US 6216129

I'll verify the current status and check for any litigation/docket activity, then summarize.

Let me check specifically for litigation/docket history and current ownership.

Summary: US Patent 6,216,129 B1

Sourcing note / uncertainty flag: I do not have direct authenticated access to USPTO Patent Center/PAIR or to the CAFC docket system in this session. My findings below are grounded in the authoritative full patent text supplied in the prompt (fetched from Google Patents), cross-checked against Justia, FreePatentsOnline, Unified Patents, and uspto.report listings. Where I could not confirm something authoritatively, I say so explicitly.

Bibliographic data (confirmed)

Related family members include WO 2000033228A1, EP 1133745A4, CA 2353393A1, AU 768680B2, JP 2002-531897A; a continuation, US 6,560,578 B2; and continuation-in-part filings US 2002/0194058A1 and US 2003/0004810A1.

Abstract (as granted)

An advertisement selection system in which vectors describing an actual or hypothetical market for a product, or a desired viewing audience, can be determined. An ad characterization vector is transmitted along with a consumer ID. The consumer ID is used to retrieve a consumer characterization vector, which is correlated with the ad characterization vector to determine the suitability of the advertisement to the consumer. The consumer characterization vector describes statistical information about the consumer's demographics and product purchase preferences, developed from previous purchases or viewing habits. A price for displaying the advertisement can be determined based on the correlation result.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 — Method for selecting a targeted ad (scalar-product correlation).
Receive an ad profile for each of several advertisements, where each ad profile describes discretionary characteristics of an intended target market (i.e., a target market that need not correspond to any actual existing market or single purchasing segment). Retrieve the consumer's profile, which was generated from detailed purchase records spanning multiple point-of-sale transactions. Compute a correlation factor as the scalar (dot) product of the consumer profile and the ad profile. Select the advertisement to present based on that correlation factor.

Claim 17 — Method for selecting a targeted ad (multi-transaction, multi-point-of-sale).
Same core idea, framed around comparing a consumer profile generated from multiple transactions (including purchases from multiple points-of-sale) against each ad profile, again computing the correlation factor as a scalar product and selecting the ad accordingly.

Claim 22 — Computer system.
A system (storage medium plus means-plus-function elements) for selecting a targeted advertisement by measuring similarity between a consumer profile generated from detailed purchase records (including multiple point-of-sale transactions) and each ad profile; includes means for receiving the ad profile, retrieving the consumer profile, calculating the correlation factor as a scalar product, and selecting the targeted ad in response.

Claim 30 — Computer program on a computer-readable medium.
Source-code segments implementing the same pipeline: receive an ad profile, retrieve the consumer profile (built from multiple transactions including purchases at multiple points-of-sale), calculate the correlation factor as a scalar product, and select the targeted advertisement responsive to that calculation. Claim 31 depends on claim 30 and adds transmission of the correlation factor to advertisers.

Notable dependent-claim features:

• Demographic-only correlation (claim 2) and product-preference-only correlation (claim 3)
• Price as a function of correlation (claim 4), including increasing monotonic pricing (claim 5, content/opportunity-provider model) and decreasing monotonic pricing (claim 6, consumer-as-profiler model)
• Product indicators ("previously purchased / never purchased / only purchases") used as a gate, with correlation performed only if purchase records support the indicator (claims 7–9)
• Detailed purchase records accumulated in an external database (claim 10) and across multiple locations (claim 11)
• Delivery via television/telecommunications access system (claims 12–14) or mail (claim 15); vector form for profiles (claim 16)
• Inclusion of television viewing transactions among the transactions (claim 18); detailed transaction record over a predetermined interval (claim 19); heuristic rules deriving probabilistic demographics (claim 20); storing and generating the transaction record (claim 21); pricing function retrieval (claim 25); transmission media (claims 26–28); heuristic-rule-based profile generation in the system claim (claim 29)

Docket / litigation check

I found no evidence of any CAFC 2026 docket or Federal Circuit appeal involving US 6,216,129, and no record of an IPR or PGR filed against it. The only "6216129" hits in PTAB-related documents I retrieved were prior-art citation lists in third-party proceedings (e.g., an exhibit listing '6216129' among cited patent numbers in IPR2022-01505, Samsung v. Intent IQ) — i.e., the patent appearing as a reference, not as the subject patent.

Caution/uncertainty: Because I am searching via general web search rather than a live, authenticated USPTO Patent Center or CAFC docket query, this absence of litigation activity should be treated as "not found in my search," not as a definitive negative. Given the patent expired around 2018-12-03 (with a six-year post-expiration damages lookback window under 35 U.S.C. § 286), any enforcement activity would have had to occur before that window closed; none surfaced.

Practical takeaway

US 6,216,129 is an early (1999-filed) targeted-advertising patent from Expanse Networks (now Prime Research Alliance E, LLC). Its core contribution is the discretionary target market concept — advertisers can specify an arbitrary, even hypothetical, target market in an ad characterization vector, and the system correlates it against a purchase-derived consumer profile using a simple scalar/dot product, with optional correlation-based pricing. It is expired and appears free of appellate or PTAB challenge.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 6216129 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search litigation databases more specifically for this patent.

Let me try the Unified Patents litigation portal and other litigation-specific sources directly.

Litigation Search Results for US Patent 6,216,129

Bottom line up front: Based on the searches I was able to complete, I could not confirm any district court litigation in which US 6,216,129 was the asserted patent. I must flag two important caveats: (1) I reached my search-step limit before exhausting sources, and (2) the patent's Google Patents page lists no "Litigation" events, which is a meaningful negative signal given that Google Patents integrates Unified Patents'/Maxval's district-court and PTAB data.

What the patent is (grounding)

• Patent: US 6,216,129 B1 — "Advertisement selection system supporting discretionary target market characteristics"
• Inventor: Charles A. Eldering
• Original assignee: Expanse Networks, Inc.; later Prime Research Alliance E., Inc., then Prime Research Alliance E, LLC (current)
• App. No.: 09/268,526 | Filed: 1999-03-12 | Priority: 1998-12-03 | Granted: 2001-04-10
• Status: Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 2018-12-03)
• Family: continuation US 6,560,578 B2; parent US 6,457,010 B1 (Ser. No. 09/205,653); siblings US 6,298,348 and US 6,324,519
• Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6216129/en

What my searches actually returned

The hits for "6216129" were prior-art citations in PTAB proceedings, not litigation over the '129 patent itself:

1. IPR2022-01505 — Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. v. Intent IQ LLC (PTAB). The '129 patent appears in the petitioner's prior-art search exhibit. This is a case about Intent IQ's patent; US 6,216,129 is cited as prior art, not asserted. Source: docketalarm.com case file for IPR2022-01505.
2. A PTACTS/USPTO petition document (a prior-art search string listing "5948061, 6216129, 6327574…") — again, the patent appears in a prior-art search log, not as an asserted patent.
3. Justia/Google Patents pages for later patents (e.g., US 9,071,886; US 9,873,052; US 7,698,236) that cite the '129 patent as references.
4. Unified Patents Portal pages for unrelated patents (US 7,698,236; US 10,321,198) that reference the '129 patent only in citation/assignee listings.

None of these constitute a lawsuit asserting US 6,216,129.

Assessment

• No confirmed plaintiff/defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome can be reported, because I did not locate any case where US 6,216,129 was asserted.
• The strongest available negative evidence is the absence of any litigation event on the patent's Google Patents events timeline (Google Patents integrates Unified Patents/Maxval district-court and PTAB data — per Unified's own announcement: https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2019/3/7/google-patents-integrates-unifieds-ptab-and-district-court-litigation-data).

Honest limitations

• I was unable to complete a full pass of litigation-specific databases (Unified Patents portal caselist, PACER, CAFC docket search, RPX/Docket Alarm "asserted patent" queries) before hitting my tool-call limit.
• I have no high-confidence recollection of a specific case asserting the '129 patent, and I will not fabricate plaintiff/defendant/case-number data. If the Prime Research Alliance E, LLC portfolio (including sibling patents such as US 6,457,010, US 6,560,578, or US 6,298,348) was asserted at some point, the '129 patent may or may not have been among the asserted claims — I did not verify this.

Recommendation: To obtain a definitive answer, query PACER/CAFC by the specific patent number and check the Unified Patents litigation caselist directly (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) filtered on Prime Research Alliance E, LLC / Expanse Networks, Inc. I can run those targeted queries if you re-enable more search steps.

I'll verify the structured data against live sources before reporting.

Let me check the CBM angle (G06Q patents were prime CBM targets) and whether the sibling patents in this family drew IPRs.

Let me check for any family-wide PTAB activity and defensive-aggregator involvement.

PTAB / AIA Trial Analysis — US Patent 6,216,129 B1

Patent: US 6,216,129 B1 — "Advertisement selection system supporting discretionary target market characteristics"
Patent Owner (current): Prime Research Alliance E, LLC (recorded 2019-08-19; predecessor Prime Research Alliance E., Inc., recorded 2004-09-17)
Inventor: Charles A. Eldering | App. No. 09/268,526 | Filed: 1999-03-12 | Priority: 1998-12-03 | Granted: 2001-04-10
Status: Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 2018-12-03)
Source of record: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6216129/en

Proceedings overview

Zero (0) AIA trial proceedings — no IPR, no PGR, and no CBM — have ever been filed against US 6,216,129; the structured USPTO Open Data Portal ("PTAB proceedings on file") block returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest, and my independent web search of PTAB petition documents, Final Written Decisions, and third-party trial trackers surfaced nothing to the contrary. Breakdown by status is therefore: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0 — and the bottom-line defensive posture is the unusual hybrid of "all 31 claims are UNTESTED at the Board (never challenged, so no claim is canceled but also no claim is validated) — and, critically, the patent expired on 2018-12-03, so no new infringement is possible and any live dispute is a past-damages case only."

Structured proceedings table

Total AIA trials on file: 0.

No per-proceeding detail is available — and that is the finding

The output template asks for a section per proceeding, most-impactful first. There are no proceedings to order. I will not generate proceeding numbers, panels, or dispositions that do not exist. What follows instead is (a) the negative evidence I actually gathered, and (b) the practitioner's read on why this patent is a PTAB blank slate.

Negative evidence actually observed

1. The Google Patents events timeline for US 6,216,129 lists assignment, priority, and expiration events only — no "Litigation" or "IPR/PTAB" event. Google Patents ingests Unified Patents' PTAB and district-court litigation data (Unified's own announcement: https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2019/3/7/google-patents-integrates-unifieds-ptab-and-district-court-litigation-data), so the absence of an event is a meaningful, if not dispositive, negative signal. Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6216129/en
2. The only "6216129" hits in PTAB-adjacent documents are prior-art citation lists, not petitions or decisions. Specifically:
   • A petitioner exhibit in IPR2022-01505, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. v. Intent IQ LLC, contains a Derwent/USPAT search-strategy table listing US-6216129 among retrieved references (Exhibit 1002 search history). The '129 patent is cited art in someone else's case, not the challenged patent. Source: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01505/Samsung_Electronics_Co._Ltd._v._Intent_IQ_LLC/docs/09-07-2022-Petitioner/Exhibit-1002-Exhibit_1002.pdf
   • A PTACTS/USPTO petition document contains a prior-art search string (('5948061') or ('6216129') or ('6327574') or ('6366298') or ('0677986')) — again a search log, not a challenge to the '129 patent. Source: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1549592](/patent/1549592)/download-documents
   • A Unified Patents Portal page for the sibling patent US 6,615,039 lists Prime Research Alliance E Inc / Expanse Networks Inc as assignees and shows that patent's own prior art — it is not a proceeding against the '129 patent. Source: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-[6615039](/patent/6615039)-B1
3. No Final Written Decision naming US 6,216,129 as the challenged patent was located. Searches for a FWD with canceled claims returned nothing bearing on this patent.

Uncertainty flags (stated plainly): I could not run a live, authenticated PTAB E2E / USPTO Patent Center query in this session, and my searches were bounded. Treat the above as "no proceeding found," corroborated by an authoritative structured feed, rather than as a certified exhaustive negative. If a petition was filed and denied institution in a manner that never generated an indexed decision, the structured ODP block is the better source and it reports none.

Why this patent has no PTAB history — the practitioner's read

This is not an accident of searching; it is a structurally predictable outcome, and understanding why is directly useful to a defendant:

1. No assertion, no IPR. IPRs are overwhelmingly filed in response to service of an infringement complaint. The prior litigation analysis in this matter found no confirmed district-court case asserting the '129 patent. With no accused infringer and no § 315(b) trigger, the natural petitioner population was empty.
2. The CBM window opened and closed without a target. The '129 patent issued 2001-04-10 and is a pre-AIA (first-to-invent) patent, which means PGR was statutorily unavailable (PGR is limited to first-inventor-to-file patents under AIA § 6(f)). The only AIA route with a broader statutory-basis menu — CBM review — was available under AIA § 18 only for petitions filed between 2012-09-16 and the program's sunset on 2020-09-16, and CBM requires that the petitioner have been sued for or charged with infringement. A G06Q30/02 targeted-advertising patent with an expired-in-2018 term and no assertion history was never going to generate a CBM petitioner.
3. IPR was technically available for ~17 years (from ~2002-01-10) and simply went unused. That is the strongest evidence that the patent was never commercially asserted in a way that put an accused infringer at risk. (See the companion litigation analysis in this matter, which likewise found no confirmed assertion.)

Strategic summary

Claim status — CANCELED vs. SUSTAINED vs. UNTESTED. All 31 claims (independent claims 1, 17, 22, and 30, plus dependents 2–16, 18–21, 23–29, and 31) are UNTESTED. Not one claim has been canceled, disclaimed, amended, or held unpatentable by the Board; conversely, not one claim has survived an IPR and thus nothing here has been hardened by adversarial testing. That cuts both ways: the patent owner cannot point to a PTAB win as evidence of strength, and a defendant cannot point to a PTAB loss as evidence of weakness. The claims stand exactly as granted, subject to whatever the art shows in district court or in a fresh IPR. Note that the patent has expired, so claim amendments and substitute claims are moot; the claims are frozen as issued. For an expired patent the Board constructs claims under the Phillips framework rather than the amendment-oriented BRI standard, since there is no prospect of amendment — a defendant's claim-construction posture should be built on that footing.

Estoppel landscape — there is none, and that is a rare luxury. Because no petitioner ever filed, § 315(e)(2) estoppel has never attached to anyone, and there is no petitioner-privity web to untangle. In practical terms:

• No prior-art ground is foreclosed by IPR estoppel. Every § 102/§ 103 ground based on patents and printed publications remains fully available in a district-court invalidity case and in a fresh IPR petition.
• The live bar is § 315(b), not § 315(e). Any defendant served with a complaint alleging infringement of the '129 patent more than one year before filing an IPR petition is time-barred from petitioning. Since the patent expired 2018-12-03, service on a past-damages theory would start that clock; a defendant should calendar the § 315(b) date immediately on receipt of any complaint or licensing demand.
• CBM is gone (sunset 2020-09-16) and PGR never applied (pre-AIA patent). For a defendant today, IPR is the only AIA trial vehicle. That narrows you to § 102 and § 103 grounds on patents and printed publications — no § 101 or § 112 attacks at the Board on this patent.

Pattern signals. No serial-petitioner pattern exists (there is only one potential petitioner population, and it never acted). No PTAB appeals by the patent owner exist, because there is nothing to appeal — no FWD, no institution decision, no denial of institution. There is no evidence that a defensive aggregator such as Unified Patents ever targeted the '129 patent; the Unified hits I found are (a) a Unified Portal patent page for the sibling US 6,615,039, and (b) Unified's unrelated 2025 ex parte reexamination of US 8,271,315 (Keysoft) — a different purchase-data-targeted-advertising patent owned by a different NPE, which Unified challenged via reexamination, not IPR (source: https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2025/4/1/keysoft-advertising-patent-challenge-instituted). That Keysoft datapoint is instructive context, not a proceeding against your patent: it shows that in this exact technology space, challengers have sometimes chosen ex parte reexamination as the cheaper tool — an option that, notably, remains available against the '129 patent and carries no § 315(b) one-year bar and no estoppel.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant facing assertion of US 6,216,129:

• There is no FWD to point to, because there has never been a proceeding. Do not tell a court or an adversary that any claim of the '129 patent has been canceled — that statement would be false, and the structured USPTO data affirmatively shows zero AIA trials. Your validity case must be built from scratch.
• Build the § 102/§ 103 record yourself, and do it early. The patent's own specification hands you a road map of the prior art it distinguishes: U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,210 (Goldhaber & Fitts, "Attention Brokerage"), U.S. Pat. No. 5,515,098 (Carles, "System and method for selectively distributing commercial messages over a communications network"), and U.S. Pat. No. 5,724,521 (Dedrick, "Method and apparatus for providing electronic advertisements to end users in a consumer best-fit pricing manner") are all cited on the face of the '129 patent as the state of the art it improves upon. Those are the natural starting references for an obviousness combination against the scalar-product-correlation limitation of claims 1, 17, 22, and 30.
• Watch the § 315(b) clock. If you have already been served, the one-year window to petition for IPR is running; if you have not been served and are only responding to a demand letter, a declaratory-judgment action is not the right trigger for § 315(b) — but confirm your posture with counsel before relying on that.
• Consider ex parte reexamination as a lower-cost, no-estoppel, no-time-bar alternative, particularly given that the patent is expired and its claims are frozen. The Keysoft reexamination above is a live illustration of that strategy in this technology zone: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90019835
• Scope the exposure to the expired term. Under 35 U.S.C. § 286, past damages reach back only six years from filing, i.e., no earlier than roughly 2019-09-30 relative to today's date (2026-09-30) — and any accused conduct after 2018-12-03 falls outside the patent term entirely. The damages tail on this patent is now very short.

If you are monitoring rather than defending: The absence of PTAB activity is itself the signal. Well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs; the '129 patent's clean PTAB record, combined with its 2018 expiration and the absence of any confirmed assertion, indicates a patent that was never a live litigation threat. It remains citable as prior art against later ad-targeting patents — as it is in Samsung v. Intent IQ, IPR2022-01505 — and that is likely its most enduring relevance.

Where to verify independently (I could not run authenticated queries here):

• PTAB E2E / PTAB Center: https://ptab.uspto.gov
• PTAB Decisions (USPTO Developer Portal / API): https://developer.uspto.gov/ptab-web/
• Unified Patents litigation caselist, filtered on Prime Research Alliance E, LLC / Expanse Networks, Inc.: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist
• CourtListener (Federal Circuit docket, for any appeal that might later arise): https://www.courtlistener.com
• USPTO Open Data Portal (the authoritative source for the zero-proceeding finding above)

Sourcing note and correction to the prior sections. My findings here are consistent with — and reinforce — the prior "PTAB proceedings on file" default and the prior litigation sections' conclusion of no confirmed assertion. I cannot confirm the prior sections' reference to US 6,298,348 and US 6,324,519 as "siblings": US 6,324,519 is "Advertisement auction system" (Expanse Networks) and US 6,298,348 is "Consumer profiling system" (Expanse Networks) — both filed 1999-03-12, i.e., co-pending same-day relatives rather than continuation family members, and I did not verify whether either drew IPR activity. I likewise found no IPR against the direct continuation US 6,560,578 B2 or the parent US 6,457,010 B1, but I flag that as search-bounded rather than exhaustive. No CAFC appeal touching US 6,216,129 was located, which follows necessarily from there being no PTAB or district-court proceeding to appeal.

I'll research the assignment chain for US 6,216,129, focusing on reel/frame numbers and correspondents.

I need the actual reel/frame records. Let me dig into assignment-specific sources.

Sourcing note (read first)

I must be explicit about a gap. I could not retrieve the underlying Assignment Center records (reel/frame) or the recorded correspondent for US 6,216,129 in this session — my tool-call budget was exhausted before I could pull the individual Abstract of Title entries from https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 6,216,129) or the legacy index at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html.

What I can state with confidence is the set of recorded assignment events, which are reproduced verbatim in the authoritative patent text supplied in this prompt (Google Patents "Legal Events / Reassignment" timeline, which is populated from USPTO assignment data). Those events give assignor/assignee/conveyance description but not reel/frame or correspondent. I am not inventing reel numbers or attorney names to fill that gap — where a field is unknown I say so. One correspondent-adjacent data point is verified: the attorney/agent of record on the face of the patent is Carlineo, Spicer & Kee, LLC (Pipersville, PA, US) (source: https://www.freepatentsonline.com/6216129.html). That is prosecution counsel, not necessarily the assignment correspondent; I flag it as a lead only.

Inventors

Pattern notes:

• Single inventor, not a team. Unlike the prompt's hypothesized "all inventors departing within 12 months" red flag, there is only one inventor, so that signal cannot arise. Eldering remained the animating figure across the whole family — he is the named inventor on the continuation US 6,560,578 B2 (filed 2001-01-31) and on the 2002 and 2007 continuations (US 2003/0004810 A1, US 2002/0194058 A1, US 2008/0052171 A1).
• Eldering's residence (Doylestown, PA) is in the same small geographic area as the prosecution firm of record (Pipersville, PA), which is consistent with a founder-inventor working with a local boutique firm rather than a large corporate IP department. This is not evidence of an NPE pattern; it is evidence that this was a startup's patent, not a big-company filing.
• The assignment was executed/recorded on the filing date (1999-03-12) — a clean founder/employment assignment. There is no gap between filing and assignment, which argues against any dispute over inventorship or ownership at filing.

Original assignee

Entity named on the issued patent: per Google Patents bibliographic data, Original Assignee: Expanse Networks, Inc.; the "Current Assignee" field lists Prime Research Alliance E Inc (i.e., the post-2004 holder). Note a naming discrepancy worth flagging: the first recorded assignment (1999-03-12) names "Telecom Partners Inc.", while the second (2000-08-24) names the assignor as "Telecom Partners Ltd." (Inc. vs. Ltd.). Either a name change, a re-incorporation, or a family of related entities is in play between those two dates. I could not verify which.

Primary line of business: Expanse Networks was an early targeted-advertising / audience-measurement company — the party that built the subscriber/consumer characterization technology described in the patent (profiling consumers from set-top viewing and point-of-sale purchase data). It is the common assignee across a whole family of late-1990s ad-targeting patents (e.g., US 6,457,010; US 6,298,348; US 6,324,519; US 6,614,394; US 6,820,277; US 6,615,039), which is consistent with a venture-funded startup holding a broad portfolio in a then-emerging field.

Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Unclear from the record. The patent describes a distributed implementation across a consumer profile server, an ad server, and point-of-purchase feeds (FIGS. 1A/1B, FIG. 5), but I found no evidence of a commercial Expanse Networks product in this session, and I will not assert one.

Current status: I could not confirm whether Expanse Networks was acquired, dissolved, or went through bankruptcy. Its pattern — a comprehensive portfolio transfer to a British Virgin Islands corporation in 2004 and no later filings under its own name in this family — is consistent with a wind-down or asset sale, but that is inference, not evidence, and I flag it as unresolved.

Assignment timeline

All four events below are drawn from the Google Patents legal-events/reassignment record embedded in the authoritative patent text. Reel/frame were not retrievable; correspondent was not retrievable. I list them in recorded order.

• 1999-03-12 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment ("Assignment of Assignors Interest — see document for details")
  • Assignor: Charles A. Eldering (inventor)
  • Assignee: Telecom Partners Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved. Lead only: prosecution counsel of record on the issued patent is Carlineo, Spicer & Kee, LLC, Pipersville, PA.
  • Context: Founder/inventor assignment of rights to his own venture, recorded on the filing date. Internal.

• 2000-08-24 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment ("Assignment of Assignors Interest")
  • Assignor: Telecom Partners Ltd.
  • Assignee: Expanse Networks, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: Internal transfer/reorganization between affiliated entities (roughly 17 months after the first link); likely a name change or re-incorporation given the Inc./Ltd. discrepancy.

• 2004-09-17 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: Expanse Networks, Inc.
  • Assignee: Prime Research Alliance E., Inc., a corporation of the British Virgin Islands
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: Portfolio transfer away from the operating company to a foreign-incorporated, non-operating holder — the pivotal event in this chain. This is the point at which the patent stops being held by the entity that developed the technology.

• 2019-08-19 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Re-domestication and entity conversion (i.e., a corporate form change; no change in beneficial ownership)
  • Assignor: Prime Research Alliance E., Inc.
  • Assignee: Prime Research Alliance E, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: Housekeeping conversion of the holder from a BVI corporation to an LLC, recorded ~8.5 months after the patent's anticipated expiration (2018-12-03) — i.e., this looks like portfolio-wide corporate maintenance, not assertion preparation.

If the Assignment Center shows records I could not pull (it should show the same four events), the fields to harvest and re-verify are: reel/frame for each, the execution date (distinct from the recording date cited above), and the correspondent for each. Re-run at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ using patent number 6216129.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6216129
    1998 : Priority date via parent app 09205653
    1999 : Filed 1999-03-12
         : Assigned to Telecom Partners Inc
    2000 : Assigned to Expanse Networks Inc
    2001 : Patent issues 2001-04-10
    2004 : Portfolio sold to Prime Research Alliance E Inc
    2018 : Patent expires per anticipated date 2018-12-03
    2019 : Entity conversion to Prime Research Alliance E LLC

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

NPE — moderate confidence

The chain terminates at Prime Research Alliance E, LLC (per the 2019-08-19 "re-domestication and entity conversion" from Prime Research Alliance E., Inc.), an entity that acquired this patent and, on Google Patents' assignee data, the broader Expanse Networks ad-targeting portfolio by the 2004-09-17 assignment — a portfolio-scale transfer from the operating developer to a British Virgin Islands corporation with no identifiable product. That is one strong structural signal (Signal 1) and the basis for the call. I stop short of "high confidence" because I could not retrieve the reel/frame entries, the recorded correspondents, or the assignee's address/registered agent, and because no assertion of this patent appears in the record assembled in the earlier sections of this analysis. It is not an operating-company assertion and not a defensive-aggregator terminal.

Verification links:

• USPTO Assignment Center (search patent 6216129): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Legacy Assignment Search (same underlying records): https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Patent bibliographic/legal-events record: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6216129/en

Priority follow-up queries (to close the three open fields): (1) reel/frame + execution dates for all four recordings; (2) the correspondent name/firm on each — the key repeat-player test; (3) the Prime Research Alliance E., Inc. (BVI) registered address, to test the registered-agent-service element of Signal 1; and (4) a PACER/Unified Patents caselist query on Prime Research Alliance E, LLC / Prime Research Alliance E, Inc. as plaintiff, to move Signal 2 off "unclear."

I'll search for the specific patent and its cited prior art references.

Let me search for the specific prior art references cited on the patent's front page.

Let me look at the Justia listing which typically shows prior art citations, and search for the key cited references.

I've reached my search-step limit, so here is my analysis based on the authoritative full patent text in the prompt plus the search results I did retrieve. I'll be explicit about what I could and could not verify.

Prior Art Analysis — US 6,216,129 B1

1. Patent identification (verified via search)

Confirmed via Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6216129B1](/patent/US6216129B1)/en), Justia (https://patents.justia.com/patent/[8626584](/patent/8626584)), FreePatentsOnline (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/[8595058](/patent/8595058).html), and the prompt's USPTO/Google Patents text. Because the priority chain reaches back to 1998-12-03, any § 102 reference must predate that date.

2. Important sourcing caveat

The complete examiner-cited "References Cited" front-page list is NOT present in the authoritative text supplied in the prompt — that text begins at the bibliographic/classification block and jumps to the Definitions, Abstract, Description, and Claims. My web searches did not surface the front-page U.S. Patent Documents list either (the searches returned later patents that cite '129, not '129's own cited references).

Therefore, below I give the references I can positively ground — the three prior-art patents the applicant itself identified and distinguished in the Background section of the specification. These are, by the applicant's own framing, "the most relevant prior art." I flag explicitly that I could not enumerate the full front-page citation list.

3. Prior art references grounded in the specification

Reference A — U.S. Pat. No. 5,515,098 (Carles)

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 5,515,098 — "System and method for selectively distributing commercial messages over a communications network," inventor John B. Carles.
• Dates: Issued 1996-05-07. (Searches did not return a confirmed filing date; treat the filing date as unverified.)
• Description (from the '129 specification): "describes a method in which target household data of actual customers of a product are compared against subscriber household data to determine the applicability of a commercial to a household." The '129 specification distinguishes it precisely because it relies on the characteristics of actual existing customers of the product.
• § 102 relevance: This is the single most structurally on-point reference for the demographic + product-preference comparison concept. It is a direct § 102 candidate against claim 3 (product preference characterization of intended market vs. consumer) and claim 2 (demographic characterization correlation), because it discloses comparing target household data to subscriber household data.
• Why it does not anticipate claim 1: Claim 1 requires (a) a profile identifying discretionary target-market characteristics ("need not be representative of an actual existing market"), and (b) a correlation factor computed as a scalar product. Carles is the very reference the patent was drafted around to capture the "discretionary" gap — it uses actual-customer data and does not disclose scalar-product correlation. On its face, Carles is properly a § 103 (obviousness) reference for claims 1/2/3, not clean § 102 anticipation of independent claim 1.

Reference B — U.S. Pat. No. 5,724,521 (Dedrick)

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 5,724,521 — "Method and apparatus for providing electronic advertisements to end users in a consumer best-fit pricing manner," inventor R. Dedrick.
• Dates: Issued 1998-03-03 (date corroborated by Justia listing: "5724521 | March 3, 1998 | Dedrick").
• Description (from the '129 specification): "utilizes a consumer scale as the mechanism to determine to which group an advertisement is intended. Such a system requires specification of numerous parameters and weighting factors, and requires access to specific and non-statistical personal profile information."
• § 102 relevance: Most relevant to the pricing-dependent claims — claims 4, 5, 6, and 25 — since the "best-fit pricing manner" of '521 ties advertisement delivery to a consumer scale. It is a candidate § 103 combination reference for those claims.
• Why it does not anticipate the independent claims: The '129 specification expressly notes '521 "requires specification of numerous parameters and weighting factors," whereas '129 claims a simple scalar (dot) product. A reference teaching an explicit multi-parameter weighting scheme does not disclose the claimed scalar-product correlation limitation, so it does not anticipate claims 1/17/22/30.

Reference C — U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,210 (Goldhaber & Fitts)

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,210 — "Attention Brokerage," inventors A. Nathaniel Goldhaber and Gary Fitts.
• Dates: Issued 1998-08-11. (Filing date unverified from my searches.)
• Description (from the '129 specification): "the consumer is presented with a list of advertisements and their corresponding payments. The consumer chooses from the list and is compensated for viewing the advertisement. The system requires real-time interactivity in that the viewer must select the advertisement from the list of choices presented."
• § 102 relevance: Relevant to the compensation / negative-pricing concepts underlying claims 4–6 (price as a function of correlation, including the decreasing-monotonic "consumer-as-profiler" model of claim 6).
• Why it does not anticipate: '210 requires real-time consumer selection from a presented list; '129 claims a system that determines applicability by correlation (a machine computation), without requiring the consumer to interactively choose. It is a § 103 reference against the pricing claims only.

Reference D — Co-pending applications Ser. Nos. 09/204,888 and 09/205,653 (self-identified, admitted NOT prior art)

The specification also cites the "Subscriber characterization system" (Ser. No. 09/204,888) and "Client-server based subscriber characterization system" (Ser. No. 09/205,653). The patent expressly states these are "incorporated herein by reference but which are not admitted to be prior art." Ser. No. 09/205,653 issued as US 6,457,010 B1 — the parent of '129 — so these cannot be § 102 art against '129 (same inventive entity / common ownership / earlier-in-time common disclosure), and I include them only to be complete.

4. Related family members (same inventive entity — not § 102 art)

• US 6,298,348 B1 (Eldering) — "Consumer profiling system"
• US 6,324,519 B1 (Eldering)
• US 6,560,578 B2 (Eldering) — continuation of '129
• US 6,457,010 B1 (Eldering et al.) — parent

These are same-family/continuation patents, so they are not prior art to '129; I mention them only because they frequently appear adjacent in citation lists and should not be mistaken for § 102 references.

5. Honest limitations

1. I could not retrieve the full front-page "References Cited" (U.S. Patent Documents) list for '129 via search; the authoritative text in the prompt omits it. If you can supply the front page, I can complete a claim-by-claim § 102 mapping for every examiner-cited reference.
2. No confirmed § 102 anticipation of any independent claim (1, 17, 22, 30) is supportable from the references I grounded. Each named reference was distinguished by the applicant, and each appears to lack at least one claim-1/17/22/30 limitation (discretionary target market characteristics; scalar-product correlation; consumer profile generated from multiple point-of-sale purchase transactions). They are far stronger as § 103 references.
3. Publication/filing dates for US 5,515,098, US 5,724,521, and US 5,794,210 should be re-verified against the USPTO full-text database before being relied on in a legal filing; I confirmed the '521 issue date via a Justia citation listing but relied on recollection for the others.

If you can re-enable additional search steps, I will pull the exact front-page "References Cited" block from the USPTO full-text/Patent Center record and produce a complete per-reference § 102 chart.

I'll ground this obviousness analysis in the actual prior-art references identified on the patent's page (the references cited in the specification and the examiner-cited references). Let me pull details on the key ones.

Good grounding. Now let me check the examiner/ISA-cited references on the '129 front page and its PCT family search report, since the actual prosecution record is the most probative §103 evidence.

Obviousness Analysis of US 6,216,129 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Scope, standard, and evidentiary posture

Legal framework. Pre-AIA § 103 governs (application filed 1999-03-12; priority 1998-12-03). A claim is obvious if the differences between the claimed subject matter and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) at the time of the invention. Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966); KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007). Motivation to combine may come from the references themselves, the state of the art, market forces, or "the inferences and creative steps that a person of ordinary skill in the art would employ." KSR at 418, 421. A known technique applied to a known structure/method to yield predictable results is obvious (id. at 417), as is a "predictable variation" of a known technique (id. at 417–18).

Level of ordinary skill. A bachelor's degree in computer science/electrical engineering (or equivalent) plus ~2–3 years' experience in database-driven marketing or interactive television/ad-delivery systems — i.e., a practitioner familiar with customer database systems, profile matching/scoring, and addressable advertising.

Sourcing caveat (flagged): The authoritative patent text supplied in this task does not include the '129 front-page "References Cited" list, so I cannot confirm which references the examiner actually relied upon. The only cited reference I could verify from an external listing is a non-patent item ("Imgis, 'Ad Force' product literature, printed Jun. 30, 1998, 5 pp.," per the FreePatentsOnline record at https://www.freepatentsonline.com/[6216129](/patent/6216129).html, Primary Examiner: Coby, Frantz). The analysis below therefore builds primarily on the references the '129 specification itself identifies as prior art — Carles US 5,515,098, Dedrick US 5,724,521, and Goldhaber/Fitts US 5,794,210 — and secondarily on point-of-sale-history art I located externally (Stein US 5,459,306; the Deaton/CVC family), which I flag as drawn from my own search rather than from the page's Prior Art section.

Second flag (record-mixing): One retrieved page listed under a US 5,459,306 URL actually carried US 5,649,114 bibliographic data (Deaton/Gabriel, Credit Verification Corp., granted 1997-07-15). I therefore attribute the "Coupon A / Super A / ECHO coupon / value formula / consumption-rate analysis" material to the Deaton/CVC family generally rather than to a single identified patent.

No contradiction detected with the previously generated sections; the family relationships and 2018-12-03 expiration stated earlier are consistent with the authoritative text.

1. The principal prior-art references

2. Independent claim 1 — element-by-element mapping (Ground A: Carles + Dedrick + Deaton/Stein)

Remaining differences from the four-reference combination: essentially (i) the label "scalar product" for the comparison, and (ii) framing the ad-side vector as discretionary rather than derived from actual product customers. Both are addressed in §6 below.

3. Motivation to combine (Ground A) — why a PHOSITA would combine Carles + Dedrick + POS-history art

1. Same field, same problem, same architecture. All references address delivering the right advertisement/promotion to the right individual household, and all use the same pipeline: unique identifier → stored customer characteristics → comparison with advertiser-supplied criteria → selection. Combination is a combination of known elements with no change in their respective functions. KSR, 550 U.S. at 417.
2. Express textual hooks, not hindsight:
   • Goldhaber itself acknowledges supermarket purchase-tracking ("savings cards") as an existing mechanism for consumer profiles and says profiles can be built from "historical data" and evolve with "transaction history." That is a direct teaching to use POS purchase records as the profile source.
   • Carles expressly contemplates that its household database "could be maintained by a network of servers, each providing information about a group of households defining its region," and contemplates multiple stores/levels of head ends — i.e., a distributed, multi-source profile database.
   • Dedrick supplies exactly what Carles lacks (Carles derives the target profile by comparing actual customers to the general population): advertiser-specified variables/weights/thresholds and price-by-match. A PHOSITA facing Carles' dependency on statistical research on actual customers would look to Dedrick's advertiser-controlled "consumer scale" as the known alternative.
   • Stein supplies the missing "detailed purchase records" link by expressly correlating a user code with stored user/use information to deliver individually targeted promotions on demand.
3. Predictable result / finite solutions. The combination merely automates a well-understood manual workflow (retailers already mailed coupons targeted from shopping-history databases — Deaton, Stein), and the only arithmetic difference (weighted sum vs. dot product) is a matter of mathematical convention with no new technical effect.
4. Market forces. Addressable advertising in the mid-1990s was driving exactly this convergence (set-top addressability + retail loyalty data + advertiser pricing by degree of match), as the references themselves document.

4. Alternative/independent grounds

Ground B — Dedrick as primary reference. Dedrick alone discloses claims 4 and 5 verbatim in substance (fee "based on the comparison"; "the higher the characteristics … the higher the fee"), and the consumer-scale disclosure of advertiser-selected variables + weights + thresholds supplies the discretionary-target element of claim 1. Add Stein or Deaton for the POS-purchase-record limitation, and Goldhaber for the "privacy/consumer-as-profiler" and compensation embodiments (claims 6, 12, 15, and 31). Dedrick + Goldhaber is a particularly clean two-reference combination for claims 1, 2, 4, 5, 16 and 31, because Goldhaber supplies profiles built from transaction history and advertiser-delineated audiences and price/compensation that varies with match.

Ground C — Deaton/Stein as primary reference for the "purchase-record" claims. Deaton/Stein supply every POS-purchase-history element (multi-transaction, unique ID, multi-location, prior-purchase/never-purchase indicators, mailing, heuristics), and Carles/Dedrick supply the ad-side vector, the scalar comparison, and correlation-based pricing.

5. Independent claims 17, 22, 30 (and 31)

• Claim 17 (multi-transaction, multi-point-of-sale variant): the additional limitations are the core teachings of the Deaton/CVC multi-store database (host/remote "global update") — obvious over Ground A, and plainly obvious over Deaton alone once Carles/Dedrick are added for the ad-side comparison.
• Claim 22 (system / means-plus-function): each means reads on disclosed structure in the references — Carles' server 10/CMMS 11 and profile database 36 (means for receiving the ad profile, retrieving the consumer profile, and selecting); Dedrick's "consumer scale matching process" and user profile database 30 (means for calculating the correlation factor and pricing function). Storage medium = the respective databases.
• Claim 30 (computer program on a computer-readable medium) and claim 31 (transmit correlation factor to advertisers): the program-claim recites the same pipeline and adds nothing; claim 31 is met by Dedrick's returning to the advertiser an indication of where the server falls on the consumer scale (blocks 208–210).

6. Dependent claims

7. Where the obviousness case is weakest — and the applicant's likely rebuttals

The patent's own specification articulates three distinctions over Carles, Dedrick, and Goldhaber. Each is contestable:

1. "Carles only allows selection based on demographics of existing customers." True as to Carles alone, but Dedrick and Goldhaber both let the advertiser specify arbitrary criteria, and Carles claim 2 embeds "at least one characteristic of a household intended to receive the commercial message." Under KSR, eliminating Carles's need for customer statistics by using Dedrick's advertiser-specified scale is a predictable use of a known alternative. Also, "discretionary" appears in claim 1 as a characterization of the ad profile; if it is treated as a statement of intended use/result rather than a structural limitation, it adds little patentable weight.
2. "Dedrick requires specification of numerous parameters and weighting factors and access to specific personal profile information." This is an argument that Dedrick is more capable of discretionary targeting, and that the profile source is a design choice — not that the claimed combination was non-obvious. A decreasing weight count and a simpler arithmetic operation are, if anything, evidence of obviousness (simplification of a known method to obtain a predictable result).
3. "The correlation is a simple scalar (dot) product; no weighted sum is required." This is the crux of the novelty argument, and it is mathematically weak: Carles' rating equation y = Σ (weight × characteristic-present) is a dot product; the applicant's distinction is a difference in notation/data encoding (Carles' indicators are difference-presence flags), not in result. Choosing the textbook similarity measure over an equally known one is a predictable variation. KSR, 550 U.S. at 417–18. (Note: a §101 challenge — abstract idea implemented on a generic processor — would also be available against claims 1/17/22/30 post-Alice, but that is outside the requested §103 analysis.)

Secondary considerations are largely unavailable on this record: no evidence of nexus, unexpected results, or copying was identified; the 528 later documents citing '129 (per the Google Patents page) show that the concept was adopted and built upon by the industry, which is at least as consistent with the claimed subject matter being an incremental, expected step as with non-obviousness. Commercial success, if any, would have to be tied to an embodiment practising the claimed features — the record does not do that.

Where a defendant would face difficulty: (a) proving the exact front-page/examiner-cited art and its §102(g)/§102(e) status without the file wrapper; (b) the "decreasing monotonic pricing" limitation of claim 6, which is only implicitly suggested by Goldhaber's negative-pricing discussion; and (c) reading "discretionary" onto Goldhaber/Dedrick's criteria with an adequate record, since both references describe advertiser-selected criteria in different domains (online ads vs. ad-network consumer scales).

8. Bottom line

• Independent claims 1, 17, 22 and 30 are, in my assessment, likely invalid under §103 as obvious over Carles US 5,515,098 in view of Dedrick US 5,724,521 and one POS-purchase-history reference (Stein US 5,459,306 and/or the Deaton/CVC family) — with Goldhaber US 5,794,210 supplying the advertiser-delineated audience, the transaction-history profile, and the payment/compensation model. The strongest single articulation is Dedrick + Goldhaber + Deaton/Stein, because it directly supplies (i) advertiser-specified, non-actual target criteria, (ii) a consumer profile built from transaction history, and (iii) a fee that varies with degree of match.
• Claims 4, 5, 25 and 31 (advertiser-side pricing and reporting the correlation) are the most vulnerable: Dedrick discloses them almost expressly.
• Claims 2, 3, 7–11, 12–16, 18–21, 23, 24, 26–29 are each met by express disclosures in the same combination.
• Claim 6 (decreasing monotonic pricing / consumer-charges-less model) is the most defensible of the dependent claims, resting on Goldhaber's negative-pricing and bid-based teachings; obviousness here would require a slightly stronger evidentiary showing.
• Practical significance: since the patent expired 2018-12-03 subject only to the six-year damages lookback under 35 U.S.C. § 286, a §103 case matters mainly for the residual damages window or for defensive/portfolio purposes rather than for prospective licensing — consistent with the earlier-generated sections, which found no asserted litigation or PTAB challenge involving US 6,216,129 itself.