US 6643650

I'll search for this patent across the sources you specified.

I have the patent's core bibliographic and claim data. Now let me check for litigation/PTAB and CAFC 2026 docket activity for this exact number.

Report — US Patent 6,643,650

Scope note: I searched for this exact number (allowing for the standard 6,643,650 / US6643650B1 / US6643650 forms) and deliberately excluded look‑alikes (e.g., 6,862,594; 6,910,205; 7,404,006; 6,862,594 is a same‑family sibling but a different grant). No CAFC 2026 docket activity was found for this number; details and caveats are in the last section.

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Bibliographic data

Sources: Google Patents US6643650B1; uspto.report grant page.

This application claims benefit of five provisionals, all titled "Distributed Computing Environment": Ser. Nos. 60/202,975 (May 9, 2000), 60/208,011 (May 26, 2000), 60/209,430 (June 2, 2000), 60/209,140 (June 2, 2000), and 60/209,525 (June 5, 2000). This is consistent with the Google Patents priority display of 2000‑05‑09. The September 12, 2000 filing date governs the actual application, and the "PTA/adjusted expiration" field is what the office shows as 2021‑08‑29.

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Abstract (verbatim summary of the official text)

A system and method for searching for documents within spaces in a distributed computing environment. A client sends a lookup message to a space which stores documents. The lookup message may specify desired characteristics, such as a name or partial XML schema, of the stored documents. The documents may include XML service advertisements and XML device advertisements as well as general‑purpose XML documents. A set of zero or more documents which match the lookup message are discovered. If the lookup message includes both a desired name and a desired schema, the set of discovered documents may include both name matches and schema matches. If the lookup message includes neither, the set may include substantially all documents stored in the space. After the matching documents are found, the space sends a lookup response message to the client. For each discovered document the response may include a name and an advertisement; each advertisement may include information (e.g., a URI) usable to obtain the document or access the resource (such as a service) that the document advertises. The advertisements and messages may be expressed in a data representation language such as XML.

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Plain‑language overview of each independent claim

Claim 1 — Method (client/space lookup).
A client sends a lookup message to a network‑addressable location of a "space" (an object/document repository that is itself a service). The space stores one or more advertisements written in a data representation language; each advertisement carries information the client can use to access a particular content or service over a network. The lookup message specifies desired advertisement characteristics. The system then finds a set of "discovered advertisements" — which may be zero or more of the stored advertisements meeting those characteristics — and the space sends back a lookup response message containing that set. In short: message‑based, schema/name‑driven search of a networked advertisement store.

Claim 12 — System.
The apparatus counterpart of claim 1: a client plus a space communicatively coupled to the client, where the space stores advertisements in a data representation language, each advertisement containing access information for a content/service. The client is operable to send a lookup message specifying desired advertisement characteristics; the space is operable to find the matching set and send a lookup response message containing that set. No method steps are recited — it is a structural/functional system claim.

Claim 23 — Carrier medium (program‑product claim).
A carrier medium comprising program instructions that are computer‑executable to implement the same three operations as claim 1: the client sending the lookup message to a network‑addressable space location, finding the set of discovered advertisements meeting the desired characteristics, and the space sending the lookup response message comprising that set. (Note: the preamble is "carrier medium," not "non‑transitory computer‑readable medium," which is the sort of language that drew § 101 "carrier wave" attacks against later Sun/Oracle claims in other patents.)

Claim 34 — Method (generalized "documents," DRL end‑to‑end).
Broader/differently‑framed method: a client sends a lookup message expressed in a data representation language to a space that stores documents (not necessarily "advertisements") also expressed in that language; the lookup message specifies desired characteristics of the stored documents. The system finds a set of zero or more discovered documents meeting those characteristics, and the space sends a lookup response message, also expressed in the data representation language, comprising the set of discovered documents. The key distinction from claim 1 is that the DRL requirement is placed on the messages/documents themselves rather than on "advertisements" specifically.

Dependent claim of note: claim 45 (depending from 34) adds an event subscription/notification feature — the client subscribes to a desired document, and the space sends an event notification message when a matching document is added to or removed from the space.

Other dependents flesh out: URI per advertisement (2, 13, 24, 36); service advertisements including a schema whose messages invoke service functions (4, 15, 26, 38); desired name / wildcard matching (5–6, 16–17, 27–28, 39–40); desired schema matching (7, 18, 29, 41); combined name + schema (8, 19, 30, 42); "return everything" queries (9, 20, 31, 43); and XML as the data representation language (10, 21, 32, 44). The specification illustrates this with a concrete XML pair — a <LookupAdvertisement> containing optional <AdvertisementName> and <AdvertisementSchema> elements, and a <LookupAdvertisementResponse> returning <Advertisement> plus <AdvertisementName> groups.

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Litigation / PTAB / CAFC check

• CAFC 2026 dockets: No results tying 6,643,650 to any Federal Circuit 2026 docket. Treat as "no evidence found," not as proof of absence.
• Oracle America v. Google, N.D. Cal. No. 3:10‑cv‑03561: This is the most likely venue for a Sun/Oracle Java‑platform patent, but 6,643,650 was not among the asserted patents. Oracle's answer identifies the patents‑in‑suit as RE38,104; 5,966,702; 6,061,520; 6,125,447; 6,192,476; 6,910,205; and 7,426,720. Do not conflate 6,125,447 or 6,910,205 with 6,643,650 — they are different grants. (Oracle's answer, Dkt. 41; docket overview)
• PTAB: I found a USPTO PTAB "public informations" petition document (petition 1549802) that reproduces the 6,643,650 front page, and 6,643,650 appears in prior‑art citation lists (e.g., in the family listing of a JP national‑phase search report, and as a citation in Google's US 10,628,847). I could not confirm from these hits that an IPR/PGR was actually instituted against 6,643,650. A single‑petition page containing the patent's cover page is more consistent with it being filed as an exhibit/reference than with it being the challenged patent — but I cannot verify that with the sources retrieved, so I flag it as unresolved rather than asserting either way.
• Other Oracle‑involving cases surfaced (e.g., Mobility Workx, LLC v. Oracle, W.D. Tex. 7:2026cv00031, filed Jan. 29, 2026; the Realtime Data v. Oracle IPRs) do not, on the evidence retrieved, involve 6,643,650.

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Explicit uncertainties

1. No authoritative CAFC 2026 hit for this number. If you need a definitive negative, this must be confirmed against PACER/CAFC docket systems directly, which my searches did not reach.
2. PTAB status is unresolved. The presence of the patent in a PTAB petition document does not establish that it was the challenged patent, the petitioner, or the outcome.
3. Assignee chain is stated per Google Patents' reassignment records (Sun Microsystems → Oracle America, Inc., 2015‑12‑12); I did not independently pull the USPTO assignment record for this patent.
4. Expiration: the office shows "Expired – Lifetime, expires 2021‑08‑29," which reflects an adjusted expiration term; I did not recompute the term from the face of the patent (which would require the specific PTA days and any terminal disclaimer), so treat the exact date as the office's stated value rather than a derived calculation.

I'll search litigation databases and court sources for this exact patent number.

Initial results are dominated by look-alike patents (e.g., Gammino's 5,812,650; Rex Medical's "650"). Let me run targeted searches on litigation databases.

Litigation search — US Patent 6,643,650

Bottom line: I found no litigation that asserts U.S. Patent 6,643,650. Searches did not surface any complaint, docket entry, PTAB proceeding, or Federal Circuit appeal in which 6,643,650 is the patent-in-suit (or even a named patent). Below are the results, the look-alikes that polluted the search, and what would be needed to convert this into a definitive negative.

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1. No case records located

Searches of the litigation-oriented sources (Unified Patents portal, PTAB petition documents, CourtListener/RECAP materials, CAFC opinion pages, RPX Insight litigation documents) returned no hit mapping US 6,643,650 to a case caption. The Unified Patents portal does host a patent page for US-6643650-B1 (it lists prior-art references and the Oracle America assignee), but that is a patent/prior-art record, not a litigation record.

This is consistent with the patent's status: expired (office-stated adjusted expiration 2021-08-29), so any assertion window would have closed years ago.

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2. Near-misses that are not this patent (explicitly flagged per the no-auto-correct rule)

The string "650" produces heavy false-positive noise. None of the following involve 6,643,650:

• Gammino v. Sprint / AT&T / Verizon / Davel, et al. — asserts U.S. 5,812,650 (Gammino's "'650 Patent") and U.S. 5,809,125. Different patent, different field (call-blocking/payphone). Do not conflate.
• Rex Medical, L.P. v. Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (Fed. Cir. argument audio) — the parties discuss a "'650 patent" (in the Covidien license/apportionment discussion). That is a different 650; not Sun/Oracle and not in the distributed-computing space.
• Ozmo Licensing v. HP / Acer / Dell (the "'991 Patent") — surfaced only because a footnote listed other cases; unrelated.
• MCOM IP, LLC v. [banks] — the "'508 patent," unrelated; appeared only in a footnote list.
• Various IPR exhibits and Google/Microsoft patents (e.g., US 10,841,104; US 10,628,847) that merely cite 6,643,650 as prior art — citation is not litigation.

I excluded these rather than folding them in.

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3. Oracle v. Google is not a 6,643,650 case

The most plausible venue for a Sun/Oracle distributed-computing patent is Oracle America, Inc. v. Google Inc., N.D. Cal. No. 3:10-cv-03561. That case is not a 6,643,650 case. The patents-in-suit were:

RE38,104 · 5,966,702 · 6,061,520 · 6,192,476 · 6,910,205 · 7,426,720

Note the trap: 6,910,205 and 6,125,447 appear in the Oracle v. Google record (and the '205 has a similar "distributed computing environment" lineage and shares inventors/priority with 6,643,650). They are different grants — both share the '3650 family DNA, which is presumably why look-alike confusion arises. Do not substitute either for 6,643,650. (Trial order identifying the six Oracle patents: gov.uscourts.cand.231846, Dkt. 539; Oracle's answer/counterclaim responses: Dkt. 60.)

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4. Unresolved item carried forward from the prior section

The earlier section flagged a PTAB "public informations" petition document (petition 1549802) whose text reproduces the 6,643,650 front page, and noted 6,643,650 also appears in third-party prior-art citation lists. I still cannot confirm from the retrieved materials that any IPR/PGR was instituted against 6,643,650. A petition exhibit quoting a patent's cover page is consistent with the patent being used as prior art or an exhibit, not as the challenged patent. I continue to flag this as unresolved rather than asserting either way.

(For contrast, the other PTAB hits that surfaced — e.g., petition 1558212, NEC v. Dell, IPR2025-00531, the IdeaHub/Unified Patents PGR2022-00044 appeal at IdeaHub Inc. v. Unified Patents, LLC, CAFC No. 2024-1684, Rule 36 judgment, April 10, 2026 — are entirely unrelated to 6,643,650.)

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5. Confidence, caveats, and how to make this definitive

Confidence that no litigation has been found: high, given that the specific-number searches returned zero case captions and the only hits were look-alikes or prior-art citations.

But treat that as "no evidence found," not proof of absence. Two limitations:

1. Search tooling limit reached. I was cut off before completing a full query set (one query returned an empty result; another hit the step cap). Unified Patents' caselist, RPX Insight case pages, and Docket Navigator were only reached indirectly via indexed PDFs, not via their case-list interfaces.
2. Title-based indexing risk. If any complaint referenced the patent only by its title ("Mechanism and apparatus for using messages to look up documents stored in spaces…") without the number, a number-only query would miss it.

Recommended verification steps for a definitive negative:

• Unified Patents litigation portal → search the exact number US-6643650-B1 in the case list (not just the patent page).
• Docket Navigator / RPX Insight → "patent number = 6,643,650" across all district courts, ITC, and PTAB.
• PACER / CourtListener RECAP → full-text search "6,643,650" and "6643650".
• CAFC docket → search the number for any appeal.
• USPTO Patent Center → "Litigation" tab / assignment-and-litigation data for the patent.

One further consistency note: the task header states the current date as April 26, 2026, while the patent-text fetch timestamp is 2026-09-29. I flag the discrepancy rather than silently picking one; nothing in my findings turns on it, and the newest item I encountered (the April 10, 2026 CAFC Rule 36 judgment) is unrelated to this patent.

If you want, I can run the Unified Patents and CourtListener full-text searches for the exact number to try to close out items 1 and 4 before you rely on this in a filing.

I'll start by verifying the structured "no proceedings" finding against public sources, since ODP ingest lags for older/settled matters.

The generic searches returned only background material. Let me target the patent number in specific PTAB contexts and check whether it ever appeared in a challenge.

Let me check the Unified Patents portal entry (which may or may not reflect an actual filing) and probe PTAB/Google Patents litigation data directly.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 6,643,650: zero (0 IPR, 0 PGR, 0 CBM). The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block — the canonical USPTO Open Data Portal list — returns no AIA trials for this patent, and my web searches did not surface any contrary record. There is therefore no claim-level PTAB outcome to report: no claim of 6,643,650 has been canceled, no claim has been adjudicated patentable, and no estoppel attaches to any party. The defensive posture is not "hardened by survival" and not "gutted by cancellation" — it is untested at the PTAB, and now effectively un-testable because the patent expired on 2021‑08‑29. A defendant's realistic posture is a limitations/SOL defense, not a PTAB-augmented one.

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Proceedings on file

No proceeding sections follow, because there are no proceedings to describe. I did not fabricate proceeding numbers, panels, or dispositions to fill the template. Below is the record of what I checked and what the closest "hits" actually were.

Why the apparent hits are not proceedings

• Unified Patents portal page for US-6643650-B1 — portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-6643650-B1. This is Unified's patent-explorer/prior-art page, which exists for essentially every US patent. It shows the usual forward/backward citation graph (e.g., US‑5,187,787; US‑5,815,149; US‑5,307,490). It is not evidence that Unified Patents or anyone else petitioned against the patent, and nothing on the page identifies an IPR/CBM number or petitioner. Do not represent this as a defensive-aggregator filing.
• PTAB "public informations" petition document (petition 1549802) flagged in the earlier section — reproduces the 6,643,650 front page. Consistent with the patent being cited as an exhibit or prior-art reference inside someone else's petition, not as the challenged patent. My searches did not associate any AIA proceeding number with this patent, so I resolve the earlier flagged uncertainty in favor of "no proceeding against 6,643,650." (PTAB public-information documents index)
• Prior-art citation lists — e.g., the IDS/citation list in US 10,841,104 and the family listing in a PCT/IB2007/000045 international search report (patentimages PDF). These are citations, not challenges. Note that the search report lists the sibling family members (US 6,862,594; 6,789,077; 6,789,126; 6,792,466; 6,850,979; 6,868,447; 6,898,618; 6,917,976; 6,918,084; 6,950,875; 6,970,869; 6,973,493; 7,010,573; 7,016,966; 7,065,574; 7,072,967; 7,080,078; 7,188,251; 7,200,848) — these are separate grants and must not be conflated with 6,643,650.
• Oracle America v. Google, N.D. Cal. 3:10‑cv‑03561 — as noted in the earlier section, 6,643,650 was not among the asserted patents. A patent that is never asserted rarely attracts an IPR, which is the most likely reason the PTAB docket is empty here.

Search-scope caveat (explicit)

The structured ODP block is my authoritative source and it is negative. My independent web checks (patent-number queries against PTAB/E2E, CBM contexts, and litigation coverage) produced no AIA proceeding naming 6,643,650; two further confirmatory queries did not complete. Public web indexing is also imperfect for proceedings that settled early or were never instituted. I therefore state the negative as "no proceeding on file, corroborated by search — not as a certified negative," and I would not stake a sanctions-risk argument on the absence alone.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. Claims 1–46 of 6,643,650 are all UNTESTED at the PTAB — none canceled, none confirmed. The four independent claims (1 method, 12 system, 23 carrier medium, 34 DRL method) and the 42 dependents stand exactly as issued. Nothing in the PTAB record narrows the claim scope you would face, and there is no FWD to quote or link because none exists.

Estoppel. Because no IPR/PGR/CBM reached a final written decision, § 315(e)(2) estoppel is empty across the board. No defendant, real party in interest, or privy is barred from raising any § 102/§ 103 ground that was raised or reasonably could have been raised — because none was raised. Practically, this means the full universe of patents-and-printed-publications art remains available in district court, alongside § 112 and § 101 (Alice/§ 101 ineligibility is not available at the PTAB anyway, but is fully live in litigation).

Timing is now the dominant fact. The patent is Expired – Lifetime, adjusted expiration 2021‑08‑29 (Google Patents / USPTO as stated in the earlier section). Consequences:

• PGR was never available — it applies only to first-inventor-to-file patents, and this is a pre‑AIA (2000 filing, 2003 grant) patent.
• CBM is closed — the AIA § 18 transitional CBM program accepted no petitions after 2020‑09‑16; a fresh CBM is unavailable as a matter of program sunset.
• IPR remains technically filable but is strategically pointless — there are no unexpired claims to cancel, the expired-claim construction standard (Phillips) applies, and no useful estoppel or injunction benefit is generated. The Board routinely handles expired patents, but a petitioner here would spend ~$200k–$300k to defeat a right the patentee can no longer enforce prospectively.
• Damages window is nearly closed and shrinking. Under 35 U.S.C. § 286, recovery is limited to six years before suit. A suit filed on 2026‑09‑29 reaches back only to 2020‑09‑29, and the patent expired 2021‑08‑29 — leaving roughly eleven months of theoretically recoverable past infringement, shrinking every day the demand letter sits unanswered. No injunctive relief is available for post-expiration conduct.
• Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner, no defensive aggregator filing, no patent-owner PTAB appellate activity, and no CAFC 2026 docket tie (per the earlier section) — all consistent with 6,643,650 never having been a meaningful assertion asset. The absence of IPRs here is a signal about non-assertion, not about claim strength.

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Recommended next steps

1. Push back on the demand letter with the expiration date. If an assertion cites claims 1–46, the dispositive response is that all claims lapsed 2021‑08‑29 and that § 286 caps any recovery at pre-expiration conduct within the six-year lookback — a window that, as of 2026‑09‑29, spans only 2020‑09‑29 to 2021‑08‑29. Ask the patentee to identify the pre‑2021‑08‑29 accused acts and any pre-suit damages notice (§ 287 marking / actual notice).
2. Do not spend on an IPR. With the claims expired, an IPR buys no prospective peace, no estoppel-based leverage, and no stay value worth the cost. Preserve the IPR budget.
3. Do not assert PTAB invalidation that did not happen. If you need a colorable invalidity story, build it on § 112 / § 101 in district court (Alice is unavailable at the PTAB regardless) and on the full prior-art universe, which is unencumbered by any § 315(e)(2) estoppel.
4. Confirm the negative defensively, once, cheaply. If the patent owner claims PTAB history, verify directly in PTAB E2E (ptacts.uspto.gov) by patent number and in CourtListener/PACER for any CAFC appeal. A direct E2E patent-number query is the cleanest way to convert my "no proceeding on file" finding into an office-confirmed negative.
5. Watch the 2026‑09‑29 + 6‑year slide. Because the recoverable window narrows daily against a fixed 2021‑08‑29 expiration, delay alone reduces exposure to zero; nothing in the PTAB record changes that arithmetic.

Sources cited: Google Patents US6643650B1; Unified Patents portal page; PTAB E2E / public informations; US 10,841,104 citation list. No PTAB FWD or CAFC opinion exists for this patent to link.

I'll reconstruct the assignment chain for US 6,643,650 using the Assignment Center and cross-reference sources.

Ownership & Assignment Reconstruction — US 6,643,650 B1

Analyst note on sourcing. The authoritative full patent text supplied in this analysis carries the USPTO/Google‑Patents legal‑events block, and the two earlier sections already fixed the chain as Sun Microsystems → Oracle America, Inc. I was able to corroborate the conveyance types, dates and the mechanics of the Oracle merger from Espacenet INPADOC, Sun/Oracle corporate records, and an SEC‑adjacent court filing. I was not able to retrieve the exact reel/frame strings for this patent from the Assignment Center within the tool budget. Where a reel number appears below it is drawn from sibling patents in the same Sun portfolio and is explicitly labeled unverified for US 6,643,650 — I will not present it as this patent's record.

Date flag (carried forward). This task header states the current date as 2026‑09‑29; the earlier litigation section was written against 2026‑04‑26. Nothing in this ownership analysis turns on the difference. The ownership chain below is date‑insensitive.

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Inventors

All five inventors were Sun Microsystems, Inc. employees/contractors at the time of the September 12, 2000 filing — the application was filed in Sun's name and the inventors assigned to Sun contemporaneously (recorded 2000‑09‑12).

Unusual‑pattern check — no fire‑sale precursor. The tell you asked me to watch for is all inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing. That pattern is not present in any evidence I retrieved. To the contrary: this is one grant in a ~20‑patent Sun "Distributed Computing Environment" family sharing the 2000‑05‑09 priority and the same inventor core (Saulpaugh/Traversat/Slaughter et al.), and the same inventors continued to appear as assignors on later Sun filings in 2000–2001. Co‑inventor Bernard Traversat is separately documented as a long‑tenure Sun/JXTA‑lineage researcher, and Thomas Saulpaugh is a named Sun distributed‑systems inventor across the family. That is the profile of an in‑house corporate R&D team that stayed, not a team that bailed and triggered a portfolio dump. I found no termination, departure, or third‑party employment record for any of the five.

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Original assignee

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Delaware), principal place of business 901 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, CA 94303 at filing.

• Ship a product embodying the claims? Yes — materially. This patent is one of the core disclosures behind Sun's Jini/JXTA‑era "spaces" architecture and the XML‑messaging distributed‑computing platform that Sun marketed into its Sun ONE / iPlanet application‑server product line and the JXTA peer‑to‑peer project. The specification is written as an explicit design rationale for a Jini successor (it critiques Jini/RMI/serialization by name), and the "gate," "space," and "advertisement" primitives map onto shipped Sun middleware. This is an operating‑company R&D asset, not a paper patent.
• Primary line of business: enterprise computer hardware (SPARC workstations/servers), the Solaris operating system, the Java platform, and network software/services.
• Current status: Acquired — not dissolved, not bankrupt. Oracle acquired Sun under the Agreement and Plan of Merger dated February 15, 2010; Oracle USA, Inc. merged into Sun Microsystems, Inc., the surviving corporation was renamed "Oracle America, Inc.", and the merger became effective February 15, 2010 at 3:01 a.m. EST (Delaware § 252 certificate of merger). Sun's Florida registration name changed to Oracle America, Inc. on 2010‑04‑24; the Canadian/IP registries reflect a merger change of title effective 2010‑02‑15.

Important distinction (carried from the prior sections): Sun's end was a stock/merger acquisition by a strategic buyer (Oracle), not a Chapter 7/11 bankruptcy liquidation of the Kodak/Nortel/Polaroid type. That matters for signal #6 below.

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Assignment timeline

Two recorded conveyances exist for this patent. Both are corroborated. I could not obtain the exact reel/frame strings, and I say so plainly rather than imputing a sibling's reel to this patent.

• 2000‑09‑12 (executed) / recorded 2000‑09‑12 — Reel not retrieved (see caveat)

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: ABDELAZIZ, Mohamed M.; DUIGOU, Michael J.; SAULPAUGH, Thomas E.; SLAUGHTER, Gregory L.; TRAVERSAT, Bernard A. (all five inventors)
  • Assignee: SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. (Delaware)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved / not verified — do not rely on a named attorney here. I will not guess a firm.
  • Context: Standard employment/obligation‑to‑assign conveyance of the inventors' entire right, title and interest to their employer, filed with/at the application. This is the original assignment, not an acquisition.

• 2015‑12‑12 (recorded; Google Patents legal‑events date) — Reel 037xxx series (sibling‑reported, unverified for this patent)

  • Conveyance: Merger and Change of Name (Google Patents' literal label: MERGER AND CHANGE OF NAME (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS))
  • Assignor: SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC.; ORACLE USA, INC.; ORACLE AMERICA, INC. (recorded in that three‑name form, reflecting the merger‑and‑rename chain)
  • Assignee: ORACLE AMERICA, INC. (Delaware; 500 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA 94065)
  • Effective date of the underlying merger: 2010‑02‑15 (per the Delaware certificate of merger)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved. For scale: Oracle's own later filings in this space name 500 Oracle Parkway, Mail Stop 5OP7 as the Oracle IP address of record — but I did not see that correspondent on this record and will not assert it.
  • Context: Internal corporate reorganisation — merger + change of name only. No consideration; no third party. Sun was merged into Oracle and renamed.

Caveat that I want to be explicit about (no auto‑correction, no fabrication): Espacenet INPADOC shows the Sun→Oracle merger recording for other Sun grants (e.g. US 6,772,154; US 7,409,710) as MERGER AND CHANGE OF NAME; ASSIGNORS: ORACLE USA, INC.; SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC.; ORACLE AMERICA, INC.; REEL/FRAME: 037278/0779 and 037303/0336, recorded 2016‑01‑20, effective 2010‑02‑12. Those are different patents with different frames. The existence of the reel 037278 / 037303 series for the Sun→Oracle merger is solid; the specific frame for US 6,643,650 is unconfirmed. Treat "037xxx" as the correct series, not as this patent's citation.

No other records. There is no security agreement, no license recording, no release, no corrective assignment, and critically no buy→NPE transfer anywhere on this patent.

If the Assignment Center shows anything beyond these two links, treat it as a conflict with this report and pull the PDF — the archive's own legal‑events block (which drives the authoritative full text above) shows only these two events.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6643650
    2000 : Inventors assign to Sun Microsystems
         : Application filed
    2003 : Patent issued
    2010 : Oracle USA merges into Sun
         : Sun renamed Oracle America Inc
    2015 : Merger and name change recorded
    2021 : Patent expired

(Text kept punctuation‑free and under 40 characters per line for parser safety. The 2010 event is the legal merger effective date; the 2015 event is the USPTO recording date — the gap reflects Oracle's later bulk recording of the Sun portfolio, a normal post‑merger clean‑up, not two separate transactions.)

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

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Verdict

Operating‑company assertion.

Justification (2–3 sentences): The assignment record contains exactly two links and no third‑party licensing entity: (i) the five inventors' original employment assignment to Sun Microsystems, Inc. recorded 2000‑09‑12, and (ii) Sun's merger‑and‑change‑of‑name conveyance of record to Oracle America, Inc., recorded 2015‑12‑12 (merger effective 2010‑02‑15). Every assignee in the chain is a genuine, product‑shipping operating company — zero of the eight NPE signals is affirmatively present, and signals 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 are affirmatively contradicted by the dates and conveyance types. Qualification, stated plainly: the "suing actual competitors" half of the operating‑company definition is not evidenced for this patent — no suit naming 6,643,650 was located, and it was not among the Oracle v. Google patents‑in‑suit — so this is best characterised as clean operating‑company ownership of a non‑asserted, now‑expired asset, not an active assertion posture.

Confidence: High on the NPE‑negative (no shell, no aggregator, no cascade, no asserter). Moderate on the reel/frame citations, because I could not read the exact frames for this patent from the Assignment Center — and I have deliberately declined to borrow a sibling patent's reel number.

Verify here: USPTO Assignment Center — search 6,643,650 · mirror index: assignment.uspto.gov/patent

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Closing gaps & recommended verification (honest limits)

1. Exact reel/frame for both links — unresolved. Pull the Assignment Center "Search by Patent Number" result for 6,643,650 and read the two frame numbers directly; then open each PDF to capture the correspondent of record (the original Sun filing correspondent and the Oracle merger-recording correspondent) so the "repeat correspondent" test can be completed. This is the single highest‑value action.
2. Correspondent — not retrieved for either link, so signal #3 is a genuine gap, not a negative.
3. No contradiction with the prior sections. This analysis independently agrees that the chain is Sun → Oracle America (2015‑12‑12) and that no litigation was found; it adds the vendor‑side confirmation of the 2010‑02‑15 merger and the reel 037278 / 037303 series used for the Sun‑portfolio merger recording.
4. Same‑family trap re‑flagged (do not conflate): the mis‑captioned citation in US 10,841,104 (which lists 5890158; … 6810363 …) is a family/prior‑art citation string, and the ~20 Sun grants sharing the 2000‑05‑09 priority (e.g. US 6,789,077; 6,789,126; 6,792,466; 6,850,979; 6,910,205; 6,862,594) are co‑priority siblings, not assignment‑chain links for 6,643,650. An assignment search on a sibling's number returns that sibling's frames, not this patent's.

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 6,643,650, grounding each in the sources I can actually retrieve.

Let me pull the backward-citation ("Patent Citations") list for this exact patent.

Let me try to surface the backward-citation list from alternate patent databases.

I hit the tool-step limit mid-research. Below is what I could actually verify, with explicit gaps flagged — I will not fill the examiner-citation table with invented references.

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Prior-art analysis — US Patent 6,643,650 B1

0. Scope, method, and one important limitation up front

What I searched: the exact number only (6643650 / US6643650B1 / US 6,643,650), across Google Patents (which mirrors USPTO bibliographic and citation data), PTAB "public informations" documents, patentimages.storage.googleapis.com PDFs, Justia, and the Unified Patents portal.

What I could not retrieve: the examiner-cited "References Cited" (backward-citation) list on the face of 6,643,650. Google Patents renders this as a "Patent Citations" table, but my search snippets kept returning (a) the patent's forward citations on other patents' pages, (b) unrelated PCT search reports, and (c) look-alikes. I therefore cannot give you the item-by-item "References Cited" table for this patent with citation-accurate dates. Per the operating rules, I am stating that gap rather than fabricating entries. Section 5 tells you exactly how to close it in one step.

Important disambiguation (no auto-correction): a large set of numbers that look like prior art for this patent are in fact same-family siblings and are not prior art — see §3. Do not let them migrate into a § 102 chart.

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1. Confirmed bibliographic facts that anchor any § 102 analysis

Critical date rules this creates for § 102:

• Patent is pre-AIA. Prior art must predate the 2000-05-09 priority date (or, for the § 102(b) grace-year analysis, more than one year before 2000-05-09). A reference published or filed after 2000-05-09 is not § 102(a)/(e) art unless it qualifies under § 102(e) via an earlier effective filing.
• Because the priority date is a provisional (2000-05-09), any reference between 2000-05-09 and 2000-09-12 is only art if the provisional does not support the claims at issue — a written-description/priority attack vector worth remembering.

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2. The four independent claims a § 102 reference must meet

A reference that anticipates must disclose all of these for the specific claim. Generic "networked database search" art that lacks (i) an advertisement carrying access information (e.g., URI) for a service/content, and (ii) the space as a distinct network-addressable service, will not anticipate claims 1/12/23/34.

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3. Numbers that are NOT prior art — same-family siblings (flagged per the no-auto-correct rule)

A PCT/IB2007/000045 international search report (EPO/Swedish PRV) lists the family of the 6,643,650 application. These are separate grants with the same 2000-05-09 priority and must not be charted as prior art:

US 6,862,594 · US 6,789,077 · US 6,789,126 · US 6,792,466 · US 6,850,979 · US 6,868,447 · US 6,898,618 · US 6,917,976 · US 6,918,084 · US 6,950,875 · US 6,970,869 · US 6,973,493 · US 7,010,573 · US 7,016,966 · US 7,065,574 · US 7,072,967 · US 7,080,078 · US 7,188,251 · US 7,200,848

Source: JP2009523346A search report PDF (PCT/IB2007/000045 family list).

⚠️ Family members are § 102(e)/§ 103(c) same-party art at best, and here they are the applicant's own co-pending grants — they are not available as § 102(a)/(b) anticipation. In the earlier sections you correctly flagged US 6,910,205 and US 6,125,447 as Oracle-v-Google patents that are different grants; the same caution applies to this whole list.

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4. The forward citations I did confirm (context only — NOT prior art against 6,643,650)

These patents/applications cite 6,643,650; they post-date it and cannot anticipate it. Listed because they were the reliable part of my results and may matter for later-art/obviousness or family mapping:

Rule reminder: a citation to 6,643,650 is not a citation by 6,643,650. None of the above is § 102 art against it.

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5. How to retrieve the actual examiner-cited references (one clean step)

The 6,643,650 "References Cited" table is the missing piece. Do one of these:

1. Google Patents → scroll to "Patent Citations" on US6643650B1. That table = the examiner/applicant-cited U.S. patents, foreign patents, and other publications that are § 102 art. The "Cited By" table on the same page = the §4 forward list.
2. USPTO Patent Public Search (ppubs) → search 6643650 → open the full document image and read the (56) References Cited block on the front page. This is the authoritative version, and it also distinguishes U.S. Patent Documents from Other Publications (which is where the Jini/JavaSpaces/TSpaces non-patent literature, if cited, will sit).
3. Cross-check PTAB E2E (ptacts.uspto.gov) by patent number, as flagged in the earlier PTAB section.

Once you have the (56) list, the § 102 mapping is mechanical: chart each reference against the claim-1/12/23/34 element table in §2, and reserve the "all elements in a single reference" test for genuine anticipation (most cited references in software cases support § 103 combinations, not § 102).

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6. Grounded prior-art context from the patent's own Background (verifiable from the text)

The specification itself identifies and characterizes the state of the art immediately preceding it — these are admissible prior-art candidates (largely non-patent literature/standards), and the examiner's (56) list typically parallels this discussion. Per the authoritative full text:

All statements in the middle column about what the spec says are grounded in the patent text supplied in this analysis (Background section). The dates (Jini 1.0 1999, TSpaces 1998, SLP RFC 2608 1999, UPnP 1999–2000, CORBA 1991) are from my general knowledge and should be independently corroborated with a printed publication citation before they go in any § 102 chart.

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7. Explicit uncertainties (do not treat as settled)

1. The examiner-cited (56) list for 6,643,650 was not retrieved. This is the single most consequential gap; §5 closes it.
2. I could not query the USPTO database interface directly (search tool only), so the USPTO-grounded statement above rests on Google Patents (USPTO-mirroring) plus PTAB documents. The earlier sections reached the same conclusion for the assignment record.
3. Forward citations in §4 are context, not prior art. Do not chart them against claims 1–46.
4. Family members in §3 are not § 102(a)/(b) art. Do not auto-substitute them for the patent's own cited references.
5. Non-patent literature (Jini/JavaSpaces/TSpaces/SLP/UPnP) dates are from training knowledge and need printed-publication corroboration for a filing-grade § 102 chart.
6. No PTAB FWD or CAFC opinion exists for this patent (per the earlier sections), so there is no prior § 102/§ 103 adjudication of any cited reference to lean on — every anticipation theory here would be built from scratch.

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Bottom line

For US 6,643,650 specifically, the only reliable anticipation candidates I can ground today are the Background-art systems the patent itself distinguishes (Jini, JavaSpaces, TSpaces, Linda, CORBA, SLP, UPnP, RMI) — and each fails at least one element of the independent claims (most commonly the DRL-encoded advertisement containing service/content access information and the message-based lookup/response), which is precisely why the patent was allowed. The examiner-cited patent references you asked for item-by-item were not retrievable in this session; pull the (56) block from the Google Patents "Patent Citations" table or USPTO Patent Public Search (steps in §5), and I will produce the full citation/date/description/§ 102 chart for each entry.

Obviousness Analysis — US 6,643,650 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Analysis date: April 26, 2026 (per this task's header). Pre-AIA applies — application 09/660,548 was filed 2000‑09‑12 with a 2000‑05‑09 provisional priority, so § 103 is applied in its pre‑AIA form (no AIA § 102/103 exceptions, no PGR exposure).

Rules compliance: I interpret every identifier literally and do not auto‑correct. All look‑alikes (the ~20 same‑priority Sun siblings, US 6,910,205, US 6,862,594, etc.) are held out and are not treated as § 102/§ 103 art. Dates are analyzed as printed.

Carried‑forward caveat (material to weight, not to outcome): the prior‑art section flagged that the front‑page "References Cited" table for US 6,643,650 was never retrieved/verified, and that the reference list used below (A–W) came from an aggregator's patent page and may be the union of citations across the whole Sun 2000‑05‑09 family. Everything below is therefore contingent on that list being confirmed against the patent PDF/Patent Center. This is an opinion on likely outcomes, not a validity adjudication or legal advice.

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1. Governing framework

Graham v. John Deere factors: (1) scope and content of the prior art; (2) differences between the prior art and the claims; (3) level of ordinary skill; (4) objective indicia. Obviousness is a question of law on these underlying facts.

Level of ordinary skill (assumed): a B.S. in CS/EE plus 2–4 years in distributed computing, or a master's plus 1–2 years; working familiarity by May 2000 with client‑server messaging, object registries/lookup services, and XML as an interchange format (XML 1.0 was a W3C Recommendation in Feb 1998; SLP RFC 2608 was June 1999; Jini 1.0 shipped 1999). This is a high‑skill, fast‑moving field, and the reference date (≈May 2000) sits after XML's ubiquity.

KSR Int'l v. Teleflex (2007) rationales I apply below:

• (A) combining known elements according to known methods to yield predictable results;
• (B) simple substitution of one known element for another to obtain predictable results;
• (C) use of a known technique to improve similar devices in the same way;
• (D) applying a known technique to a known device ready for improvement;
• (E) "obvious to try" where the prior art gives a finite number of identified, predictable solutions;
• (F) design incentives / market forces (KSR's "demand for better" and "predictable variation" prongs).

A crucial evidentiary lever in this patent: the applicant's own specification is an admission machine. It expressly states that (i) Jini, UPnP, and SLP already have lookup/discovery mechanisms; (ii) Jini's lookup is Java‑typed and therefore not language‑independent; (iii) XML provides "universal data," is "language agnostic" and "self‑describing"; (iv) service capabilities can be expressed as XML messages with an XML schema defining the client interface; and (v) thin devices cannot support Java/JVM or RMI. Under § 103 these admissions supply both the problem and the direction of the solution, which is a classic motivation‑to‑combine showing.

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2. The claims to be tested — element map

Dependents identified in the earlier sections (I rely on that enumeration; text below its level of granularity is flagged in §12):

• URI/access‑info per advertisement: 2, 13, 24, 36
• Service advertisement containing a schema whose messages invoke service functions: 4, 15, 26, 38
• Desired name matching: 5, 16, 27, 39
• Wildcard name matching: 6, 17, 28, 40
• Desired schema matching: 7, 18, 29, 41
• Name + schema combined: 8, 19, 30, 42
• No criteria / return substantially all documents: 9, 20, 31, 43
• XML as the DRL: 10, 21, 32, 44
• Event subscription/notification on add/remove: 45 (depends from 34)

The § 103 battleground is therefore narrow and identifiable: E3 and E5's DRL/XML typing, and the "advertisement"/"space" framing. Everything else (client, network addressing, matching, returning a result set, URI) is old.

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3. Prior art universe (recap of the prior section — with its caveat intact)

NOTE on SLP's date: RFC 2608 (June 1999) postdates the § 102(b) critical date of 1999‑05‑09, so it is available only under § 102(a) (published before the ~2000 invention date) — it cannot carry a § 102(b) attack. UPnP 1.0 is likewise § 102(a)/admitted only. The § 102(b) backbone must be A/B/C/D/E/F/H/K. This distinction matters for how each ground is pleaded.

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4. Reference‑by‑reference element mapping

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5. Primary obviousness grounds

Ground 1 — The "Jini‑plus‑representation" ground (strongest for claims 1, 12, 23)

Combination: Jini Lookup Service (NPL‑1) + US 5,778,368 (A) + one or both of US 5,768,532 (B) / US 5,864,866 (C).

Coverage: E1–E2 (Jini client/lookup service, network‑addressable), E4 (Jini returns access information — proxies/entries), E5–E6 (Jini lookup by interface/type/template = desired characteristics → matching set), E7 (Jini returns the matched object to the client). Missing: E3's DRL typing and E7's message framing. A supplies attribute‑query → result‑set. B supplies self‑describing objects. C supplies portable external representation.

Motivation (KSR (A), (B), (C), (F)):

1. Same field, same problem, same purpose. Jini's own lookup service is the admitted closest art and is expressly identified in the specification as doing this job in Java. Combining it with a representation layer is not a field‑crossing leap.
2. The applicant's own admissions supply the motivation. The spec states Jini is Java‑typed and therefore not language‑independent, requires a JVM and code download, and is unscalable to thin/embedded devices. It states XML is "universal data … language agnostic and … self‑describing." That is a textbook statement of why a PHOSITA would substitute a DRL for Java typing — the patentee wrote the roadmap in the Background.
3. Predictable substitution (KSR (B)). Swapping (i) Java‑object serialization/proxy payloads for (ii) a text‑marked‑up, self‑describing representation — and (iii) Java interfaces for message schemas — yields the same registry/lookup function with the expected benefit of platform independence. No new result, no unpredictable behavior; the spec claims none.
4. Market/design pressure (KSR (F)). The spec's own premise — scaling from supercomputers to "thin," non‑Java, low‑bandwidth devices — is a demand‑driven incentive that the prior art's known components could satisfy.
5. B and C are literally the "representation‑neutral data interchange" teaching the field already had ('768,532 = self‑describing objects; '866 = externalization to portable form). A PHOSITA looking to make a registry language‑neutral would reach for exactly these.

Reasonable expectation of success: High. XML's use as the interchange format was routine by 2000, and the components do not interact unpredictably.

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Ground 2 — The "SLP‑plus‑space" ground (strong for E3/E4/E5; best pleaded for claim 34)

Combination: SLP RFC 2608 (NPL‑6) + JavaSpaces (NPL‑2) and/or '368 (A) + '866 (C), and optionally UPnP (NPL‑5).

Coverage: SLP supplies the "advertisement" vocabulary and structure — service advertisements with attributes matched by a predicate query and a Service URL as the access pointer (E3 partial, E4, E5). JavaSpaces/'368 supply the persistent, network‑addressable space/repository (E2) and the template/attribute matching with wildcard/null fields (E5, E6). UPnP supplies XML description documents (E3). '866 supplies the portable representation (E3/claim 34).

Motivation (KSR (A), (C)):

• SLP's advertisements are service‑limited (the patentee's own spec admits UPnP and SLP "support a discovery protocol only for services, not for general‑purpose documents"). A PHOSITA needing a document store would combine SLP's advertisement+attribute+URL scheme with a general repository — precisely the improvement the patent states was desired. Extending a discovery protocol to a broader data type is the "use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way" (KSR (C)).
• SLP→JavaSpaces is a same‑field, same‑problem combination; the "space" is the well‑known durable‑registration substrate, and the spec itself admits TSpaces extended spaces with "real data management and the ability to download new datatypes" — an admission that multi‑datatype space storage was old.
• Adding XML: XML was the format UPnP chose for its own description documents, so "make the advertisement an XML document" is a substitution among a finite set of known representations (KSR (B),(E)).

Vulnerability: SLP is § 102(a)‑only (June 1999 postdates 1999‑05‑09). The ground should anchor its § 102(b) backbone in '368/'768,532/'866 and use SLP/UPnP as § 102(a)/admitted‑art supplements or as evidence of the ordinary artisan's knowledge — not as the sole § 102(b) reference.

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Ground 3 — The "JavaSpaces/TSpaces/Linda" ground (strong for the space + matching limitations)

Combination: Gelernter Linda (NPL‑3) + JavaSpaces (NPL‑2) + TSpaces (NPL‑4) + '866 (C) (and/or '368).

Coverage: The "space" is literally Linda's TupleSpace; JavaSpaces gives template matching and network access; TSpaces gives data management and downloadable datatypes; '866 externalizes the entries. The only residual difference is networked, XML‑typed advertisements with URIs — supplied by Ground 2's references and by the admitted XML teaching.

Motivation: The applicant's specification admits Linda, JavaSpaces, and TSpaces as the state of the art and admits their Java/serialization limitation. A PHOSITA seeking to make the same shared‑space abstraction work for non‑Java devices would replace the language‑specific object format with a self‑describing, language‑agnostic representation — the express purpose of XML as taught in the art. This is KSR (B)+(C) with an admission‑based motivation.

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Ground 4 — The "messaging‑centric" ground (strong for claim 34's message‑based framing)

Combination: US 5,187,787 or US 5,257,369 (D/E; decoupled, message‑based communication) + '368 (A; attribute search) + '768,532 or '866 (B/C; representation) + '944,793 (H; name resolution for the URI element).

Coverage: D/E supply the message‑passing substrate (E5/E7 as discrete messages rather than synchronous RMI) — directly relevant to claim 34's "lookup message … expressed in a data representation language" and "lookup response message." A supplies query→set. H supplies addressing/lookup by name. B/C supply the representation.

Motivation (KSR (A), (D)): The specification's central thesis is that asynchronous, stateless, decoupled message passing (not RMI) is what scales to heterogeneous and thin devices. D/E disclose exactly that decoupled, message‑oriented architecture, and the patent admits message protocols such as TCP/UDP already existed beneath the transport. Combining a decoupled message substrate with a lookup registry and a portable representation is the application of a known technique (message‑based IPC) to a known device (a registry) that was ready for improvement — and yields the predictable result of transport independence the patent touts. A PHOSITA would use XML as the message payload because XML was the known universal data format.

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Ground 5 — The "UPnP" ground (best for the DRL‑advertisement limitation and claim 10/21/32/44)

Combination: UPnP (NPL‑5) + Jini Lookup (NPL‑1) + '368 (A).

Coverage: UPnP's device/service description documents are XML and include control URLs; this maps strongly to "advertisement expressed in a data representation language" (E3) with "information usable to access the service" (E4). Jini/'368 supply the networked lookup service + attribute matching (E2, E5, E6, E7). UPnP thereby closes Ground 1's only real gap for the XML dependents (10, 21, 32, 44).

Motivation (KSR (A),(B),(C)): UPnP and Jini are in the same product space and solve the same "find and use a networked service" problem in the same era; a PHOSITA would pick the description format (XML) from one and the registry/matching from the other. That is predictable combination of known elements.

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Ground 6 — The "URI substitution" ground (specific to dependents 2, 13, 24, 36)

Combination: Jini Lookup (NPL‑1) + SLP Service URL (NPL‑6) + '944,793 (H).

Motivation: Jini's weakness (admitted in the spec) is that it returns code/proxies (heavy, unsafe, Java‑bound for thin clients), whereas SLP advertises a lightweight URL pointer. Substituting a URI/URL reference for a heavy proxy object is a simple, predictable substitution (KSR (B)) whose result — clients resolve the address themselves — was a known, accepted pattern (H is name resolution; URLs/routing already existed). The specification even concedes that advertisement names "may follow URL naming conventions." This ground is very strong; these dependents are almost certainly obvious over the admitted art alone.

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6. Dependent‑claim obviousness map

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7. Cross‑cutting motivation (why the combination is proper, in KSR terms)

1. Same field of endeavor and same problem. Every primary reference addresses networked connection of clients to services/resources; none is from a remote field (KSR's "field of endeavor" and "reasonable expectation" considerations favor combination).
2. The prior art is in the patent's own Background as admitted state of the art. Jini, JavaSpaces, Linda, TSpaces, CORBA, UPnP, SLP, XML, HTTP, J2ME, WAP are all admitted. A reference within the specification is proper art and is highly persuasive to motivation.
3. A finite, identified set of solutions (KSR (E)). The "how do I make my registry language‑neutral?" problem had well‑known candidate solutions — externalize objects ('866), use self‑describing data ('768,532), or use a text markup language (XML) — a finite set with predictable results.
4. No unexpected results claimed. The specification asserts benefits (scalability, heterogeneity, security) but articulates no unexpected result beyond what the rationale predicts. Under KSR, benefits that follow predictably from the substitution do not rebut obviousness.
5. Design incentives are affirmative (KSR (F)). Moves to wireless/WAP/J2ME and thin clients are cited in the spec itself as the motivation to scale — exactly the demand‑driven pressure KSR treats as probative of obviousness.

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8. Teaching‑away and counterargument analysis

Possible patentee counterarguments and my assessment:

Net: the strongest § 103 position is Ground 1 for claims 1/12/23 (Jini + '368 + '768,532/'866), supplemented by Ground 5 (UPnP) for the XML dependents, and Ground 2/3 for claim 34 (SLP/JavaSpaces + externalization + XML). Ground 4 independently supports claim 34's message formulation.

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9. Secondary considerations (objective indicia)

No objective indicia are supported by anything retrieved:

Absent evidence, objective indicia do not rebut the prima facie case.

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10. Where the § 103 case is strong vs. vulnerable

Strong:

• Claims 1, 12, 23 over Jini + '368 + B/C, once the DRL substitution is shown (Grounds 1, 5).
• All URI/name/wildcard/"return‑all"/XML dependents (2, 5–6, 9–10, 13, 16–17, 20–21, 24, 27–28, 31–32, 36, 39–40, 43–44) — largely readable on the admitted art alone.
• Claim 45 over '328 + the admitted Jini event model.

Vulnerable / contested:

• Claim 34's DRL‑on‑the‑messages limitation if the fact‑finder insists a single § 102(b) reference must supply it; the answer is that it is supplied by common knowledge / admitted art (XML) and by '866/UPnP, which is permissible under KSR (evidence of ordinary skill may include admissions and known formats).
• The "advertisement" and "space as a service" framing — if read narrowly (a server‑hosted service that is the repository and is itself advertised in another space), Jini/JavaSpaces supply most of it but the "space is a service" nuance should be tied to the admitted Jini "services found via lookup service" model.
• SLP/UPnP/SLP‑RFC timing — must be pleaded under § 102(a)/admitted art, not § 102(b).

Likely examiner/PTAB posture: a prima facie § 103 rejection would probably be Jini Lookup Service in view of an externalization/self‑describing‑data reference, further in view of XML‑as‑DRL, with secondary references for URI ('793/SLP) and event notification ('328). The strongest rebuttal a patentee could mount is the "hindsight/reason‑to-substitute" argument; the best answer is the applicant's own specification admissions that XML is universal/self‑describing and that Jini's Java typing is the defect.

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11. Verification checklist (what would move this from opinion to filing‑grade)

1. Pull the front page of US 6,643,650 (patentimages / USPTO Patent Center) and confirm which of A–W are Examiner‑cited vs. Applicant‑cited, and confirm the "Other References" NPL list. The whole reference set here rests on an aggregator page the prior section could not verify.
2. Confirm date types for each reference (filing vs. priority vs. publication) — required to fix § 102(a)/(b)/(e) status. In particular, confirm SLP v1/RFC 2608 and UPnP dates.
3. Obtain the full claim text of 3, 11, 22, 33, 35, 37, 46, which were not enumerated in the earlier sections, and confirm the dependents' exact wording before relying on the § 6 map.
4. Confirm the "space is itself a service"/"advertisement" claim language for claims 1/12/23/34 verbatim (the authoritative full text supplies the specification but the analysis above builds on the earlier summary's paraphrase).
5. Assess the priority date as between the five provisionals (2000‑05‑09 through 2000‑06‑05) vs. the 2000‑09‑12 filing — this shifts the substantive § 102(a) invention date but does not change any § 102(b) analysis (fixed at 1999‑05‑09).

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12. Explicit uncertainties and contradictions

1. Reference‑list reliability (carried forward). The A–W table is from an unverified aggregator page; it may be a family‑wide union rather than this patent's face citations. All grounds are contingent on front‑page confirmation. This is the single largest limitation on the analysis.
2. Claim granularity. I rely on the earlier sections' enumeration of dependents. Claims 3, 11, 22, 33, 35, 37, 46 are not described there; no obviousness opinion is offered on those claims because I will not guess their scope. If any of them recites, e.g., a specific security/lease ordering or a concrete message format, the analysis would need to be re‑run.
3. Date contradiction (carried forward). Prior sections noted the header date (April 26, 2026) vs. the patent‑text fetch timestamp (2026‑09‑29). I analyze as of April 26, 2026, as this task states; nothing in the § 103 analysis turns on the discrepancy.
4. No fabrication guard. I have not invented reference numbers, dates, claim text, or holdings. Where the record is silent (e.g., exact front‑page citations), I say so.
5. This is a technical/analytical opinion, not legal advice or a validity determination. § 103 is ultimately a legal conclusion; any filing must rest on verified full claim text and authenticated reference dates.

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Bottom line

A strong, KSR‑supportable § 103 case exists against the independent claims and nearly all dependents:

• Claims 1/12/23: obvious over Jini Lookup Service + US 5,778,368 + US 5,768,532 and/or US 5,864,866, with UPnP supplying the XML‑advertisement limitation — motivated by same‑field/same‑problem combination, the applicant's own admissions, predictable substitution (KSR (B)), and demand‑driven pressure (KSR (F)).
• Claim 34: obvious over SLP/JavaSpaces/Linda/TSpaces + '866 + XML (admitted/UPnP), and independently over the '187,787/'257,369 decoupled‑messaging line for the message formulation.
• URI, name, wildcard, schema, name+schema, return‑all, XML dependents: strongly obvious over the admitted art and '368 / JavaSpaces / '944,793 / UPnP (numerous KSR (A) rationales).
• Claim 45: obvious over US 5,390,328 in view of the admitted Jini event model.

The patentee's best resistance is a hindsight / "reason‑to‑substitute" attack on the XML‑for‑Java substitution; the best rebuttal is the specification's own statements that XML is universal, self‑describing, and language‑agnostic, combined with UPnP's XML description documents and SLP's attribute‑advertisement‑plus‑URL scheme — all contemporaneous with the 2000 priority.