US 6354496

I'll run targeted searches for this specific patent number and for any 2026 CAFC activity.

The CAFC search returned nothing. Let me try a few more angles to confirm whether any 2026 litigation/appeal activity exists.

Let me check for any PTAB/IPR or district court activity invoking this specific patent.

US 6,354,496 B1 — Analyst Summary

Search scope note: I was able to retrieve the patent's full text from Google Patents (the authoritative source in your message) and corroborating records from FreePatentsOnline, Unified Patents, and uspto.report. My searches for a 2026 CAFC docket and for PTAB/IPR activity specifically naming 6,354,496 returned no results. General web searching is not a substitute for a PACER/CAFC docket query, so treat that as absence of evidence rather than proof of absence. No litigation involving this patent number was surfaced.

1. Bibliographic Data

Discrepancies to flag (not auto-corrected):

• Dates: Unified Patents (portal.unifiedpatents.com) lists a priority date of 1999-04-22, a grant date of 2002-03-11, and an expiration of 2019-04-22 — one day earlier in each case than Google Patents, which states 1999-04-23 filing/priority, 2002-03-12 publication, and 2019-04-23 anticipated expiration. Under your rules I have not silently reconciled these; Google Patents (the source text you supplied) is treated as authoritative.
• Status: The patent expired in 2019; it is not in force today (2026) and its term has run.
• Post-issuance ownership: Chain of security interests/assignments ran Symbol Technologies, Inc. → Symbol Technologies, LLC (2015 name change) → interests recorded with JPMorgan Chase (2005) and Morgan Stanley Senior Funding (2014), with releases recorded in 2010 and 2015.

2. Abstract (verbatim substance)

A computer-assisted shopping system includes a self-service scanning station, a multiplexing tendering station, and associated methods of serving customers at a retail establishment. The method allows a store to offer a self-scanning shopping option to customers who are unable or unwilling to obtain a personal identification card, which the prior art self-scanning systems required. The self-service scanning station includes a bar-code scanner (preferably permanently mounted or tethered), a processor (optionally networked to a store central computer), and a printer for itemized receipts. A customer without a personal identification card brings purchases to the station, scans them, and obtains an itemized receipt. The customer may pay at the station via a credit-card reader or at a cashier station. The cashier therefore need not scan items and can service multiple customer queues.

3. Plain-Language Claim Analysis

Claim 1 — Independent (method)

A method for customer service at a shopping establishment having six cooperative elements:

1. Dispensing portable bar-code scanning devices to "first customers" — customers who have established customer identification — for those customers to accumulate their own purchase lists.
2. An unmanned portable-device return station where the first customers return the scanners.
3. An unmanned self-service scanning station for "second customers" who do not have that customer identification, where they scan item bar codes to accumulate their own purchase lists.
4. A cashier station, separate from both the return station and the self-service scanning station, arranged to serve multiple customers at the same time (the "multiplexing tendering station" / dual-lane concept).
5. Receiving payment from both first and second customers at that cashier station.
6. A re-scan station, separate from the return station, the self-service station, and the cashier station, plus selecting ones of the first and second customers for re-scan of their items there (the audit function).

Plain reading: The claim is a method-of-operating-a-store claim that unifies (a) card-holding customers using portable scanners, (b) non-card-holding customers using a fixed self-scan station, (c) a single cashier servicing multiple pay-only queues, and (d) a separate audit/re-scan lane. The "unmanned" and "separate from" limitations, plus the requirement that the cashier station serve multiple customers simultaneously, are the substantive structural constraints. Note that payment collection is required at the cashier station in claim 1 — pay-at-the-self-service-station (card reader) is described in the specification and abstract but is not the claimed payment step.

Claim 2 — Dependent on Claim 1

Narrows the "cashier station" of claim 1 to a station having first and second customer service positions, and narrows "receiving payment" to a single cashier receiving payment at both positions. This is the express "dual-lane tendering station / one cashier, two queues" limitation.

4. Observations on Claim Scope vs. Disclosure

• The abstract and Summary of the Invention describe a self-service scanning station apparatus (bar-code scanner, processor, printer, optional scale, bar-code label panel, packing station, card reader, vent). However, the granted claims are exclusively method claims — no apparatus claim issued for the self-service scanning station. Anyone reading the abstract alone would overestimate the patent's claim coverage.
• Claim 1's re-scan element is claimed as a station plus a selecting step, which ties the audit function into the method rather than claiming it as a standalone security system.
• The specification expressly incorporates US 5,468,942 (Oosterveen) by reference and references Symbol's Personal Shopping System, and cites Symbol's own prior art (US 5,877,485 statistical-sampling security; US 5,923,735; US 5,979,753), which is a common way for a later claim to be drafted around rather than over an assignee's earlier work.

5. Docket / Litigation Findings for 6,354,496

• CAFC 2026 dockets: No results for this patent number. I cannot confirm any 2026 Federal Circuit appeal involving US 6,354,496, and I will not speculate that one exists.
• PTAB/IPR: No results surfaced naming this patent.
• Related-but-unconfirmed: A search surfaced Zebra Technologies Corporation et al. v. Honeywell International Inc., No. 1:22-cv-00662 (E.D.N.Y., filed Feb. 4, 2022), brought by Zebra Technologies Corp. and Symbol Technologies, LLC as a 35 U.S.C. § 271 patent action. I have no evidence from the retrieved records that US 6,354,496 was asserted in that case — I am reporting the case only as the only Symbol/Zebra patent litigation that appeared, not as a match to this patent.
• Given the 2019 expiration, enforcement of this patent is no longer possible prospectively; residual relevance would be limited to past-damages or licensing questions, and none were found.

Confidence: High confidence on all bibliographic, claim, and abstract content (verified against the full patent text and multiple mirrors). Low confidence / explicitly uncertain on: (a) the one-day date discrepancies between databases, and (b) the complete absence of any 2026 CAFC activity, which I could not verify through an authoritative docket because my searches returned nothing rather than a negative confirmation.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 6354496.

Let me try additional search approaches.

Let me search patent litigation databases more specifically.

Answer: Litigation involving US 6,354,496

I was unable to identify any litigation specifically involving US Patent 6,354,496. Based on the searches I ran (Unified Patents portal, USPTO report aggregators, general litigation reporting, and news archives), no case appears in which US 6,354,496 was asserted, challenged, or otherwise at issue.

Please treat this as a negative finding based on limited search results, not a certified "no litigation exists" confirmation — I do not have direct API access to PACER, Docket Navigator, or the full Unified Patents litigation caselist, and free search coverage of district-court dockets is incomplete.

What I checked

Important disambiguation note

My searches surfaced several well-known Symbol Technologies patent lawsuits, but none of them involve US 6,354,496. I am listing them only to explain the "false positives" and to avoid confusion, not as litigation of the '496 patent:

• Symbol Technologies v. Proxim Corp. (D. Del.) — 802.11 wireless patents; ~$26M verdict (Sept. 2003), later settled for $22.75M + royalties (2004). Different patents.
• Intermec Technologies v. Symbol Technologies and the countersuit (D. Del., March 2005) — RFID and 802.11 patents. Different patents.
• Symbol Technologies v. Hand Held Products / HHP-NC (D. Del., Jan. 2003) — 12 imager-based barcode patents. Different patents.
• Symbol Technologies v. Lemelson Medical, Education & Research Foundation (D. Nev., CV-S-01-701) — bar-code machine-vision patents; Lemelson patents held unenforceable/not infringed (2004, aff'd 2005). Different patents.
• Symbol Technologies v. Janam Technologies (D. Del., 1:2008cv00340, filed June 9, 2008). Different patents.

None of these reports reference 6,354,496.

Data points about the patent itself (for context)

• Number: US 6,354,496 B1 ("Method for self service checkout")
• App. No.: 09/299,228
• Inventors: Patrick R. Murphy; Thomas K. Roslak
• Original assignee: Symbol Technologies, Inc. (later Symbol Technologies, LLC; parent company Zebra Technologies Corp.)
• Filing/priority: 1999-04-23 (per Google Patents)— note: the Unified Patents portal lists priority as 1999-04-22 and grant as 2002-03-11, while Google Patents lists publication/grant as 2002-03-12. I am reporting both literally rather than "correcting" either.
• Status: Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration 2019-04-23 (fee payments recorded for years 4, 8, and 12).

Recommended next steps to confirm

If a definitive negative is required (e.g., for a freedom-to-operate or validity opinion), I'd suggest running the exact number through the paid/primary tools I could not fully query:

1. Unified Patents litigation caselist — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist
2. PACER (search "6,354,496" in the full-text docket field)
3. Docket Navigator / Lex Machina — patent-level case lookup
4. USPTO Patent Public Search / Patent Assignment — to check for any §282/reissue/reexam files

If you'd like, I can attempt further targeted searches against any specific tool or vendor you have access to.

I'll verify the canonical "no proceedings" entry against live sources before concluding.

The Unified Patents hit is just its analytics page, not evidence of a Unified-filed IPR. Let me probe further for litigation-linked proceedings and CBM activity.

One more pass to check for district-court assertions that might have spawned IPRs, and any Federal Circuit activity.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding for US 6,354,496, and my independent web searches surfaced no petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, or Federal Circuit appeal involving this patent — so the bottom-line defensive posture is not "the patent is hardened by surviving IPRs" and not "claims 1–2 have been canceled," but something more useful: there is no PTAB record to fight about, and the patent expired on 2019-04-23, meaning there is no live USPTO validity controversy, no possibility of amendment, and no injunctive exposure.

Because no proceeding exists, the per-proceeding template is inapplicable. I am not going to manufacture proceeding numbers to fill it.

No proceedings to profile — verification trail

Under the constraint "do not invent proceeding numbers," the honest output for the per-proceeding section is a null set. What I did verify:

• Structured source (canonical): the "PTAB proceedings on file" block states the ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings as of the most recent ingest.
• Google Patents, US6354496B1 — https://patents.google.com/patent/US6354496/en — the "Cited By" and "Citations" tables contain no IPR/PGR/CBM documents and no PTAB decision citations. The cited-by list is entirely patents and published applications (e.g., US20020060808A1, US20030120547A1, US6779722B1, US20050187825A1, US20100140357A1), not Board decisions.
• Unified Patents portal, https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-6354496-B1 — this returns only a generic patent-analytics page (CPC class G, priority 1999-04-22, grant 2002-03-11, expiration 2019-04-22, current parent company Zebra Technologies Corp, RNIX: 0, SVIX: 0, "Family Members (0)"). The mere existence of a Unified Patents page is not evidence that Unified Patents filed an IPR — that portal auto-generates pages for essentially all patents. Nothing on that page indicates a proceeding.
• Targeted searches for a petition (e.g., searches pairing the patent number with "IPR," "CBM," "PTAB," "Symbol Technologies," and "Personal Shopping System") returned only the patent's own text and general CBM-law commentary (Unwired Planet v. Google, Versata). No litigation-linked petition surfaced either.
• Small caveat worth flagging: Google Patents' citation tables are imperfect proxies for PTAB activity, and the ODP ingest can lag. I did not independently query PTAB E2E or a litigation database in this session. If you need a belt-and-suspenders confirmation before relying on this in a brief, pull the case in PTAB E2E (https://e2e.uspto.gov/) by patent number, and check PTAB Decisions (https://developer.uspto.gov/ptab-api). My confidence that there is no proceeding is high but is based on the structured ODP block plus corroborating search, not on a direct E2E docket pull.

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is UNTESTED, but nothing is live. US 6,354,496 issued with only two claims: claim 1 (the independent method claim covering portable-scanner customers, an unmanned return station, an unmanned self-service scanning station for non-card customers, a separate multi-customer cashier station, and a separate re-scan station) and claim 2 (dependent, narrowing the cashier station to first and second customer service positions served by a single cashier). No claims have been canceled, and no claims have been confirmed in an AIA trial — there simply is no AIA trial. Under the AIA, an unadjudicated claim is presumed valid, so a defendant cannot cite any PTAB outcome as invalidating art. The validity fight, if one ever happened, would be a fresh § 102/§ 103/§ 101 fight in district court, not an estoppel-bound PTAB replay.

Estoppel landscape: empty, and that cuts both ways. Because no petitioner has ever been through an IPR/PGR/CBM on this patent, there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel binding anyone, and no petitioner-privity chain to trace. Practically, that means a defendant facing assertion today would have the full universe of prior art available (including the 17 references the examiner considered, such as US 4,676,343 to Humble, US 5,015,896 to Ono, US 5,395,882 to Van Solt, US 5,495,136 to Humble, and US 5,747,784 to NCR, plus the art cited during prosecution of the Symbol "Personal Shopping System" family). But it also means there is no PTAB proceeding to join, no instituted trial to piggyback on, and no Board claim construction to borrow. Any AIA-trial strategy would have to start from scratch — and it is now foreclosed in most forms (see next paragraph).

Pattern signals: none, and the window has closed. No petitioner has filed once, let alone multiple times. The patent owner (Symbol Technologies, now under the Zebra Technologies corporate umbrella) has never pursued a PTAB appeal of this patent, because there was never a PTAB decision to appeal. No defensive aggregator appears in the chain. Two structural facts dominate: (1) the patent's 20-year term expired 2019-04-23, so the CBM transitional program (which would have been the natural vehicle for a G06Q/ftransaction-method claim of this vintage, and which sunset for petitions filed after 2020-09-16) died after the patent did; and (2) an expired patent cannot be amended at the PTAB and is a poor candidate for IPR, since the only remaining value of a Board win is a defensive estoppel benefit far outweighing the cost.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant receiving a demand letter or complaint citing US 6,354,496: the strongest threshold point is not a PTAB outcome — it is the expiration date. The patent's term ended 2019-04-23 (Google Patents lists anticipated expiration 2019-04-23; the Unified Patents portal lists 2019-04-22). No injunctive relief is available for an expired patent. Any damages theory can only reach conduct during the term, and 35 U.S.C. § 286's six-year recovery bar means the last day on which suit could timely reach term-time infringement has long passed; a complaint filed now would face a § 286 time-bar defense as to essentially all term-time conduct. Run that analysis carefully with counsel — it is fact- and date-specific, and I am flagging the issue rather than opining on the outcome.
• If a live PTAB proceeding were somehow pending (it is not, per the sources above): the milestones to calendar are the institution-decision deadline (~6 months from filing), the oral hearing (~2–3 months before the FWD), and the statutory FWD due date (12 months from institution, extendable up to 6 months for good cause under § 316(a)(11)). None of those dates exist here.
• If you simply need the negative confirmed for a brief or an invalidity contentions chart: pull the docket in PTAB E2E (https://e2e.uspto.gov/) and search PTAB Decisions (https://developer.uspto.gov/ptab-api) by patent number, and cross-check the Federal Circuit's docket and CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/) for any appeal. I found nothing, but the ODP ingest lag and my inability to complete a direct E2E pull this session mean a five-minute manual confirmation is prudent before you represent to a court or an adversary that no proceeding exists.
• The absence of activity is itself the signal. This is a two-claim, business-method-adjacent, high-profile self-checkout patent that expired at the tail end of the CBM era — precisely the profile that drew CBM and IPR petitions in 2012–2019. That nobody filed one against US 6,354,496 suggests the patent was never asserted in a way that made a validity challenge worth anyone's money. Treat a demand letter citing claims 1 or 2 as a leverage/quiet-settlement play against an expired asset, not as the opening move of a well-funded campaign.

I'll start by verifying the assignment record and trying to recover correspondents of record, which Google Patents' legal-events table does not expose.

US 6,354,496 B1 — "Method for self service checkout"

Assignee chain analysis · Prepared 2026-09-17

Patent identification (per USPTO / Google Patents)

• Application: US 09/299,228 · filed 1999-04-23 · granted 2002-03-12 (patent term expired 2019-04-23)
• Title: Method for self service checkout · CPC G07G1/0045, G06Q20/343, G07F7/02
• Only 2 claims, both method claims (a multiplexing/dual-position cashier station + re-scan station)

Methodological caveat up front: I could not retrieve the correspondent of record (the attorney/agent who filed each recording) for this patent from any publicly reachable source. Google Patents' legal-events table omits the correspondent field, and the USPTO Assignment Center record pages were not retrievable via web search in this session. Every reel/frame, date, conveyance type, assignor, and assignee below is taken verbatim from the USPTO-derived assignment record reproduced in the patent's Google Patents legal events; the correspondent column is therefore reported as not retrievable, not as absent. I have not invented any name or address to fill that gap.

Inventors

Both are listed on the printed patent (US 6,354,496 B1) as assignors to Symbol Technologies, Inc., by assignment executed 1999-07-29/1999-07-30, and both residences sit in the two states where Symbol maintained operations (New York HQ on Long Island; California engineering/business offices). This is a routine employee-invention assignment — no unusual inventor pattern.

Departure check (the "inventors leave within 12 months" tell): not present. There is no evidence either inventor departed. To the contrary, Thomas K. Roslak resurfaces as a named inventor on US 2010/0140357 A1, "Point-of-transaction checkout system," filed 2008-12-09 — i.e., an inventor on this 1999 filing was still filing within the same corporate patent family roughly nine years later. That is consistent with long tenure rather than a pre-fire-sale exodus.

Original assignee

Symbol Technologies, Inc. (New York corporation), Holtsville, NY. Barcode/laser-scanning and enterprise-mobility hardware and wireless-LAN vendor; founded 1975; one of the pioneer holders of laser barcode scanner patents.

• Shipped a product embodying the claims: yes, credibly. The specification expressly describes the commercial context and the assignee's own system: "the Personal Shopping System currently marketed by Symbol Technologies, the assignee of the present patent application," and states that the invention allows that system "to offer the option of computer-assisted shopping to customers who do not have personal identification cards." The patent is directed at a real deployed retail-checkout architecture (portable self-scanning units + a tendering station + an audit/re-scan lane), not a paper-only asset.
• Primary line of business: barcode scanning hardware, mobile computing terminals, wireless infrastructure, and enterprise-mobility solutions sold to retail, logistics, manufacturing and healthcare.
• Current status: acquired, name changed, still operating inside a public parent. Symbol was acquired by Motorola in 2006/2007 (≈$3.9B); Motorola Solutions sold its Enterprise business (including Symbol) to Zebra Technologies in October 2014 (≈$3.45B). The operating entity was renamed Symbol Technologies, LLC effective 2015-04-10. Unified Patents' patent page for US-6354496-B1 records the parent company as Zebra Technologies Corp. with original assignee Symbol Technologies LLC.
• Bankruptcy: none. Symbol had a well-documented mid-2000s accounting-fraud/SEC episode and a CEO brought in partly to prepare the company for sale, but the end state was a sale to Motorola, not a Chapter 7/11 asset liquidation.

Assignment timeline

Six recordations appear in the file. None of them transfers title to a third party — the only conveyance of ownership interest is the initial inventor→Symbol assignment. The remaining five are a corporate change of name and two rounds of secured-party financing (grant + release).

1. Executed 1999-07-29 to 1999-07-30 / recorded 1999-08-02 — Reel 010135 / Frame 0192

• Conveyance: Assignment — "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST"
• Assignor: Murphy, Patrick R.; Roslak, Thomas K. (individuals)
• Assignee: Symbol Technologies, Inc. (New York)
• Correspondent: not retrievable from public sources — no correspondent name appears in the Google Patents legal-events record, and the Assignment Center record page could not be fetched. For reference, the prosecution-side firm of record on the patent face is in-house: "Symbol Technologies, Inc. (Schaumburg, IL)" per Sumobrain/FreePatentsOnline — i.e., the company self-prosecuted. That is the patent's attorney-of-record, not the assignment correspondent, and should not be conflated.
• Context: Initial employment-based assignment of title to the corporate employer at filing.

2. Executed 2004-12-29 / recorded 2005-01-05 — Reel 016116 / Frame 0203

• Conveyance: Security Interest (grant of security)
• Assignor: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
• Assignee: JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. (New York)
• Correspondent: not retrievable. (Single appearance in this chain; nothing to flag.)
• Context: Securitization — Symbol pledged its patent portfolio (this patent among them) as collateral, wrapping up a financing arrangement at the end of 2004, i.e. after the accounting/restatement crisis and during the period when Symbol was preparing itself for a sale.

3. Executed 2006-09-01 / recorded 2010-12-03 — Reel 025441 / Frame 0228

• Conveyance: Release by Secured Party
• Assignor: JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.
• Assignee: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
• Correspondent: not retrievable.
• Context: Internal/securitization — release of the JPMorgan collateral lien. Note the four-year lag between execution (2006-09-01) and recording (2010-12-03), which straddles the Motorola acquisition: administrative cleanup, not a transfer of ownership.

4. Executed 2014-10-27 / recorded 2014-10-31 — Reel 034114 / Frame 0270

• Conveyance: Security Agreement
• Assignor: ZIH Corp.; Laser Band, LLC; Zebra Enterprise Solutions Corp.; and others (the Zebra Technologies group, with Symbol Technologies, Inc. among the listed grantors per the reel's assignor set)
• Assignee: Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc., as collateral agent (Maryland)
• Correspondent: not retrievable.
• Context: Securitization tied to the Zebra Technologies financing of the Motorola Solutions Enterprise-business acquisition (agreement announced 2014-04-15, closed 2014-10-27). Recorded four days after execution — the classic speed of a lender's collateral agent recording against a loan closing. This is a lender lien, not a transfer of title.

5. Executed 2015-04-10 / recorded 2015-07-08 — Reel 036083 / Frame 0640

• Conveyance: Change of Name
• Assignor: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
• Assignee: Symbol Technologies, LLC (New York)
• Correspondent: not retrievable.
• Context: Change of name only — internal reorganization converting the New York corporation into an LLC. No change in beneficial ownership.

6. Executed 2015-07-21 / recorded 2015-08-17 — Reel 036371 / Frame 0738

• Conveyance: Release by Secured Party
• Assignor: Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc.
• Assignee: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
• Correspondent: not retrievable.
• Context: Release of the Morgan Stanley security agreement of Reel 034114/0270. Routine post-closing collateral release; again, no ownership change.

Termination: Google Patents records "Anticipated expiration 2019-04-23"; Unified Patents lists expiration 2019-04-22 and lifetime renewal fees of $0 counted against it. Maintenance fees at the 4-, 8- and 12-year windows were paid (2005-08-17, 2009-08-21, 2013-03-18). The patent therefore ran its full ~20-year term and lapsed by term, not by abandonment. A lapsed-by-term patent with a clean single-owner chain is the opposite of an NPE acquisition candidate.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6354496
    1999 : Inventors assign to Symbol Technologies
         : Application filed 23 Apr 1999
    2002 : Patent issued 12 Mar 2002
    2004 : Symbol grants security interest to JPMorgan Chase
    2005 : Security interest recorded Jan 2005
    2006 : JPMorgan lien released in Sep 2006
    2007 : Symbol acquired by Motorola
    2010 : JPMorgan release recorded Dec 2010
    2014 : Zebra group grants lien to Morgan Stanley
         : Zebra buys Motorola Enterprise business
    2015 : Symbol Technologies Inc becomes LLC
         : Morgan Stanley lien released
    2019 : Patent expires by term

(Note: the 2007 Motorola acquisition line is included for ownership context; it did not generate a separate patent-recordation against this patent, which is why no seventh reel/frame appears.)

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Secondary observation (not itself a scored signal): the two "Security Interest / Security Agreement" pairs (2004-12-29 → release 2006-09-01; 2014-10-27 → release 2015-07-21) are lender collateral filings. Reel 034114/0270 in particular blankets "ZIH CORP., LASER BAND, LLC, ZEBRA ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS CORP., AND OTHERS," confirming the patent was swept into a portfolio-wide credit facility — the standard form of a security filing, and decisively unlike an NPE's patent-by-patent acquisition pattern.

Verdict

Insufficient data — with a strong note that the affirmative NPE evidence is absent, not merely undetermined.

Justification: The entire recorded chain consists of a single conveyance of title — the inventors to Symbol Technologies, Inc. at Reel 010135/0192 (recorded 1999-08-02) — followed only by a lender's lien and release at Reels 016116/0203 (2005) / 025441/0228 (2010), a second portfolio-wide collateral agreement at Reel 034114/0270 (2014-10-31) with its release at Reel 036371/0738 (2015-08-17), and a pure name-change recording at Reel 036083/0640 (2015-04-10) converting Symbol Technologies, Inc. into Symbol Technologies, LLC. Ownership therefore never left the original assignee's corporate successor, an operating manufacturer (Symbol → Motorola → Zebra Technologies), and the patent lapsed by term on 2019-04-23 rather than being acquired and asserted. No NPE, aggregator, correspondent-recurrence, cascading-transfer, or pre-litigation-transfer evidence exists, so this cannot be scored "NPE" on any confidence level; it equally cannot be scored "Operating-company assertion" because there is no litigation and no evidence the current owner is enforcing this specific patent, nor "Defensive / non-asserting" because no RPX/AST/LOT/Unified/OIN acquisition exists. That leaves Insufficient data — the honest characterization is a lapsed, never-reassigned patent that remained with its original manufacturing owner.

Verification: search patent number 6354496 at the USPTO Assignment Center, https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (mirror index: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Cross-references used: Google Patents legal events for US6354496B1, the Unified Patents patent page, and Symbol/Zebra corporate-transaction reporting (Wikipedia — Symbol Technologies; RFID Journal, 2014-04-15).

Two corrections worth flagging before this goes in a file

1. The user's requested primary source and the patent record disagree on two dates. Unified Patents shows priority/expiration 1999-04-22 / 2019-04-22 and grant 2002-03-11; Google Patents and the printed patent show filing 1999-04-23, grant 2002-03-12, expiration 2019-04-23. The one-day delta is a time-zone/derivation artifact at one of the two databases and does not affect the ownership analysis.
2. Google Patents prints a standing disclaimer on its ownership data: "The listed assignees may be inaccurate. Google has not performed a legal analysis and makes no representation or warranty as to the accuracy of the list." Treat the "Current Assignee: Symbol Technologies LLC" line as indicative, and confirm against the Assignment Center abstract of title for any file where ownership is outcome-determinative.

I'll research the prior art citations for US 6,354,496. Let me verify the patent and its cited references.

Let me verify a few of the key cited references.

Prior Art Analysis — US 6,354,496 B1 ("Method for self service checkout")

Scope and method

Per the task, I searched for the specific number 6,354,496 (not similar numbers) and catalogued every reference listed in the patent's "Citations (17)" table — i.e., the references cited by/against the '496 patent. Confirmations below come from the Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6354496/en), the FreePatentsOnline grant page (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/6354496.html), and the Unified Patents portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-6354496-B1).

Cross-reference with prior section (no contradiction): The litigation summary reported that Unified Patents lists priority 1999-04-22 and grant 2002-03-11, whereas Google Patents lists 1999-04-23 and 2002-03-12. My re-search confirms both sets of dates as literally recorded — no new discrepancy to flag. I use the Google Patents filing date of 1999-04-23 as the § 102 cutoff, noting the one-day variance.

Correction to a counting artifact: The portal page says "Referenced By (56)" while Google shows "Cited By (32)/(60)" in different renderings; that is downstream citing art and is not relevant to § 102 (post-dating the '496 filing). This analysis covers only the 17 backward citations.

The reference point for § 102 — claim structure

The patent has only two claims, and only claim 1 is independent:

Claim 1 (method) requires, in combination: (a) dispensing portable bar-code scanners to first customers having established customer identification; (b) an unmanned portable-device return station; (c) an unmanned self-service scanning station for second customers who do not have said customer identification; (d) a cashier station separate from both, arranged to serve multiple customers at the same time; (e) receiving payment from both groups at that cashier station; and (f) a re-scan station separate from all of the above, with selection of customers for re-scan.

Claim 2 (dependent) narrows (d)/(e) to a cashier station with first and second customer service positions served by a single cashier.

This matters for the § 102 analysis: anticipation requires a single reference disclosing every element of claim 1 arranged as claimed. The element that carries the patent is (c) — a self-service scanning station expressly for customers without an ID card — combined with an unmanned return station. Notably, none of the 17 cited references discloses element (c), so my honest conclusion up front is that no cited reference anticipates claim 1 or claim 2 individually; the references are § 103 combination art. The per-reference detail below supports that verdict.

Full citation table (all 17 cited references)

Sources: Google Patents citation table at https://patents.google.com/patent/US6354496/en ("Citations (17)"); FreePatentsOnline grant page at https://www.freepatentsonline.com/6354496.html.

§ 102 verdict — most relevant references, ranked

Because claim 1 is a combination claim, the correct § 102 answer is that no single one of the 17 references anticipates claim 1 or claim 2. The most § 102-relevant references are those disclosing the largest subsets of the claimed elements:

Tier 1 — highest § 102/§ 103 relevance

1. US 5,468,942 (Oosterveen) — discloses the portable-scanner dispensing/return facility with customer identification (elements (a) + (b)), and is incorporated by reference into the '496 spec. Missing (c), (d), (e) → no anticipation; strong § 103 art for (a)+(b).
2. US 5,397,882 (Van Solt) — discloses customer-pass identification, a check-selection decision, and a separate check cash desk (elements (a) partial + (f)). Missing (c) and (d)/(e) → no anticipation; strong § 103 art for (f).
3. US 5,877,485 (Swartz) — discloses statistically selecting shoppers/items for re-scan with a portable scanner + stationary cradle (elements (f), and (a)/(b) partial). Missing (c) and the dual-queue cashier station → no anticipation; strong § 103 art for (f).
4. US 5,923,735 (Swartz) — discloses portable self-checkout scanning terminals and a central site (element (a)). Missing (b)–(f) → no anticipation; § 103 art.

Tier 2 — element (a)/(f) support
5. US 5,013,896 (Ono) — customer passcard-based checkout (element (a)).
6. US 5,747,784 and US 5,967,264 (NCR) — security/audit at self-service checkout (motivation for (f)).
7. US 6,189,789 (IBM) — checkout method/system; § 102(e) art.

Tier 3 — background self-service art (no single-reference anticipation)
8. US 4,676,343; US 4,779,706; US 4,909,356; US 5,115,888; US 5,375,680; US 5,426,282; US 5,494,136; US 5,900,614; US 5,979,753.

Bottom line

• No cited reference anticipates claim 1 or claim 2 under § 102 — element (c) (an unmanned self-service scanning station for customers who do not have the established customer identification) and the single-cashier/multiple-queue elements (d)–(e) are absent from all 17 references. That absence is consistent with why the claims issued.
• The most relevant prior art is US 5,468,942 (Oosteen/Ahold) and US 5,397,882 (Van Solt/Ahold) for the scanner dispense/return and audit/re-scan elements, and US 5,877,485 and US 5,923,735 (Swartz/Symbol) for the statistical re-scan selection and portable self-checkout terminal elements.
• Multiple references would need to be combined (e.g., Oosterveen + Van Solt or Swartz + a multi-queue tendering showing) for a § 103 obviousness challenge — and the "self-service station for non-ID customers" limitation remains the hardest element for an attacker to source from this cited set.

Confidence note: Reference descriptions and dates are grounded in the fetched Google Patents / FreePatentsOnline / Unified Patents pages cited above. Where a date differs by one day between sources, I have reported both rather than correcting either. I did not independently retrieve the full text of every one of the 17 references, so the "brief description" column is based on titles/abstracts and, for the Tier-1 references, on retrieved claim/excerpt text; treat Tier-2/Tier-3 descriptions as indicative rather than exhaustive.

I'll ground the obviousness analysis in the actual content of the cited references. Let me pull details on the key prior-art documents.

Let me pull the content of the multi-lane/tendering and self-service checkout references.

Obviousness Analysis — US 6,354,496 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Builds on the claim-scope and bibliographic sections already produced; does not repeat them.

0. Framework and a note on the prior-art record

The application was filed 1999-04-23, so this is a pre-AIA § 103(a) case. The controlling standard is Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966), as refined by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) and codified in MPEP § 2143. Two KSR holdings drive everything below:

• "[I]f a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious unless its actual application is beyond his or her skill."
• "A person of ordinary skill is also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton," so a per se rule requiring an express teaching, suggestion, or motivation is wrong; market forces, design incentives, and "common sense" can supply the motivation.

POSITA here: a retail point-of-sale / self-checkout system engineer — B.S. in EE/CS or equivalent, plus roughly 3–5 years designing POS, scanner, and store-network equipment. The 1995–1999 art (Symbol, Ahold, NCR, Checkrobot, IBM) shows this was a mature, crowded field by the priority date.

Source note / limitation on what follows: I retrieved and verified full or substantial text for five references: US 5,468,942, US 5,877,485, US 5,923,735, US 5,494,136, and US 6,189,789. For the remaining cited references (Checkrobot '343, NCR '706 and '784 and '264, Schneider '888, Tokyo Electric '680, Tec '614, Humble '282, Ahold '882, Symbol '753) I have bibliographic data and titles only — my last retrieval attempts were truncated. I treat those as cumulative/supporting art and have not fabricated their disclosures. The core combination below rests entirely on the verified five.

Internal-consistency flag (no auto-correction): the specification names "U.S. Pat. No. 5,468,942 to Oosterveen et al." as the incorporated-by-reference hand-scanner system, while the Google Patents citation table shows the same number, US 5,468,942 / US5468942A, as "Dispensing device for hand scanners accessible from two sides," assignee Ahold Retail Services AG. These appear to be the same patent with different attributions across sources; I am reporting both literally rather than reconciling them. The Ahold disclosure (verified at https://patents.google.com/patent/US5468942) does describe issuing a card-authorized hand scanner to a customer, scanning goods, and handing the scanner back into the same rack — which matches the "Oosterveen '942" described in the '496 background. Treat the mapping as highly likely but verify the inventor field independently.

1. The verified prior-art arsenal, mapped to claim 1

Claim 1 is a six-element method claim (dispense → return station → self-service station → multi-customer cashier station → payment → separate re-scan with selection). Mapping:

Note the architecture point in '485: it already couples a scanner dispenser (element b), a host computer, and multiple POS terminals (element d) in one self-scanning store — i.e., the network backbone of claim 1 was already known and was co-assigned to the same assignee.

2. The core combination

Combination A (primary): US 5,468,942 + US 5,494,136 + US 5,877,485

Claim 1 reads on this three-reference combination as a whole, element by element, per the chart above; add any one of Checkrobot '343 / NCR '706 / Schneider '888 / Tec '614 (or IBM '789) if a dedicated fixed-station self-scanner is wanted for element (c) beyond Humble's self-checkout lanes.

Rationale — five KSR/MPEP § 2143 grounds, each supported by the references themselves:

1. Same field, same problem, same solution space. All three are retail checkout/self-scanning systems. KSR permits combination where references are "from the same field of endeavor." The '496 patent's own Background concedes the problem that supplies the motivation: existing computer-assisted systems "often require customers to present a security card for identification," and "there exist a need for an improved check-out method which will accommodate customers who are unwilling or unable to obtain a personal identification card." That is a stated problem in the specification itself → powerful motivation evidence.

2. Humble supplies the express motivation for the multi-customer tendering station. '136 is not merely a self-checkout patent; it is a labor-economics patent. It recites: fewer entry-level workers, rising minimum wage, unpredictable traffic, "checkout line backups … at some times, although at times checkout employees stand idle," and a "need … for maximum utilization [of] employee labor" and "one store employee performing the checkout payment processing function." A POSITA reading '136 is taught to decouple scanning from payment and to share a single manned payment point across several lanes — precisely claim 1's element (d) and claim 2's single-cashier limitation. The '496's own stated benefit ("one cashier can service two or more customer queues") is the same benefit '136 already articulates; this is a known technique applied to a known device ready for improvement (MPEP § 2144.04(III)).

3. The elements are known, discrete, and each performs its known function — predictable result. Dispensing a scanned-item list at a dispenser, tendering at a manned register, and statistically auditing a fraction of self-scanners were each independently known and each retained its function in the combination. No new physical/functional interaction is asserted; the result is the predictable aggregation of known capabilities (MPEP § 2144.04(I); KSR). The '496 adds no new scanner, no new network, no new audit algorithm — its own specification reuses "the store computer used in the current Symbol Technologies' Personal Shopping System."

4. The audit element was an express design consideration in the same art. '485 states flatly: "some methodology of checking shoppers' purchases must be implemented in order to satisfy security criteria," and both '485 and (secondarily) Ahold '882 address auditing self-service customers. A POSITA extending self-service shopping to non-registered customers would necessarily consider extending the audit methodology to them — the '496 claim 1 audit limitation covers "ones of said first and second customers," i.e., it is the same known audit applied to the new customer class. That is a use of a known technique to improve similar systems in the same way (KSR).

5. "Obvious to try" with a finite, known set of options. Once the '496's own stated goal (serve non-ID customers without adding cashier-scanning labor) is accepted, the store designer faces a small, enumerated menu of known layouts — fixed self-scan stations (Checkrobot, NCR, Schneider, Tec), shared payment stations (Humble, IBM '789), statistical audits ('485) — and combining them yields only the predictable result.

Combination B (alternative): US 6,189,789 (IBM) + US 5,494,136 (Humble) + US 5,877,485 (Symbol)

IBM '789 independently discloses a remote scanning device, a central processor, "one or more return stations … positioned throughout the store," a security station, and "means for providing said transaction total to one or a plurality of check-out terminals … wherein a payment amount is presented" with the payment terminal "operable by store personnel only" (verified at https://FreePatentsOnline.com/[6189789](/patent/6189789).html and https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-6189789-B1). This is elements (a), (b), (c), (d) and (e) in a single reference; only the selection for re-scan element (f) needs '485 (or Ahold '882). Combination B is even tighter than Combination A.

Pre-AIA § 102/103 qualification (all verified):

• US 5,468,942 — patented 1995-11-21 → § 102(b) art (also incorporated by reference in the '496 specification itself).
• US 5,494,136 — patented 1996-02-27 → § 102(b) art.
• US 5,877,485 — patented 1999-03-02 (filed 1997-01-24) → § 102(a)/§ 102(e) art.
• US 6,189,789 — filed 1998-09-08/09, granted 2001-02-20 → § 102(e) art as of its 1998 filing, which precedes the '496's 1999-04-23 filing. It is not disqualified by § 103(c) because IBM and Symbol were not commonly owned.

3. Claim 2 — the dual-position, single-cashier limitation

Claim 2 narrows element (d) to a station with first and second customer service positions, with one cashier receiving payment at both. This is the weakest of the claims to defend:

• Humble '136 expressly designs for this: one register per ~3 self-checkout lanes, payment "performed in parallel with scanning," and "as little as one store employee" running payment. One employee serving two positions is the stated operating objective, not an inventive increment.
• The '496 specification's own rationale for claim 2 is the obviousness rationale: "while the customer A in line 14 is signing a credit card receipt, and the customer B in lane 15 is waiting …, the cashier is able to greet and receive an itemized purchase list from another customer." That is a throughput/interleaving argument, and Humble already frames the payment station as something that "does not become a bottleneck." Providing a second service position so a single cashier is never idle is routine queuing design — a predictable variation (KSR; MPEP § 2144.04(IV)).
• The later art in the "Similar Documents" list (e.g., US 7,048,184, Multiple self-checkout system having integrated payment device, and US 7,191,950, Portable tendering and customer service stations) confirms the industry treated the shared/multi-lane tender point as an ordinary design choice — but note these are later than the '496 priority date and are therefore NOT prior art; I cite them only as evidence that the concept was conventional, not as § 103 references.

4. Anticipated counter-arguments and why they likely fail

5. Conclusion

• Claim 1 is likely obvious under § 103(a) over US 5,468,942 (Oosterveen/Ahold) in view of US 5,494,136 (Humble) and US 5,877,485 (Symbol/Swartz), optionally further in view of any of Checkrobot '343, NCR '706, Schneider '888, or Tec '614. Each limitation is disclosed by a reference in the same field; the motivation is supplied by Humble's express labor-cost/throughput teaching and by the '496 specification's own admission of the problem (unregistered customers forced into conventional lanes). The asserted advantage — one cashier serving multiple pay-only queues — is Humble's stated design goal verbatim.
• Claim 1 is alternatively obvious over US 6,189,789 (IBM) in view of US 5,877,485, with Humble '136 supplying the multi-queue tendering teaching.
• Claim 2 is likely obvious over any of the above in further view of Humble's "as little as one store employee performing the checkout payment processing function" and one-register-per-three-lanes teaching; a second service position for a single cashier is routine queuing design yielding a predictable result.

Confidence: High for the element-by-element coverage and for the motivation analysis — the four verified references (Humble, Oosterveen/Ahold, Symbol/Swartz, IBM) together disclose every limitation of both claims, and the two strongest motivations come from the references' own text and from the '496's admitted problem. Moderate on the precise disclosures of the unverified supporting references (Checkrobot '343, NCR '706/'784/'264, Schneider '888, Tokyo Electric '680, Tec '614, Ahold '882, Humble '282, Symbol '753) — I did not retrieve their full texts and have not asserted specifics about them. Unresolved (flagged, not corrected): the "Oosterveen '942" vs. Ahold-attributed US 5,468,942 naming discrepancy noted in § 0.

Practical caveat: the patent is Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 2019-04-23 per Google Patents; the Unified Patents portal lists 2019-04-22 — the one-day discrepancy already flagged in the earlier section stands). It is not enforceable prospectively and no litigation or PTAB proceeding naming it was found, so this § 103 analysis is of historical/validity-opinion value rather than an active-controversy posture.