings overview

Zero. The canonical structured source for this analysis — the USPTO Open Data Portal "PTAB proceedings on file" block — lists no AIA trial proceedings (IPR, PGR, or CBM) for U.S. Patent No. 6,141,611 as of 2026-10-01; there are therefore no claims invalidated, none sustained in an FWD, none settled, and no institution denials to report. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not "hardened patent" in the IPR sense — it is an untested patent that no petitioner has ever bothered to challenge at the Board, on a patent that has already expired (anticipated expiration 2018-12-01) with only 4 method claims. That is a materially different risk profile from a trolled patent with a litigated validity record, and it is discussed in the Strategic summary below.

Proceeding-by-proceeding

Not applicable. No proceeding numbers exist to report, and I will not invent any. The per-proceeding template (type, filed date, status, panel, grounds, institution decision, FWD, settlement, appeal, defensive value) is intentionally left empty because the canonical data set is empty and my searches surfaced no contrary evidence.

Why this is a "no activity" finding rather than an incomplete search

⚠️ Critical false positive — do not conflate these

Web searches for "the '611 patent" return a large, active PTAB docket that has nothing to do with US 6,141,611. Every one of the following proceedings is directed to U.S. Patent No. 8,326,611 B2 (Jawbone Innovations, LLC) — microphone-array / audio-signal-processing art, asserted in the Jawbone Innovations smartphone-litigation campaign against Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Meta, and Sony:

• IPR2022-00604 (Google LLC v. Jawbone Innovations, LLC) — institution denied, Paper 12 (2022-07-11 / related papers)
• IPR2022-00889 (Google) — institution denied (2022-11-14, over a dissent by APJ Repko; rehearing denied)
• IPR2022-01085 (Apple) — terminated following settlement (Paper 14, 2023-01-09)
• IPR2022-01495 (Apple) — terminated following settlement (Paper 8, 2023-01-09)
• IPR2023-00285 / IPR2023-00286 (Amazon.com) — instituted on claims 1–28 (Paper 10, 2023-06-07; panel Braden, Beamer, Amundson)
• IPR2023-01129 (Meta Platforms) — joinder motion to IPR2023-00285
• IPR2023-01176 / IPR2023-01177 (Sony) — same family of challenges

Those numbers, panels, and claim ranges (claims 1–28, claims 29–44) must not be attributed to US 6,141,611. US 6,141,611 has only four claims, all method claims, and its contested-claim vernacular would be "claims 1–4," never "claims 29–44."

Other search hits for the string "6141611" are likewise irrelevant to PTAB: the Connecticut Superior Court docket number NNH-CV-24-6141611-S (Tomanelli, New Haven, 2025-01-22), and citation of US 6,141,611 A as prior art on the face of other patents (e.g., WO 2006/052080 A1 — cited against claims 1–3 of a Korean vehicle accident-recording application; EP 1286312 A3; EP 1324274 A3; CN 102024279 B). Being cited as art by someone else is not a PTAB proceeding; it is evidence the reference is well-known, and it cuts only one way analytically (see below).

Strategic summary

Claim status: all four claims are UNTESTED, not canceled and not sustained. Claims 1–4 of US 6,141,611 stand exactly as issued on 2000-10-31: claim 1 (the independent method claim: on-board recording of video plus vehicle-operating data, accident sensing, automatic encryption, automatic wireless transmission to a remote server, covering a pre- and post-accident interval); claim 2 (coupling to a central database accessible by network terminals); claim 3 (re-recording the encrypted data back into on-board memory); claim 4 (data includes inputs from the vehicle's on-board computers). No FWD has ever construed, narrowed, or canceled any of them. Any representation that the '611 claims are "invalidated," "survived IPR," or "hardened" would be fabrication, and a demand letter from an asserting party that gestures at a PTAB record on this patent should be treated as false until a proceeding number is produced.

Estoppel landscape: there is none against anyone. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only after an IPR "results in a final written decision under section 318(a)," and § 315(e)(1) applies in PTO proceedings on the same trigger. Here there is no FWD, no institution, and no petition — so no petitioner, real party in interest, or privy is estopped from raising any ground. Conversely, and more importantly for a defendant, there is no institution-denial record either, which means there is no Board reasoning (no dispositive claim construction, no § 325(d) treatment, no Fintiv ruling) that a defendant could mine for free. A defendant today walks onto a completely clean slate — both a burden (no roadmap) and an opportunity (no adverse Board precedent on claim 1's construction).

Pattern signals: entirely absent. No petitioner has ever filed against this patent; the patent owner has never appeared as a party in an AIA trial and therefore has no PTAB appeal history at the Federal Circuit for this patent; there is no defensive aggregator in the chain (Unified Patents surfaces US-6141611-A only as an indexed prior-art citation on other patents' pages, e.g., US-10,121,204-B1 and US-9,349,112-B2 — not as a case participant). The absence of IPRs is itself the signal: well-asserted patents eventually attract them, and this one never did. Combined with the expired-lifetime status recorded 2018-12-01 and the litigation section's finding of no suits, the record is consistent with a patent that was never enforced in the AIA era.

Practical ceiling on any new challenge. Three timing realities bound what can still be filed: (i) the PGR window closed nine months after 2000-10-31 and is long gone; (ii) CBM review is unavailable — the transitional program sunset for new CBMs on 2020-09-16, and this patent's expiry would in any event foreclose the "machine" and claim-construction postures CBM offered; and (iii) IPR remains theoretically available even against an expired patent (the Board applies the Phillips framework and patent owners cannot amend), but the economic value is now near zero — the patent expired 2018-12-01, so any § 286 damages lookback is closed and there is no injunctive exposure. A § 315(b) one-year bar would also be measured from any hypothetical service of a complaint, which per the litigation analysis does not exist.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a target of a demand letter citing US 6,141,611: say so plainly — there are no PTAB proceedings on this patent, and no claims have been canceled. Ask the sender to identify the proceeding number behind any "PTAB" or "invalidity" contention. If they cannot, treat the demand as unsupported.
• Verify the negative yourself before relying on it, since my tool run was capped: (a) the patent's page in the USPTO PTAB E2E / PatentCenter system for US-6141611-A, (b) the Unified Patents portal page for US-6141611-A case list (not its "cited-by" list), and (c) CourtListener and PACER for any recently filed petition that post-dates the ODP ingest. Any hit should be checked for the patent number in the caption — if the caption reads "8,326,611" or names Jawbone Innovations, it is the wrong patent.
• Do not build a defense narrative around a PTAB record that does not exist. If the patent is ever asserted, the viable levers are (1) a fresh IPR on § 102/§ 103 grounds using the substantial body of pre-1998 vehicle-recorder art already cited on the face of this patent (e.g., US 4,281,354 Conte; US 4,533,962 Decker; US 4,789,904 Peterson; US 4,843,463 Michetti; US 4,992,943 McCracken; US 5,111,289 Lucas; US 5,928,210 Kalatel — the last being especially interesting as anticipatory-adjacent art on pre-trigger image buffering and transmission) plus the reference's own use as a § 103 combination anchor in later examination (WO 2006/052080 A1 cites it against claims 1–3); (2) § 112 enablement/written-description and indefiniteness attacks on the "meet or exceed the signature values" trigger and the undefined "definable period of time before and after the accident"; and (3) § 101 subject-matter challenges — in Alice step two terms, the claim 1 combination (generic camera + generic accelerometer + generic encryption + generic cellular transceiver) is a plausible § 101 target at the district court, and § 101 is not an available IPR ground (§ 311(b) limits IPR to § 102/§ 103), so that fight belongs in court or in a § 282 posture.
• No estoppel risk to manage. Because no petition exists, a defendant can select its best art and forum free of § 315(e) constraints, and need not worry about a co-defendant's prior IPR having burned a ground.

I'll research the assignment records before writing. Let me run several targeted queries.

Notable: AFIX Technologies lists "Phoenix Group" as a former name. Let me dig into that and try to find reel/frame data.

Two distinct "Phoenix Group" entities appear — I need to disambiguate. Let me search further.

⚠️ Corrections and flags before the analysis

Three things must be flagged before building on the earlier "Litigation summary" section:

1. Date inconsistency in the prior section. It states the patent has been "expired for roughly seven years as of today (April 26, 2026)." Today's date for this task is 2026-10-01. The patent's anticipated expiration is 2018-12-01 (per Google Patents legal events), so it has been expired ≈7 years 10 months. The substantive point (long-expired) stands; the date does not.
2. The prior section named "Phoenix Group Inc." as an assignee without disambiguating it. There are two unrelated U.S. companies using that name, and one of them is a fingerprint-biometrics vendor. This is material to the "original assignee" question and is analyzed below.
3. The supply-side record contains internal contradictions (spelling, priority date, and assignor identity) that I reproduce rather than silently normalize.

Assignment reconstruction — US 6,141,611

Verification status, stated up front: I was unable to retrieve reel/frame numbers or correspondent-of-record data for any link in this chain. My tool run surfaced Google Patents legal-events data (which carries no reel/frame) and secondary sources only; I could not reach and page through the USPTO Assignment Center record for patent 6,141,611 before my tool budget was exhausted. No reel/frame numbers appear below, because inventing them would be fabrication. Apply to all "Correspondent" fields: not retrieved. Verify at USPTO Patent Assignment Search.

Inventors

Unusual pattern — present, and worth naming precisely. The two inventors who can be placed were both affiliated with LMS, yet the application was assigned at filing to Phoenix Group Inc. LMS was simultaneously describing Phoenix Group Inc. (Hauppauge, NY) and Instrumented Sensor Technology as "business partners" supplying rugged-computer and high-speed-recorder hardware for the MACbox. Combined with the fact that every subsequent recorded transfer runs to LMS or its successor, and Mackey personally appears as assignor in 2001 and again in 2005, the record is consistent with LMS having been the real party in interest from day one, with Phoenix Group holding paper title as the manufacturing/contracting party.

Inventors departing within 12 months of filing: I found no evidence of inventor departure, and the contemporaneous 1999 evidence points the other way (Mackey and Brogan still with LMS roughly two months post-filing). Not present.

Original assignee

Name of record: "Phoenix Group Inc." — rendered "PHOENEX GROUP INC." in the Google Patents legal-events feed (almost certainly a typographical corruption in the indexed record; do not treat "Phoenex" as a distinct entity without checking the Assignment Center image).

Two candidate entities — unresolved:

Assessment: Candidate B is the better-supported original assignee on the merits of the technology and the contemporaneous LMS/NHTSA document. Candidate A is the entity that a patent-database name match attributes the patent to. I am flagging this as unresolved rather than picking one — the safest reading is that a database disambiguation error is possible in either direction, and the Assignment Center cover sheet (assignor address, entity execution language) is the only thing that settles it.

Product embodying the claims: Yes, in the LMS channel — the MACbox™ Mobile Accident Camera ("LMS BLACK BOX"), described by LMS as recording pre-impact and post-impact imagery and telemetry and uploading it via cellular/PCS/SMR to a central data vault. This maps onto claims 1–4 nearly element-for-element. LMS further reported a partnership with IBM and the Insurance Services Office, Inc. (ISO) to promote "a global auto-crash database," and NHTSA/NTSB were evaluating the device for regulation. The technology was subsequently tested in the Drive Atlanta project at Georgia Tech (per EPIC's EDR comment filing).

Current status of the original assignee: Candidate A (AFIX): operating, absorbed into Aware, Inc. (2020). Candidate B (Hauppauge PGI): unclear — no evidence of current operation, bankruptcy, or dissolution surfaced. I did not find a bankruptcy filing for either candidate.

Assignment timeline

Source: Google Patents legal-events feed for US09/201,663 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6141611/en). Reel/frame not available.

• 1998-12-01 (executed) / recorded 1998-12-01 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment (inventor → company, at filing)
  • Assignor: Christopher J. Brogan; John J. Mackey; Richard Pandolfi
  • Assignee: Phoenix Group Inc. [recorded as "PHOENEX GROUP INC."]
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Initial acquisition at filing — the inventors' rights go to a company two of them were not apparently employed by; see Inventors above.

• 2001-07-02 (executed/recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment / reassignment
  • Assignor: Mackey, John J. (only)
  • Assignee: Loss Management Services, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Transfer-in-substance to the operating MACbox company. Anomaly: only an individual inventor is named assignor, not Phoenix Group Inc. If Phoenix Group held the whole right, this entry is either (a) a recording of Mackey's individual/undivided interest only, or (b) an indexing truncation of the assignor list. The cover sheet must be read to distinguish these.

• 2005-08-29 (executed/recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment / reassignment
  • Assignor: Mackey, John J. (only)
  • Assignee: Loss Management Services, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Duplicate or confirmatory recording to the same assignee as the 2001 entry — the same Mackey-to-LMS pair is recorded twice, four years apart. Internal reorganization or cleanup, not an arm's-length sale.

• 2005-08-30 (executed/recorded) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Change of Name
  • Assignor: Loss Management Services, Inc.
  • Assignee: Safety Intelligence Systems Corporation
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Change of name only — no consideration, no change in beneficial ownership. Independently corroborated: EPIC's EDR comment filing states "SISC, which was formerly Loss Management Systems, Inc."

• 2018-12-01 — Anticipated expiration (not an assignment; included for chain completeness)

Family/divisional notes (application lineage, not assignments): US09/201,663 produced a divisional US09/698,131 (filed 2000-10-30), and a further application US10/164,708 (filed 2002-06-10) → US20030028298A1. Foreign siblings WO0028410A1, AU1812100A, EP1046099A4, CA2331481C. Each of these carries its own assignment record that I did not retrieve; do not assume the chain above propagates unrecorded.

Related entities I could not tie to this patent by any recorded assignment (do not treat as owners): L&M II / Logistics & Management II Inc. (introduced a "MACBOX" event data recorder in 2006) and DriveQuest Technologies (MACBOX III, NYC TLC pilot presentation). These indicate the technology line continued commercially, but no assignment to either appears in the record I retrieved.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6141611
    1998 : Application filed 1 Dec
         : Inventors assign to Phoenix Group Inc
    2000 : Patent issued 31 Oct
    2001 : Mackey interest recorded to Loss Management Services
    2005 : Mackey interest recorded again to LMS
         : LMS renamed Safety Intelligence Systems Corp
    2018 : Patent expired 1 Dec

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT. No link in the chain carries an IP/Licensing/Holdings/Ventures suffix. Each assignee is a trading-company name: "Loss Management Services" (insurance claims and loss control services) and "Safety Intelligence Systems" (event-data systems). The terminal assignee is documented as a single-location operating business in Lindenhurst, NY with an opening date of 1995 and an owner/principal (John Mackey) — the opposite of a registered-agent service address. No single-member DE/TX LLC appears anywhere in the chain.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT. Neither assignee, nor either "Phoenix Group" candidate, matches Acacia, Marathon Patent Group, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, or any Spangenberg-linked entity, and none surfaced via Unified Patents or RPX as a high-frequency plaintiff. The '611 patent appears on Unified Patents pages only as a cited prior-art reference (e.g., on US-10121204-B1 and US-9349112-B2), never on an assertion list.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR (data unavailable). This is the signal I most wanted and could not obtain. Indirect indicia of a single filer do exist: the Mackey → Loss Management Services pair is recorded twice, 2001-07-02 and 2005-08-29, and the 2005-08-30 change of name would most naturally be filed by the same agent a day later. That pattern suggests one recording firm handled the 2001/2005 cluster, but without a correspondent name I cannot state it as a finding. Explicitly: absent reel/frame and correspondent data, this signal must not be scored present.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT. The chain is 1998 → 2001 → 2005 → 2005. Only the two 2005 entries fall within 24 months of each other, and they are a one-day-apart housekeeping pair (duplicate Mackey recording, then change of name) — not chained LLCs. No shared-registered-agent pattern is discernible because no addresses or agents were retrieved.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT. There is no infringement suit naming this patent in the record I found (consistent with the prior Litigation summary), so no transfer can be pre-litigation. The 2005 recordings predate expiry by ~13 years and were never followed by assertion.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — UNCLEAR (no evidence found). No Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 proceeding for Phoenix Group Inc. (either candidate), Loss Management Services, Inc., or Safety Intelligence Systems Corporation appeared in my searches. The 2005 change of name is not a sale in bankruptcy, and the absence of a documented wind-down means I cannot rule a later insolvency in or out. Not scored as present.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT. Privateering requires an operating company to hand rights to an NPE for assertion against competitors. Here the movement is the reverse in substance: rights flowed toward the operating, product-shipping company (LMS/SISC). No NPE ever entered the chain, and there is no evidence of assertion against competitors.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT. The chain terminates at Safety Intelligence Systems Corporation, an operating event-data-recorder vendor — not RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. The patent was not neutralized by defensive aggregation; it simply expired on 2018-12-01.

Verdict

Insufficient data.

The record is not empty — four post-filing events are indexed — but every verdict-driving datapoint is missing: no reel/frame numbers, no correspondent-of-record, no assignment cover sheets, and an unresolved two-way ambiguity over which "Phoenix Group Inc." is the 1998 assignee (a Kansas fingerprint-biometrics vendor that PitchBook links to the patent, versus a Hauppauge, NY rugged-computer maker that the LMS/NHTSA MACbox document names as the product's hardware partner). That is a definitional stretch from the rubric's "no records, or only the original assignment," and I am naming the stretch rather than hiding it: all eight NPE signals scored not present, and the affirmative evidence runs against NPE status — the chain moves toward the product-shipping operating company, the terminal link is a documented change of name corroborated by an independent 2000s-era federal filing (EPIC/NHTSA), and the patent was never asserted and expired 2018-12-01. On the evidence available this is an operating-company-owned, non-asserted, clean-title chain, but I will not certify that without the reel/frame and correspondent fields.

To close the gap: pull the Assignment Center record for 6,141,611 and capture, for each of the four events, the reel/frame, the assignor entity address (which resolves the Phoenix Group question), and the correspondent name/address; then reconcile the 2001/2005 duplicate Mackey recordings against the recorded assignor on the 1998 filing.

Verify at: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/search/result?q=6141611 and the USPTO Assignment Center.

I have the authoritative patent text with the complete citations list. Let me verify key reference details before analyzing.

Let me verify a few more references where the wireless-transmission and event-capture elements are most relevant.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 6,141,611 ("Mobile vehicle accident data system")

0. Verification note and contradiction flag

• I worked from the authoritative full text you supplied (fetched from patents.google.com/patent/US6141611/en), which contains the complete "Patent Citations (20)" list. I did not rely on any similarly-numbered patent.
• I independently verified the disclosure content of five of the cited references via live search: US 5,926,210 (Kalatel/Hackett), US 4,281,354 (Conte), US 4,992,943 (McCracken), US 4,843,463 (Michetti), and US 5,223,844 (Auto-Trac/Mansell). My tool run was capped before I could verify the remaining references, so for those I rely on the citation record's own title/assignee strings plus general knowledge, and I say so explicitly below where the description is thin.
• Date contradiction to flag: the previously generated litigation summary in this file states "Today's … April 26, 2026," the current task header also says "April 26, 2026," but the system framing gives today as 2026-10-01 and the patent text was fetched 2026-09-24. This does not affect the § 102 analysis (all critical dates are 1981–1999), but the internal inconsistency should be reconciled before the file is finalized.
• Second relevant point (not a contradiction, but often mis-stated): the record shows two different dates. The '611 application's own filing date is 1998-12-01 (Appl. No. 09/201,663). The 1998-11-06 date that appears in the family table belongs to the PCT/WO 00/28410 and its family members (AU, EP, CA), not to the '611 filing. I have used 1998-12-01 as the '611 critical date below.

1. Element breakdown of the claims (the yardstick for § 102)

Claim 1 (independent method claim) requires, in combination:

• (A) a method for capturing vehicular accident data and automatically making it available to authorized parties;
• (B) recording/storing data significant to vehicle operation in an on-board memory;
• (C) that data including video data of a scene external to the vehicle;
• (D) sensing the vehicle's involvement in an accident;
• (E) in response, automatically encrypting the data;
• (F) automatically transmitting the encrypted data to a data storage server remote from the vehicle over a wireless link;
• (G) the encrypted data covering an interval preceding and following the accident.

Claim 2 adds (F1) coupling the encrypted data to a central database connected to a network and accessible by terminals.
Claim 3 adds (H) the encrypted data is re-recorded in encrypted form in the on-board memory after the accident.
Claim 4 adds (I) the data includes inputs from the vehicle's on-board computers.

Because claims 2–4 are all dependent on claim 1, a reference can only anticipate claims 2–4 if it discloses every element of claim 1 as well (pre-AIA § 102; In re Royka line of authority on dependent claims).

2. Critical-date framework

Applying this: US 5,926,210 (granted 1999-07-20), US 6,009,370 (granted 1999-12-28), and US 6,037,860 (granted 2000-03-14) are not § 102(a)/(b) art on their face — each qualifies only as § 102(e) art as of its earlier US filing date. (US 5,926,210 additionally has PCT publication WO 97/41686, published 1997-11-06, which is § 102(a)/(b) art and can be used against '611 on its own.)

3. The 20 cited references, with § 102 assessment

The record's citation list contains 20 entries, but US 5,223,844 A and US 5,223,844 B1 are the same disclosure (the B1 is a reexamination certificate), so there are 19 distinct disclosures.

4. The most relevant prior art, in ranked order

Rank 1 — US 5,926,210 (Hackett / Kalatel)

Why it matters: This is the single most damaging reference. Mapped against claim 1:

§ 102 conclusion: anticipates nothing, because of element (E). § 103 conclusion: with any secondary reference teaching on-board or link-level encryption of recorded vehicle data, claim 1 is a strong obviousness candidate; claims 3 and 4 then need only routine-optimization showings.

Rank 2 — US 4,281,354 (Conte)

The earliest disclosure of the conceptual heart of the invention: a continuous on-board video loop that is automatically frozen by an event sensor so that the moments preceding the event are preserved. Anticipates nothing claimed (no encryption, no wireless), but it is the anchor for arguing that the pre-event-buffer element (G) is old.

Rank 3 — US 4,992,943 (McCracken)

Best art against claim 4's added limitation. It both detects impacts and affirmatively polls the vehicle's on-board computer for status, storing impact-time and post-impact values continuously. On its own it cannot anticipate claim 4 because claim 4 incorporates all of claim 1, and McCracken has no external-scene video, no encryption, and no wireless link.

Rank 4 — US 5,223,844 (Mansell / Auto-Trac)

Best art against the automatic-wireless-transmission element (F): cellular transceiver, automatic event-triggered upload to a Control Center, GPS location insertion. No video, no encryption, no pre/post video buffer. Note the duplicate citation (the A patent and the B1 reexamination certificate) is a single disclosure, not two references.

Rank 5 — US 5,797,134 (Progressive) and US 4,843,463 (Michetti)

Progressive is relevant to the commercial/central-facility architecture; Michetti is relevant to capturing camera imagery together with vehicle operating parameters (speed, brakes, seat belt, ID, date/time) on a recorder in the vehicle.

Least relevant

US 5,353,023 (Mitsubishi navigation) and the two Hitachi control-unit references (US 5,794,165 / US 6,009,370) are background; they supply no claimed element beyond a generic on-board/vehicle-data-processing environment.

5. Bottom line on § 102

No one of the 20 (19 distinct) cited references anticipates any of claims 1–4 of US 6,141,611.

• The encryption limitation (E) of claim 1 is absent from every cited reference. No cited reference discloses automatic encryption, either before or after the accident.
• The wireless transmission limitation (F) is disclosed only by US 5,926,210 (timed to its 1995-07-28 filing / WO 97/41686 publication) and US 5,223,844 (1992-04-17 filing), and neither of those combines it with encryption.
• The pre- and post-accident interval (G) in combination with video (C) is best disclosed by US 5,926,210 and, for the pre-event half only, by US 4,281,354.
• Because claims 2–4 depend from claim 1, their added limitations — network-accessible central database (claim 2), re-recording encrypted data in on-board memory (claim 3), and on-board-computer inputs (claim 4) — cannot be anticipated by references that fail on claim 1's encryption and/or wireless elements.

Accordingly, the cited art supports an obviousness (§ 103) attack, not an anticipation (§ 102) attack. The natural primary combination is US 5,926,210 as the base (all of claim 1 except encryption), optionally with US 4,281,354 or US 4,992,943 for the pre-event buffer/on-board-computer elements, plus any encryption-teaching reference. This is consistent with the earlier section of this file, which found no assertion history for the patent and noted its expiration on 2018-12-01.

6. Caveats

1. Scope of verification. I verified the disclosure text of US 5,926,210, US 4,281,354, US 4,992,943, US 4,843,463 and US 5,223,844 by live search. Descriptions of the remaining references are drawn from the citation record's titles/assignees plus general knowledge; I did not confirm their full specifications, so the "(B)/(D) partial" characterizations for items 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 15 are provisional. A definitive chart should be built from the granted specifications at patentimages/Google Patents.
2. § 102(e) mechanics. My treatment of US 5,926,210, US 6,009,370 and US 6,037,860 as § 102(e)-only art assumes the '611 was entitled to a 1998-12-01 invention date with no earlier § 119/§ 120 benefit. If an earlier invention date were established, the date analysis would shift; note WO 97/41686 independently supplies § 102(a)/(b) art for the Kalatel disclosure regardless.
3. Dependent-claim rule. I have applied the strict rule that a dependent claim is only anticipated where the reference discloses all limitations the claim incorporates by reference. If a reader instead treats the dependent claims' added limitations in isolation, then US 4,992,943 becomes relevant to claim 4 and US 5,926,210 to claims 1–3-except-encryption; but that is not the correct § 102 framing.
4. Forward citations excluded. The record lists 275/683 "Cited By" documents (DriveCam/Lytx, SmartDrive, State Farm, Allstate, etc.). Those are later patents citing '611; they are not prior art to '611 and are excluded here.

I'll ground the obviousness analysis in what the cited prior art actually discloses, so let me verify the key references rather than rely on memory.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent 6,141,611 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope note (read first). This analysis uses only the references in the "Prior Art"/Citations section of the '611 record you supplied (the 19–20 examiner-cited U.S. patents). I verified the actual disclosure of the four load-bearing references (Hackett, Monroe, Mansell, McCracken, plus McMillan/Progressive) against live full text. For the remaining cited references I rely on their titles, classification codes, and their appearance in other patents' "References Cited" lists — I did not open their full texts, and I say so where it matters. This is an analytic assessment, not a legal opinion on validity; no §103 rejection is being sustained or defended here.

I also note one tension with the earlier-generated sections that becomes material in this section: the prior work flagged the 1998-12-01 vs. 1998-11-06 priority-date ambiguity but treated it as immaterial. It is not immaterial for §103. The Kalatel reference's PCT publication (WO 1997/41686, published 1997-11-06) sits exactly one year before 1998-11-06 and one year + 25 days before 1998-12-01. So whether Kalatel's PCT publication is §102(b) art or only §102(a)/(e) art turns on that unresolved date. It is prior art either way, but the distinction matters if anyone argues about the critical date. I flag this rather than resolve it.

1. Element-by-element map of claim 1 to the cited art

Claim-by-claim: Claim 4 ("data includes inputs from a vehicle's on board computers") is squarely met by McCracken's express polling of on-board computer 30 and by McMillan's OBD-II / SAE-J1978 connection to vehicle data bus 304. Claim 2 ("coupling said encrypted data from said wireless link to a central data base connected to a network and accessible by terminals") is met in substance by Mansell's Control Center and Monroe's ground tracking station, though neither is described as an Internet/intranet-accessible database in the exact terms of the '611 spec. Claim 3 (re-recording the encrypted data in encrypted form in on-board memory) has no direct antecedent in the cited set, but is a narrow storage-order step over Hackett's random-access, overwrite-capable non-volatile store.

2. Primary combination rendering claim 1 obvious

Hackett (US 5,926,210) + Mansell (US 5,223,844) + McCracken (US 4,992,943), with Monroe (US 5,798,458) as a secondary teaching.

• Hackett supplies elements (a) external-scene video, (b) on-board memory, (c) impact-triggered capture, (d) the pre-/post-event window, and (e) automatic wireless push of the images to a remote location on the trigger. This is the closest art and it alone accounts for roughly five of the six claim-1 concepts.
• Mansell supplies the specific wireless architecture the '611 contemplates — a cellular telephone transmitter in a hidden mobile unit that automatically inserts event/condition and location information and transmits to a Control Center, plus a store-and-forward-on-failure mode and a backup-power arrangement.
• McCracken supplies the "data significant to the operation of the vehicle" / on-board-computer input dimension, the threshold-based impact sensor, the continuous pre-impact buffer in a non-volatile memory, and the post-impact continuation ("at subsequent predetermined intervals following the impact").
• Monroe supplies the aircraft analogue in which (i) an on-board catastrophic-event detector automatically activates a radio link to a ground station, and (ii) the ground station can retrieve stored and near-real-time data — reinforcing that automatic remote retrieval of event data was a known, cross-domain solution.

Motivation to combine (KSR, 550 U.S. 398 (2007)):

1. Express admission in the '611 specification. The Background states that prior proposals existed "for on-board logging of vehicular data generally, and data relevant to vehicular accidents, in particular," and that they fail only because they "require a person to act after an accident in order to make the accident data available." That is an applicant-admitted statement that everything except automation of availability was known. It confines the asserted advance to a single design choice — automate the retrieval — which Hackett already made.
2. Same field of endeavor / analogous art. Hackett, Peterson, Lucas, Michetti, McCracken, Decker, Ousborne and Nicol are all vehicular event-recording or driver/vehicle monitoring systems. Monroe is aircraft, but it is reasonably pertinent to the problem of capturing a vehicular catastrophic event for post-event reconstruction and evidentiary use — the exact problem the '611 states it solves.
3. Predictable combination of familiar elements. Combining a video recorder with a parametric vehicle-data logger is the aggregation of two known recording functions, each of which the cited art already performed in a vehicle, "according to known methods." KSR: "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results."
4. Market/industry pressure — supplied by a cited reference. McMillan (Progressive, US 5,797,134) states the problem in the insurer's own words: conventional data "is not verifiable," has "minimal evidential value," and there is a "long-felt need" for data "having a highly relevant evidential value." It also expressly teaches the hardware: on-board computer monitoring via SAE-J1978/OBD-II connector to vehicle data bus 304, GPS antenna 312, and a communications link to a central control station "through the cellular telephone, radio, satellite or other wireless communication system 314," with immediate uplink of trigger-event information. That reference is a direct motivation to route vehicle event data wirelessly to a central station for insurance evaluation — the '611's own stated purpose.
5. Design incentive to centralize. Once Hackett's on-board record is wirelessly pushed, routing it to a central station with remote access (Mansell; Monroe; McMillan) is the natural, predictable next step, and Monroe confirms that near-real-time ground-station interrogation of on-board event data was known.

3. Alternative/stacked combinations

One drafting point worth recording: claim 2 does not actually recite an authorization/access-control limitation. The "proper authorization code" language appears only in the specification. So claim 2's patentable weight over claim 1 is thin — it adds "a central data base connected to a network and accessible by terminals," which Mansell's and Monroe's ground stations approach.

4. The encryption limitation — the one real gap, and how it would be argued

No reference in the cited set discloses encrypting the data, still less doing so automatically in response to an accident. On the face of the record supplied, a §103 rejection built only from these 19–20 references does not reach "automatically encrypting said data."

How that gap would likely be closed or contested:

• For obviousness (KSR-style rationale): encryption of data transmitted over an unsecured commercial wireless link (cellular) was a well-known technique by the 1998 filing date; the '611 specification itself treats encryption as an off-the-shelf application program ("an encryption application program 36"), i.e., not the point of novelty. KSR permits the conclusion that using a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way is obvious "unless its actual application is beyond [the artisan's] skill." Motivation is supplied by the specification's own stated purpose — "the system user … use the data as evidence" and two levels of tamper protection — which maps directly to authentication/confidentiality of evidence.
• Against obviousness: that rationale still requires either (a) a reference teaching encryption of wirelessly transmitted vehicular/event data, or (b) an Official Notice-type finding that such encryption was routine. Neither is present in the cited list. A challenger relying solely on the references on the face of the '611 would likely need to add art from the wireless-security or cryptographic-evidence literature.
• Uncertainty flag: I did not run a search for encryption/cryptographic-evidence prior art (my tool run was capped). My statement that the cited set lacks an encryption teaching is based on the reference list and the four full texts I verified — not on a comprehensive search of the '611's full prosecution file or of non-patent literature.

5. Objective indicia and the counterweights

• Secondary considerations (to be weighed, not dismissed). Possible evidence: commercial embodiment (the "MACBOX" product associated with Safety Intelligence Systems Corp. — from the earlier section's Manda listing), and the specification's framing of the automation gap as a long-felt need. But nexus is weak: whatever the '611's commercial success, the automation that supposedly met the long-felt need was already disclosed by Hackett (impact-triggered automatic wireless transfer of pre-/post-alarm images) and Monroe (event-activated radio link to a ground station). Objective indicia attach to the claimed advance, and if the only distinguishing feature is encryption, the indicia would have to be tied to encryption to carry weight.
• No unexpected results are described. The specification claims the record can "be used as evidence," which is an expected benefit of authenticated/encrypted capture, not an unexpected one.
• Preamble: "for capturing vehicular accident data and automatically making it available to authorized parties" reads as a statement of intended use and would generally not be treated as limiting, so it adds nothing against the combinations above.

6. Bottom line

• Claim 1 — the strongest obviousness case is Hackett + Mansell + McCracken (+ Monroe). Every limitation except "automatically encrypting" is disclosed in the cited set, and the '611's own Background concedes the rest of the field. The claim reduces to automating a retrieval that Hackett had already automated, plus encryption.
• Claims 2 and 4 — highly vulnerable. Claim 4 is met almost verbatim by McCracken's on-board-computer polling (and McMillan's OBD-II/DIN-bus connection); claim 2 is met in substance by Mansell's/Monroe's central stations.
• Claim 3 — the narrowest step (re-recording encrypted data into on-board memory); obvious over Hackett's on-board store if the encryption limitation is otherwise supplied.
• The pivot is "automatically encrypting." It is the only limitation with no disclosed antecedent in the cited art. Whether the '611 survives a §103 challenge turns less on the vehicle-recording architecture — which is thoroughly anticipated in concept by the art the examiner cited — than on whether encryption of the wireless accident record is treated as a routine, motivated application of a known technique or as an untaught addition.

Verification gaps to close before relying on this: (1) full text of Peterson '904, Lucas '289, Michetti '463, Decker '962, Ousborne '182, Nicol '273, and the two Hitachi references; (2) the '611's actual USPTO prosecution file to see what the examiner did and did not argue; (3) a dedicated search of wireless-security/cryptographic-evidence art dated before 1998-12-01; (4) resolution of the 1998-11-06 vs. 1998-12-01 date, which controls whether Kalatel's WO 1997/41686 publication is §102(b) or §102(a)/(e) art.

Sources used: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6141611](/patent/US6141611)/en · https://patents.google.com/patent/US5926210 · https://patents.google.com/patent/US5798458 · https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5223844A](/patent/US5223844A)/en · https://patents.google.com/patent/[US4992943A](/patent/US4992943A) · https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5797134A](/patent/US5797134A)/en · WO 1997/41686 (Kalatel PCT) at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/dc/aa/04/d1a2ffd9cfe959/WO1997041686A1.pdf