US 6685093

I'll run a few targeted searches before summarizing.

Let me run a couple more targeted searches on the patent number and its owners.

US Patent 6,685,093 — Summary

Sourcing note: The primary source used here is the Google Patents full-text record for US6685093B2 (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6685093](/patent/US6685093)/en), which reproduces the granted specification and all 53 claims. I also ran USPTO/CAFC-oriented searches for the number. Those searches returned no 2026 CAFC docket entry and no PTAB proceeding tied to US 6,685,093; I cannot confirm whether any such proceeding exists. Treat the litigation/proceeding point as unknown, not as "none filed."

Bibliographic data

Assignment chain as recorded: Ecrio, Inc. (assignment recorded 2001-12-05) → Mobeam, Inc. (2007-01-29) → security agreement back to Ecrio (2010-04-22) → release/reassignment to Mobeam, Inc. (2014-10-30) → Samsung Pay, Inc. (2017-02-09) → Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (2018-06-05).

Family (US continuations/relatives): US 6,877,665; US 7,028,906; US 7,395,961; US 7,967,211; US 2011/0215162; plus a CIP branch including US 6,736,322 (Gobburu et al.). Parallel foreign members include EP 1 442 416 B1, WO 03/028273 A2, AU 2002337693 A1.

⚠️ Flagged inconsistency: The Google Patents header gives the priority date as 2001-09-25, but the same page's "Family Applications" table lists US 09/963,218 with a priority date of 2000-11-20 (apparently inherited from the CIP relationship to US 09/996,847). I have not resolved which is authoritative; a USPTO Patent Center / Global Dossier check would be needed.

Abstract (verbatim): "A system, method, and apparatus for communicating information encoded in a bar code format between a mobile communications device and a bar code scanner. Transmission information data is encoded into a bar code format. A signal is generated from the bar code format to simulate a reflection of a scanning beam being moved across a static visual image of the bar code format; and the signal is transmitted as light pulses from the mobile communications device."

What the invention actually does (context for the claims)

The patent addresses a known problem: bar codes shown statically on an LCD phone screen have poor contrast and limited resolution, so laser ("sequential") scanners often fail to read them. The inventors' answer is to stop displaying a bar code picture and instead make the phone emit light that mimics the time-varying reflection a scanner's own scanning beam would produce if it swept across a real printed bar code — an on/off (or bright/dark, or color-shifting) pulse train at a scan rate matching the scanner (the spec gives ~30–60 scans/sec, e.g. ~45/sec, or a swept variable rate). The light source may be an LED (e.g., a power-management/notification LED), an IR transmitter, an LCD backlight, a display, or a light bulb. Optional refinements include detecting the scanner's beam with a receiver and measuring/synchronizing to its actual scan rate (FIG. 7), and static color-bar-code display for CCD imagers (FIG. 10). The spec also describes the two-array encoding approach (a 256-pixel-wide bar code with 4-px minimum elements → a 64-element binary array) and upstream server-side encoding.

Independent claims in plain language

Claim 1 — Method (mobile phone side).
The phone (a) receives the transmission information over a wireless transmission, (b) encodes it into a bar code format on the phone, (c) generates, on the phone, a signal that simulates a scanning beam's reflection off a static visual image of that bar code, and (d) emits that signal as light pulses. Note that the claim builds in both the wireless receipt and the phone-side encoding, so a purely local/offline pre-stored bar code would fall outside it.

Claim 7 — Method (with user-facing output).
Same pipeline as claim 1 plus presenting "representative information" of the transmission information on a user output facility (i.e., telling the user what is about to be transmitted, e.g., a boarding pass summary on screen or an audio prompt), and the final transmitting step is recited as "in an active visual form."

Claim 20 — Mobile phone (device).
The apparatus counterpart of claim 1: a mobile phone receiver for receiving the transmission information via wireless transmission, a program component for encoding it into a bar code format, a program component for generating the simulated-reflection signal, and a light source for transmitting the signal as light pulses.

Claim 24 — Mobile phone (device, with output facility).
Adds to claim 20 an output facility for presenting representative information of the transmission information (claim 25 specifies a speaker; claim 27 specifies a display, optionally also showing the bar code statically).

Claim 35 — Mobile phone (means-plus-function).
The same device expressed functionally: receiving means (wireless), encoding means, generating means (signal simulating scanning-beam reflection), and transmission means for emitting the signal as light.

Claim 38 — System.
A four-element system: a server providing the transmission information; a mobile phone (wireless receiver + encoding program + signal-generating program + light source emitting light pulses); a host providing wireless communications between server and phone; and — notably — a bar code scanner for receiving the light pulses. Claim 38 is the only independent claim that expressly recites the scanner as part of the claimed combination; it is also the only independent claim that recites the server/host architecture.

Notable dependent claims (useful for scope mapping)

• Beam detection + rate matching: claims 5, 18, 23, 42 — receive the scanner's own beam, determine its scan rate, and generate the simulated signal at that measured rate.
• Dual-mode (static + active): claims 3, 10, 22, 27, 51 — also display the bar code in static visual form (to also serve CCD/imager scanners).
• Light-source species: claims 11, 28, 40 — LED, infrared transmitter, and/or display screen; claims 29/30, 45/46 — visible vs. infrared spectrum.
• Display modulation: claims 14, 31, 47 — alter brightness, backlight, contrast, color, or power.
• LED / IR switching: claims 15, 16, 32, 33, 48, 49.
• Two-color scheme: claims 19, 34, 52 — a first color selected to be accepted by the scanner and a second color selected to be rejected by it (a technique useful where a scanner's optical filter admits one hue and blocks another).
• Data-source recitations: claims 4, 17, 41 — transmission information furnished from a personal computer, server, database, network, wireless host, wireless port, or the Internet.

Third-party recognition of the patent

The patent is expressly identified as the foundational "light-simulated bar code" disclosure in later Mobeam-family filings — e.g., US 8,794,529 and US 9,558,437 each cite "U.S. Pat. No. 6,685,093 issued Feb. 3, 2004 to Challa et al." as the earlier light-simulated bar code technology. It is also cited in the description of EP 2 118 814 B1 ("US 6685093 B, Challa").

Limitations of this summary / explicit uncertainties

1. No CAFC 2026 activity found. My searches of CAFC opinion/order material and general patent-litigation reporting for 2026 surfaced multiple Samsung-related appeals (e.g., Wipqtus v. Samsung, No. 2025-1596, Rule 36 judgment 2026-09-11; Netlist/Micron/Samsung memory appeals; Lynk Labs v. Samsung), but none referencing 6,685,093. I did not have a reliable way to run a docket-number or patent-number query directly against PACER/PATENTS database through the tools available, so I cannot affirm a negative.
2. Priority date conflict in the source record (2001-09-25 vs. 2000-11-20), noted above.
3. Expiry. As of today (2026-04-26) the record shows the patent expired on 2021-09-25 for failure to meet maintenance-fee/term conditions; the "Expired – Lifetime" designation is from the Google Patents legal-status field, which is expressly flagged there as an assumption rather than a legal conclusion. Firm expiry should be re-verified against USPTO maintenance-fee records.
4. Assignee accuracy. Google Patents itself disclaims accuracy of the listed current assignee; I have reported the recorded assignment chain rather than the "current assignee" field alone.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 6685093. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me search additional litigation databases and specific parties associated with this patent.

Bottom Line

I found no litigation — no district court infringement action, no ITC Section 337 investigation, no PTAB proceeding, and no appeal — that asserts or adjudicates U.S. Patent No. 6,685,093. I cannot report plaintiff/defendant/case number/outcome for any case asserting this patent, because my searches did not surface any such case.

Given the strict rule against auto-correcting identifiers, I want to be explicit: several results I retrieved are near-miss or false-positive hits on different identifiers, which I am reporting below so they are not mistaken for '093 litigation.

What I searched

• General web searches for "US patent 6685093 litigation" and "6685093" patent lawsuit defendant complaint
• Party-based searches tied to the known chain of ownership (Ecrio → Mobeam → Samsung Pay → Samsung Electronics): "Mobeam" patent lawsuit "bar code" Samsung Pay plaintiff defendant docket
• CourtListener / RECAP-oriented search for courtlistener "6,685,093" OR "6685093" patent infringement case
• Attempted the Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/) for this patent number; no litigation record for '093 surfaced in the results returned.

Search capacity was exhausted before I could query PACER directly or run Docket Navigator–style party queries. My confidence is therefore moderate, not high, and this should be verified before being relied on.

The only docket appearance of "6685093" I found — and why it is not asserted-patent litigation

Interpretation: The format — a numbered list of patent numbers with dates and inventor/assignee names — is consistent with an exhibit listing references (prior art / patents-at-issue bibliography), not with a pleading asserting '093. I did not find any complaint, infringement contention, or claim chart in that case in which 6,685,093 is asserted as a patent-in-suit. I am flagging this explicitly because it is the closest thing to a hit, and it is not a case involving '093 as an asserted patent. I have moderate (not high) confidence in this characterization and recommend pulling Dkt. 163/Att. 11 directly to confirm.

Explicitly excluded results (different identifiers — not to be confused)

Per your instruction not to return results for similar numbers, these were returned by search but are different patents/identifiers:

Surrounding facts that bear on litigation exposure

From the authoritative full text provided:

• Ownership chain (as recorded): Ecrio, Inc. (original assignee) → Mobeam, Inc. (2007 I.P. transfer agreement; 2014 release by secured party) → Samsung Pay, Inc. (2017) → Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (2018). Current listed assignee: Samsung Electronics.
• Filing/priority: 2001-09-25 (application 09/963,218); granted 2004-02-03.
• Status: "Expired – Lifetime," with anticipated expiration 2021-09-25. A patent that has expired cannot be asserted in new infringement litigation (though it could still be litigated in a declaratory-judgment or past-damages posture within the limitation window).
• Family members that could be litigated (but for which I found no confirmed '093-specific litigation): US 6,877,665; US 7,028,906; US 7,395,961; US 7,967,211; US 8,556,176; US 8,807,432; and EP 1442416 B1 / WO 2003/028273. Any litigation on those family members is not litigation on '093, and I have not confirmed any of it.

Recommended verification steps (since my search was inconclusive)

Because the searches were inconclusive rather than affirmatively exhaustive, please confirm via:

1. PACER / CourtListener party queries for "Ecrio, Inc.," "Mobeam, Inc.," "Samsung Pay, Inc.," and "Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd." filtered by patent nature-of-suit, run against the assignee history above.
2. Unified Patents litigation portal case list (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) and its per-patent page, queried on the number as written: 6685093.
3. PTAB / USPTO Patent Center for any IPR, PGR, CBM, or reexamination filing involving 6,685,093 (I found no such record, but did not complete this check).
4. ITC EDIS for Section 337 investigations naming '093 (the ITC matter referenced in one result, Inv. No. 337-TA-1061, Certain Bar Code Readers, is a Honeywell matter and I found no connection to '093).

Conclusion: On the record I was able to retrieve, no known litigation is identified involving US Patent 6,685,093. If you need a litigation-grade clearance statement, have a service such as Docket Navigator or Lex Machina run a patent-number verification search, since the free sources available to me did not return a complete docket history.

I'll verify the structured data with targeted searches before reporting.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 6,685,093. The USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) structured block returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding for this patent, and four targeted web searches surfaced no IPR/PGR/CBM petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, or Federal Circuit appeal naming U.S. Patent No. 6,685,093 — the hits returned were proceedings on unrelated patents (e.g., IPR2016-00309 on the " '668" patent, an IPR on the " '658" and " '883" patents, Samsung v. Polaris PowerLED on the " '087" patent, and Anthony v. ControlTec on the " '181" patent). Status breakdown is therefore 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution-denied.

Bottom line for a defendant: there is no PTAB win to borrow. The patent has never been tested at the Board, so every claim — 1 through 53 as issued — is untested rather than hardened or dead. The material defensive posture here is not a canceled claim; it is expiry: the '093 patent's anticipated expiration is 2021-09-25 per Google Patents, and ODP/Google list its legal status as "Expired – Lifetime." Any demand letter you receive today can only target pre-expiration conduct, and only within the six-year damages lookback of 35 U.S.C. § 286.

No proceedings to report

Because the structured data is empty and no proceeding was found on the open web, there is no proceeding entry to render in the requested per-proceeding format. Per the task constraint, I am not inventing a proceeding number to fill the template. What follows is the verified negative and the surrounding context that a defendant actually needs.

What I checked and what it returned:

I did not obtain a clean hit confirming or denying a Unified Patents (or other defensive-aggregator) challenge to the '093 patent. I am flagging that as an unverified gap rather than asserting either way. A definitive check is a free, direct lookup in PTAB E2E by patent number, and a CourtListener docket search for "6685093" on the Federal Circuit docket.

Family context (not proceedings on the '093 patent). US 6,685,093 (Challa & Gobburu, filed 2001-09-25, granted 2004-02-03, original assignee Ecrio, Inc.) sits at the head of a family that includes US 6,877,665, US 7,028,906, US 7,395,961, US 7,967,211, US 6,736,322 and US 7,857,225 — all prosecution-lineage relatives (continuations/CIPs), traced through Ecrio → Mobeam, Inc. → Samsung Pay, Inc. → Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. A negative finding on '093 says nothing about the siblings; if you are looking at a Mobeam/Samsung-family demand letter, check each asserted patent's number against E2E separately.

Strategic summary

Claim status. All 53 claims of US 6,685,093 are UNTESTED. Nothing is canceled, nothing has been confirmed patentable by the Board. Claims 1, 7, 20, 24, 35 and 38 are the independents that would matter most in an assertion; claim 1 recites the core method (wireless receipt of transmission information on a mobile phone → encode to bar code format → generate a signal simulating a reflection of a scanning beam moved across a static bar code image → transmit as light pulses). Because no IPR ever ran, the presumption of validity under § 282(a) is fully intact and there is no PTAB record — favorable or unfavorable — to litigate around.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel operative against anyone on this patent, because no petition was ever filed. That cuts both ways: a defendant faces no estoppel (nothing is foreclosed), and equally has no estoppel-derived leverage ("you already lost this ground at the Board"). Any IPR you file would be a first-instance petition on a clean slate, subject to ordinary § 314(a) Fintiv-style and § 325(d) discretion arguments. One live § 325(d) consideration: the patent's own Background section cites International Publication No. WO 00/03328 (Motorola, 2000-01-20) and the Aeritas Inc. cellular-phone bar-coded boarding-pass proposal, which describes wirelessly obtaining and screen-displaying a bar-coded boarding pass on a cell phone. That art is close to claim 1's "receiving on the mobile phone the transmission information via a wireless transmission" + "encoding... into a bar code format" steps. If that art was before the examiner, expect the Board to weigh it under Advanced Bionics/Becton, Dickinson; if it was not in the IDS, it becomes a strong primary reference — but I have not verified what appears in the '093 file wrapper, so treat that as a lead to confirm, not a conclusion.

Pattern signals. No repeated-petitioner pattern exists to infer from — there are no petitioners. Notably, the absence is not strong evidence of weak claims: this patent's active monetization window overlapped heavily with the pre-Alice-to-post-Alice years when Mobeam's light-simulated-barcode portfolio was licensed into Samsung handsets rather than litigated against deep-pocket defendants (Ecrio/Mobeam press materials describe OEM integration and Samsung app distribution rather than an enforcement campaign). The absence of IPRs is consistent with a licensing-heavy, no-litigation history rather than with a hardened, IPR-surviving patent.

The real defense here is the calendar, not the Board. The patent is expired (anticipated expiration 2021-09-25; "Expired – Lifetime"). Note the caveat: patent term extension/PTA, if any, could push actual expiry modestly past that date, and I have not verified the PTA figure on the face of the patent. Even so, damages exposure is confined to the six-year pre-suit lookback under § 286 and cannot reach post-expiration conduct. A demand letter citing the '093 patent today is, in substance, a claim for historical (at least four-plus-year-old) royalties.

Recommended next steps

1. Confirm the negative yourself, in one lookup each. Run the patent number through PTAB E2E and the USPTO Patent Center for the file wrapper, and search dockets for the patent number on CourtListener. This takes minutes and eliminates the residual risk of an unindexed proceeding — including any Unified Patents-style filing my search did not surface.

2. Pull the '093 file wrapper for the IDS. Verify whether WO 00/03328 (Motorola) and the Aeritas references were submitted and considered. If they were not, you have an unconsidered-art IPR narrative with no § 325(d) hurdle.

3. Check expiry and PTA on the face of the patent. Confirm the actual term end (filing date + 20 years + any PTA) and compute the § 286 damages window from the date of any demand or complaint. If the window is short or already closed, that fact is ordinarily dispositive of settlement value regardless of validity.

4. If a demand letter asserts the family, screen the siblings separately. The '665, '906, '961, '211, '322 and '225 patents are distinct assets with distinct claim sets and distinct PTAB histories; a clean '093 slate is not a clean family slate.

5. If you do file, budget for a first-instance petition on an untested patent. With no prior institution or FWD, there is no Board guidance to leverage, and the § 314(a) discretionary-denial doctrine (parallel litigation, Fintiv-type factors) plus § 325(d) on any art already of record are your two threshold risks.

Caveat on scope: This report is grounded in the ODP structured block plus open-web search. Where I could not verify something — a possible defensive-aggregator challenge, the IDS contents, and the precise PTA-based expiry date — I have said so explicitly rather than inferring it.

I'll research the assignment record for US 6685093 before reconstructing the chain.

Let me try more targeted searches for the recorded reel/frame data and correspondent attorneys.

Sourcing note (read first)

I attempted the USPTO Assignment Center / Patent Assignment Search lookups for US 6,685,093, including targeted queries for the reel/frame numbers and the correspondent-of-record on each link of the chain. None of my retrievals returned reel/frame numbers or correspondent names — those fields are populated on the Assignment Center search results themselves, which my available search tools did not surface or index. I have therefore not reported any reel/frame or correspondent value, because supplying one would require fabrication.

What I can report is the recorded transaction set as mirrored in the Google Patents "legal events / reassignment" table for US 6,685,093 (which reproduces the USPTO assignment data: parties, conveyance type, and recording dates). Where the requested field is unavailable, I mark it not retrieved rather than guess. The Assignment Center record should be pulled directly for a litigation-grade citation.

Verification link: USPTO Assignment Center — search by patent number (mirror: assignment.uspto.gov/patent).

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check — departures within 12 months of filing: not present / no evidence.
Both inventors assigned to the original assignee, Ecrio, on a recorded assignment roughly 2½ months after the 2001-09-25 filing — the ordinary employment-based assignment, not a pre-sale severance. Challa remained Ecrio's CEO for at least seven more years (documented through the 2008-05-05 Ecrio release). I found no evidence of simultaneous inventor departure preceding a portfolio sale. Gobburu's later affiliation is unresolved in my sources; I am not asserting one.

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: Ecrio, Inc. (also written "ECRIO, INC."), Cupertino, California.
• Primary line of business: Real-time communications and mobile-commerce software for handsets — Instant Messaging & Presence (IMPS), IMS, Push-to-Talk over Cellular (PoC) — with the MoBeam digital-barcode product line. Customers named in Ecrio releases include NTT DoCoMo, Visa, NEC, Panasonic, Sharp, Fujitsu, Sony Ericsson, ASUSTeK and Pantech.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Yes, evidenced. Ecrio's own materials describe the MoBeam service (LED "beaming" of a barcode's reflection into a standard laser scanner) and a physical keychain hardware device — the MoBeam Key / ClipPod (approx. 2″ x 1.5″ x .5″) — with a Bluetooth-enabled variant announced 2008-01-28 and ClipPod production quantities announced for Q3 2008. This is the FIG. 4/5/6 LED-transmitter embodiment practiced in hardware, not merely a paper portfolio.
• Current status: Operating as of the latest Ecrio materials I retrieved (2009). I found no bankruptcy filing, no dissolution notice, and no evidence Ecrio itself was acquired. Note the corporate IP carve-out (see timeline) transferred the MoBeam patent rights to Mobeam, Inc. in 2007 while Ecrio took back a security interest in 2010 — consistent with a financed carve-out of the MoBeam business line, not a fire-sale of the company. Caveat: I could not confirm Ecrio's present-day status from a primary registry source; treat "operating" as my best evidence-based reading, not a verified current state.

Assignment timeline

Field-availability caveat, applying to every entry below: reel/frame and correspondent-of-record were not retrieved from any source available to me. The dates/parties/conveyance types come from the Google Patents reassignment table for US 6,685,093, which mirrors USPTO assignment data. That source does not separate execution date from recording date — the dates shown are the recorded legal-event dates, so I mark them "recorded (exec. date not retrieved)."

1. 2001-12-05 recorded (exec. date not retrieved) — Reel not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
   • Assignor: Challa, Nagesh; Gobburu, Venkata T. (individuals)
   • Assignee: ECRIO, INC.
   • Correspondent: not retrieved — could not be assessed for recurrence.
   • Context: Inception assignment — founders conveying rights to the original assignee, standard employment practice.

2. 2007-01-29 recorded — Reel not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Intellectual Property Transfer Agreement
   • Assignor: ECRIO, INC.
   • Assignee: MOBEAM, INC.
   • Correspondent: not retrieved.
   • Context: Corporate carve-out / internal reorganization — Ecrio separates the MoBeam patent rights into a distinct entity that goes on to sell MoBeam hardware.

3. 2010-04-22 recorded — Reel not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Intellectual Property Transfer Agreement
   • Assignor: ECRIO INC.
   • Assignee: MOBEAM INC.
   • Correspondent: not retrieved.
   • Context: Second transfer instrument between the same two parties — either a corrective/re-recording of the 2007 transaction or a distinct second agreement. ⚠️ Anomaly: two "IP Transfer Agreement" conveyances Ecrio→Mobeam, three years apart. This should be verified at the Assignment Center to determine whether one is a duplicate or a correction.

4. 2010-04-22 recorded — Reel not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Security Agreement (recorded as an assignment-type conveyance)
   • Assignor: MOBEAM INC.
   • Assignee: ECRIO INC.
   • Correspondent: not retrieved.
   • Context: Securitization — Mobeam grants Ecrio a security interest in the patents, i.e., Ecrio finances the carve-out and takes the IP as collateral. Grant-backs of this kind are recorded as "assignments" in the USPTO index and must not be read as an ownership change.

5. 2014-10-30 recorded — Reel not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Release by Secured Party
   • Assignor: ECRIO, INC.
   • Assignee: MOBEAM, INC.
   • Correspondent: not retrieved.
   • Context: Lien release / clean-up — Ecrio releases the 2010 security interest, leaving Mobeam unencumbered title holder.

6. 2017-02-09 recorded — Reel not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
   • Assignor: MOBEAM INC.
   • Assignee: SAMSUNG PAY, INC.
   • Correspondent: not retrieved.
   • Context: Strategic acquisition by an operating-company subsidiary — the portfolio is sold into Samsung's payment platform.
   • ⚠️ No SEC 8-K/10-K describing this acquisition was retrieved by my searches. Samsung Pay, Inc. is a private subsidiary, so a US securities filing would not necessarily exist for this transaction.

7. 2018-06-05 recorded — Reel not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
   • Assignor: SAMSUNG PAY INC
   • Assignee: SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD.
   • Correspondent: not retrieved.
   • Context: Internal reorganization — upstream transfer from the US payment subsidiary to the Korean parent. This is the terminal link in the recorded chain; Google's current-assignee field reflects exactly this (with its own express accuracy disclaimer).

No post-2018 assignments recorded. The chain terminates at Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6685093
    2001 : Founders assign rights to Ecrio
    2007 : Ecrio IP transfer to Mobeam Inc
    2010 : Second Ecrio to Mobeam transfer
         : Mobeam security agreement back to Ecrio
    2014 : Ecrio releases security interest
    2017 : Mobeam sells portfolio to Samsung Pay Inc
    2018 : Samsung Pay transfers to parent

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present (as far as determinable). The 2007 Ecrio→Mobeam "Intellectual Property Transfer Agreement" moved the patent into a separate company name, which superficially fits the pattern, but the concrete indicia are absent: Mobeam shipped hardware (MoBeam Key / ClipPod, production quantities announced 2008), licensed the technology (Visa mobile platform, Feb-2007), and did not sit behind a registered-agent address as a single-purpose Delaware/Texas LLC in any source I retrieved. It reads as a financed business-line carve-out. Caveat: I could not retrieve Mobeam's state of formation, registered address, or member structure, so the "single-purpose LLC at a registered-agent service" test could not be run.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No entity in the chain (Ecrio, Mobeam, Samsung Pay, Samsung Electronics) matches the enumerated public NPE lists (Acacia, Marathon, IPNav, IV, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities). Caveat: I was not able to complete a Unified Patents / RPX high-frequency-plaintiff cross-check within my search budget.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / not determinable. This is the signal you specifically flagged as most probative, and it is the one I could not evaluate: no correspondent-of-record value appeared in any retrieved record for any of the seven links. There is no basis to report either recurrence or its absence.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. The chain spans 2001 → 2007 → 2010 → 2014 → 2017 → 2018, with no run of sequential LLC-to-LLC hops inside a 24-month window. The only same-day pair (both recorded 2010-04-22) involves the same two parties and is a grant-back security structure, not a cascade through unrelated shells.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present / not applicable. No infringement suit naming 6,685,093 was identified (see the prior litigation section), so the 2017-02-09 Mobeam→Samsung Pay transfer cannot be shown to have preceded an assertion on this patent. Timed transfer-to-enable-suit is unsupported on this record.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not found. No Chapter 7/11 proceeding for Ecrio, Inc. or Mobeam, Inc. surfaced, and no court-supervised IP sale is evidenced. The 2017 Mobeam→Samsung transfer is styled as an ordinary "Assignment of Assignors' Interest," not a bankruptcy-sale instrument. I cannot affirmatively exclude distress, but there is no positive evidence of it.

7. Privateering — unclear. The 2017 transfer runs into an operating company's payment subsidiary, the opposite of an operating company pushing patents out to a proxy asserter. That said, the absence of any SEC disclosure in my sources means I cannot fully rule out an indirect arrangement. On the retrieved evidence, this signal does not fire.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present as literally defined. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. — a large operating company. The "neutralization" substance (see verdict) is supplied by expiry and non-assertion, not by a defensive aggregator.

Verdict

Defensive / non-asserting.

Justification and category caveat: No NPE label fits. There is no shell-entity/licensing-LLC link, no listed asserter, no cascading LLC-to-LLC transfers, no bankruptcy sale, and no transfer timed to a suit in a chain that runs 2001-12-05 (founders→Ecrio) → 2007-01-29 and 2010-04-22 (Ecrio→Mobeam) → 2010-04-22 (Mobeam security grant-back to Ecrio) → 2014-10-30 (Ecrio release) → 2017-02-09 (Mobeam→Samsung Pay) → 2018-06-05 (Samsung Pay→Samsung Electronics). I therefore chose Defensive / non-asserting on its substance (held by an operating company, never asserted on this patent, and expired 2021-09-25), while flagging that the option's literal prong — termination at a formal defensive aggregator — is not met, since the terminus is Samsung Electronics. Had the option set contained "operating-company-owned, non-asserting," that would describe this chain more precisely.

Cross-reference flags against the earlier sections

• Priority-date contradiction (previously flagged, unresolved): the header gives 2001-09-25, while the family table lists US 09/963,218 with 2000-11-20. A new observation sharpens this: the alleged CIP parent, US 09/996,847, was filed 2001-11-19 — after '093's own 2001-09-25 filing, so '093 cannot derive a 2000-11-20 priority benefit from it. The 2000-11-20 entry appears to be a table artifact inherited from the CIP relationship, and 2001-09-25 is the operative priority date for '093. This has no effect on the assignment chain, but it does mean any term/expiry analysis should run from 2001-09-25 (consistent with the recorded 2021-09-25 anticipated expiration).
• Consistency check: the assignee sequence I reconstructed here is identical to the assignment chain reported in the earlier Patent Summary section, which is a useful internal cross-validation. The earlier summary likewise could not produce reel/frame or correspondent data — that gap is systemic to my sources, not a discrepancy between sections.
• Neither this section nor the earlier litigation section found any suit on '093, so the "no pre-litigation transfer" finding (signal 5) is consistent across sections.

Recommended primary-source steps (since reel/frame and correspondent were unobtainable here): pull the Assignment Center results page for patent 6,685,093 and capture Reel/Frame + Correspondent for each of the seven recorded events above; specifically verify whether the two 2010-04-22 recordings are a duplicate/corrective pair; and confirm Ecrio, Inc.'s and Mobeam, Inc.'s current corporate status via the relevant Secretaries of State.

I'll research the front-page references cited for US 6,685,093, since the full text I was given omits the "References Cited" section.

Let me pull the patent's own front page and its cited references directly.

Let me find the patent's own front-page references (USPTO/PDF) rather than those of its continuations.

Prior Art Analysis — US 6,685,093 B2

Sourcing note (read first — it materially limits what follows)

I was unable to retrieve the front-page "References Cited" section of US 6,685,093 itself in this session. Google Patents' rendering of US6685093B2 (the authoritative text you supplied) omits the (56) References Cited block entirely, and my searches for the patent's own PDF front page did not return it before search capacity ran out.

What I did retrieve is the citation set of the family, from three independent sources:

1. patents.searchlight.law/doc/US7395961 — "Patent Citations (39)" for US 7,395,961, a continuation of the '093 application sharing the same specification.
2. freepatentsonline.com/7967211.html and freepatentsonline.com/7395961.html — the "US Patent References" lists (US 7,967,211 and US 7,395,961).
3. pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/patent/US-7028906-B2 — the "Other References" (non-patent literature) block for US 7,028,906.

⚠️ Critical caveat: the US 7,395,961 citation list cannot be identical to '093's front page, because it contains references that post-date '093's 2004‑02‑03 issue — e.g. US 6,854,652 (2005‑02‑15, Omori), US 6,942,151 (2005‑09‑13, Ehrhart), and US 2004/0019792. Those were added during the 2006 continuation prosecution. So treat the list below as the family's reference set, with the older items being the ones most likely also of record in '093. I have flagged confidence per item.

I am not asserting an examiner's citation tag ("Applicant" vs. "Examiner") for '093 with certainty.

A. Confirmed patent citations of record in the family (grounded in the retrieved lists)

Sources: https://patents.searchlight.law/doc/US7395961 ; https://www.freepatentsonline.com/7967211.html ; https://www.freepatentsonline.com/7395961.html

B. Foreign patent document cited in the '093 specification itself (confirmed from the authoritative text you supplied)

This is the only prior-art document I can confirm is of record in '093, because the specification's Background section names it expressly:

§ 102 relevance: This is the closest confirmed art to the "static display" dependent claims — claims 3, 10, 22, 27, 51 (displaying the bar code in static visual form on the device) and to the general preamble concept of a mobile device that displays bar-coded transmission information. It does not disclose the generating/transmitting of a simulated reflected scanning beam as light pulses, so it cannot anticipate independent claims 1, 7, 20, 24, 35 or 38.

C. Non-patent literature of record (from the US 7,028,906 "Other References" block)

Applicant-submitted (tagged "(APP)") press coverage of Aeritas Inc.'s wireless bar-coded boarding-pass system. Retrieved at https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/patent/US-7028906-B2. Those published before 2001‑09‑25 are § 102(b)-eligible; those after are not:

§ 102 relevance: These are printed publications describing a mobile phone that receives a bar-coded boarding pass wirelessly and displays the bar code for scanning. They map well onto:

• Claim 1's preamble + "receiving on the mobile phone the transmission information via a wireless transmission" and
• Claim 7's "presenting representative information … on a user output facility."

They do not disclose the generating of a simulated-reflection signal or the light-pulse transmission — the actual point of novelty.

D. Prior art cited in EP prosecution of a later Mobeam-family case (not '093 prosecution, but the same subject matter)

From the EP 2 573 705 A1 applicant/search citations (http://data.epo.org/gpi/EP2573705A1.pdf):

• US 5,340,971 A — Rockstein et al. (1994‑08‑23) — bar code scanning system.
• US 6,619,549 B2 — Zhu (2003‑09‑16); US 7,128,266 B2 — Zhu (2006‑10‑31) — imaging bar code readers.
• US 2004/020988 A1 — Omori, Youichi — barcode display.
• GB 2 478 712 A — Jackson, David (2011‑09‑21).
• EP 1 376 419 A1 — Sega Corp. (2004‑01‑02).
• US 2002/121552 A1 — Kim, Seung Kil.
• US 2005/103846 A1 — Zhu, Xiaoxun; US 2008/314985 A1 — Kotlarsky, Anatoly.

These are not citations of record against '093 (most post-date it) and I flag them as secondary context only.

E. Most relevant prior art — ranked, with § 102 claim mapping

Bottom line: I found no single cited reference that discloses every element of any independent claim of '093. That is expected — the examiner allowed all 53 claims over this art. The references below are the ones with genuine § 102 or § 103 bite, with the honest caveat that I have not read each reference's full text in this session.

1. US 5,763,383 A — Heske, III (1998‑06‑02) — "Method and apparatus for simulating bar code" [highest relevance]

• Why: This is the only cited reference whose stated subject matter is bar-code simulation — i.e., it appears directed at the very concept of generating, rather than printing/displaying, a bar-code-representative signal.
• § 102 candidate against: the generating step of claims 1, 7, 20, 24, 35, 38 ("generating … a signal from the bar code format to simulate a reflection of a scanning beam being moved across a static visual image of the bar code format").
• Anticipation gap: the reference would need to also disclose (i) a mobile phone, (ii) wireless receipt of the transmission information, and (iii) phone-side encoding into the bar code format. If Heske's simulator is a bench instrument rather than a mobile phone, claims 1/20/38 are not anticipated, though § 103 combination with a mobile handset is squarely on the table.
• Confidence: medium on the title (grounded in the retrieved list); medium-low on my characterization of its disclosure.

2. US 5,480,571 A — Jacobs et al. (1996‑01‑30) — downloading information from a controllable light source to a portable information device

• Why: Directly on the "transmit data to a portable device using an engineered light source" axis, which underlies claims 20/24's "light source for transmitting the signal as light pulses."
• § 102 candidate against: the transmitting … as light pulses limitation of claims 1, 7, 20, 24, 35, 38.
• Gap: no bar-code format, no scanning-beam-reflection simulation, no mobile phone / wireless receipt. Anticipation unlikely; § 103 material.

3. US 5,570,297 A — Brzezinski et al. (1996‑10‑29) — synchronizing data transfer rate from a CRT monitor to a portable information device

• Why: This is the closest art to the synchronization features that '093 claims as dependent subject matter.
• § 102 candidate against: claims 5, 18, 23, 42 — "receiving a scanning beam emitted by a bar code scanner; and determining a scan rate of the scanning beam … generating the signal … at the scan rate." Brzezinski's rate-synchronization-of-light-transmitted-data to a portable device is the same technical problem.
• Gap: it synchronizes to a display, not to a detected scanner beam, and has no bar-code simulation. § 103 material for claims 5/18/23/42.

4. US 6,082,620 A — Bone, Jr. (2000‑07‑04) — "Liquid crystal dynamic barcode display"

• § 102 candidate against: claims 3, 10, 22, 27, 51 (displaying the bar code format in static visual form) and the LCD-bar-code background generally; also relevant to claim 1's "bar code format" encoding step.
• Gap: displays a bar code; does not emit a simulated reflected beam. Also § 102(b) (published 2000‑07‑04, comfortably pre-critical-date).

5. US 6,119,943 A — Christy (2000‑09‑19) — "Multi-layer bar code arrangement using wavelength separation"

• § 102 candidate against: claims 19, 34, 52 — "a first color selected to be accepted by the bar code scanner, and a second color selected to be rejected by the bar code scanner." Wavelength separation to make a scanner accept one hue and reject another is the same mechanism.
• Gap: multilayer printed arrangement rather than an emissive color light source. § 103 material. (Note the date is only 6 days inside the § 102(b) one-year bar.)

6. US 6,281,820 B1 — Fields (2001‑08‑28) — "Methods and apparatus for transferring data from a display screen"

• § 102 posture: published after 2000‑09‑25, so § 102(a)/(e) only, not § 102(b).
• § 102 candidate against: the display-modulation aspects of claims 14, 31, 47 ("altering one or more attributes of the display … brightness, backlight, contrast, color, power") and claims 11/28/40 (display screen as the light source).

7. US 6,318,631 B1 — Halperin (2001‑11‑20) — "Scanning communicator"

• § 102 posture: § 102(e) only (would need its underlying application's filing date checked).
• Relevance: portable scanning/communicating device; goes to the "bar code scanner … receiving the light pulses" element of claim 38.

8. WO 00/03328 A1 — Motorola (2000‑01‑20) — bar code display on a selective call receiver

• § 102(b) — confirmed of record in '093's own specification.
• § 102 candidate against: claims 3, 10, 22, 27, 51 (static display of bar code on a mobile device) and the background "mobile device displays bar-coded transmission information" concept.
• Gap: purely static display; no active light simulation. Anticipates no independent claim.

9. US 5,585,…… (n/a) / US 5,882,769, US 5,953,047 (Nemirofsky) and US 5,523,794 (Mankovitz)

• Relevance: interactive smart-card and TV-signal-delivered data systems — the "transmission information furnished from … a server/database/network" ancestor for claims 4, 17, 41. § 102(b) by date, but each has an anticipation gap on the light-simulation element.

F. Claim-by-claim § 102 summary (patent-side view)

G. Explicit uncertainties / what to verify

1. I could not retrieve US 6,685,093's own (56) References Cited block. The list in § A is reconstructed from US 7,395,961 / US 7,967,211 / US 7,028,906 and demonstrably includes references added after '093 issued. A USPTO Patent Center / Global Dossier pull of US 09/963,218 (or the issued patent PDF front page at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../US6685093.pdf) is needed to fix the exact list and citation tags.
2. Descriptions of items 1–9 and 12–21 (Baer, Monteath, Crutcher, Lurie, Ushikubo ×2, Hoemann, Uemura, Zouzoulas) are given only at the level of "optical reader / optical data transmission," because the retrieved citation lists omit their titles. Do not rely on those characterizations without reading the references.
3. Priority-date conflict (carried over from the earlier section). If the operative priority is 2000‑11‑20 rather than 2001‑09‑25, the § 102(b) one-year bar moves to 1999‑11‑20, which removes US 6,036,086, US 6,041,374, US 6,082,620, US 6,119,943 and WO 00/03328 from § 102(b) (they become § 102(a)/(e) art), and largely eliminates the Aeritas press as § 102(b) art. This is a material swing and must be resolved.
4. No reexamination, IPR, or PTAB prior-art record for '093 surfaced. If one exists, the examiner's/Board's own § 102 and § 103 findings would supersede this analysis.
5. '093 is Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiry 2021‑09‑25), per the Google Patents legal-status field (itself flagged there as an assumption). Prior-art analysis retains value for the family members still within term, but is moot for '093 itself.

Net conclusion: On the record available, the most material prior art for US 6,685,093 is US 5,763,383 (Heske, III) for bar-code simulation, US 5,480,571 (Jacobs) and US 5,570,297 (Brzezinski) for light-based data transfer to portable devices and rate synchronization, US 6,082,620 (Bone) for LCD bar-code display, US 6,119,943 (Christy) for wavelength-selective bar codes, and WO 00/03328 (Motorola) as the confirmed-of-record static-display art. None of them, alone, appears to anticipate any independent claim, and no confirmed § 102 rejection is evidenced in the granted record.

I'll gather grounding on the prior-art references associated with this patent before analyzing.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Pat. No. 6,685,093 (Challa et al.), 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope note / sourcing limit (read this first). The task asks me to use "the results from the Prior Art section of this page." The page supplied (the Google Patents full text for US6685093B2) contains only two prior-art artifacts: (a) a "Prior art keywords" field reading bar code, mobile phone, signal, transmission information, code format and "Prior art date 2001-09-25", and (b) the "Description of Related Art" discussion, which expressly names WO 00/03328 (Motorola) and the Aeritas Inc. proposal. The page's mirrored text does not include a "Patent Citations"/"References Cited" (U.S. Patent Documents) list, and two independent attempts to retrieve that back-citation list (front-page image text / Justia) failed. I therefore cannot map the examiner's actual cited art. Everything below is built from (i) the references the patent itself acknowledges, (ii) references I could positively confirm by search, and (iii) undisputed general knowledge in the field as of the critical date. Where I could not confirm a pre-2001 reference for an element, I say so rather than supplying a number.

1. Critical date and the priority conflict that affects every combination

This is a pre-AIA application (filed 2001-09-25; AIA first-inventor-to-file applies only to applications filed on/after 2013-03-16), so §§ 102(a)/(b)/(e) and 103(a) govern.

As flagged in the previously generated summary, the record is internally inconsistent on priority: the Google Patents header states 2001-09-25, while the same page's Family Applications table stamps US 09/963,218 with 2000-11-20 (apparently inherited from the CIP relationship to US 09/996,847). This matters because it changes the 102(b) one-year bar (2000-09-25 vs. 1999-11-20) and the 102(a) invention-date window. The practical consequence is small for WO 00/03328, which published 2000-01-20 and therefore qualifies as prior art from either date. It matters more for late-2000/early-2001 secondary references and for the Aeritas non-patent proposal, whose exact publication date I could not verify. I flag this rather than resolve it.

2. Person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA)

A POSITA here is a software/firmware engineer working on portable wireless devices (phones, pagers, PDAs) with working familiarity with (a) retail/POS bar-code symbologies and their encoding (UPC/EAN/Code 39/Code 128/Interleaved 2 of 5 — all recited as known in '093's own block 24), (b) LCD/display driver and backlight control, (c) IrDA/IR transceiver data communication, and (d) the basic electro-optics of the sequential (laser) scanner: a photodetector whose output is a time-varying electrical waveform, one edge per bar/space transition.

3. Element-by-element mapping of independent claim 1

The whole § 103 case reduces to the fourth row. WO 00/03328 + Aeritas + ordinary device hardware get you rows 1, 2, 3 and 5. The question is whether the simulate-reflection element is itself an obvious improvement.

4. The combinations

Combination A — WO 00/03328 + the Aeritas cellular-telephone proposal + the device's own IR/LED emitters (primary combination for claims 1, 7, 20, 24, 35)

What each reference contributes. WO 00/03328 supplies the entire architecture: wireless delivery of data to a portable device, on-device storage, on-device rendering of that data as a bar code, display of the same data in alphanumeric form to the user (its claims 5–6 — i.e., '093's "representative information" element), a store-side scanner that reads the displayed bar code, and a server/computer/messaging-system/host topology (its FIG. 10). Aeritas supplies the cellular-telephone species and the wireless-remote-source-with-user-identification framing. The emitters are supplied by the device itself.

Motivation to combine. (1) Same field, same problem, same actors: both references are directed to reading identity/coupon/ticket data off a portable wireless device at a scanner-equipped point of entry. (2) The references themselves supply the bridge — '093's background paragraph names both WO 00/03328 and Aeritas in the same breath, then immediately identifies the deficiency motivating the change: LCD contrast is too low and "the physical dimension and/or resolution of the display may also limit the size of the bar code." A POSITA reading WO 00/03328 with that known deficiency has an explicit design incentive. (3) Predictable result: the scanner's photodetector does not care whether the light it receives came from a printed label, an LCD, or an LED; it decodes an on/off sequence. Substituting one known light-producing element for another to perform the same known function is a textbook KSR "known element performing its known function" substitution. (4) Finite, identified set: the mobile device already carries an IR transceiver (the patent's own FIG. 6 PDA), a notification LED (its FIG. 4/5), and a modulable backlight (its FIG. 8/9). Choosing among them is the "finite number of identified, predictable solutions" scenario.

Weak link, stated candidly. I found no pre-2001 reference, and none in the material the page supplies, that expressly teaches emitting a waveform shaped to mimic a scanner's own reflected beam. If no such reference exists, Combination A rests on the KSR "obvious to try" / ordinary-creativity leg rather than on a two-reference express teaching: an artisan who understood the scanner's detection principle — and the patent concedes this principle in detail — would predict that a correctly timed light pulse train from any compliant emitter would be decoded as a genuine scan. That is the strongest available theory and also the most attackable.

Combination B — Combination A + a "wand emulation"/scanner-signal-simulation reference (reinforces A)

The bar-code industry had, by 2001, long used electrical injection of synthetic bar-code waveforms to test/calibrate decoders and used "wand emulation" outputs to feed one scanner's decode into another device's input. A POSITA in that field would have known that a bar-code "signal" is separable from a printed bar-code "image." I could not confirm a specific pre-2001 patent number for this from the material retrieved; I flag it as a category of art that a validity challenge would be expected to find and that, if found, converts Combination A from "obvious to try" into an express two-reference showing for the simulate-reflection element.

Combination C — WO 00/03328 + Motorola US 5,859,594-type selective-call-receiver art (for the device and output-facility claims 7/24/25/27)

US 5,859,594 ("Selective call receiver having selectable displays," Motorola, as retrieved) discloses a wireless receiver, decoder, processor, memory, and an LCD display, with a "presentation element" that determines whether a received message is presented graphically, plus a graphics database and over-the-air programming of image data. This is a clean second reference for "output facility presenting representative information" and for device-side rendering, and removes any doubt that wireless receipt + on-device image/graphic rendering was old. Motivation: both are Motorola wireless-messaging references addressing the same user-information-delivery problem.

Combination D — Static-display art (WO 00/03328 / Aeritas) + known display control + known scanner filter optics (for claims 3, 10, 14, 19, 22, 27, 31, 34, 47, 51, 52)

The dual-mode claims (display the bar code statically as well as actively) are satisfied by WO 00/03328 alone — it is the static-display case. The display-attribute claims (brightness, backlight, contrast, color, power) recite knobs every 2001-era portable device firmware already had for power management; and the two-color "accepted/rejected" claims align with the well-known fact that laser scanners use a narrow-band optical filter (typically matched to red HeNe/laser-diode output) that admits one hue and rejects others — the patent's own FIG. 10 discussion concedes that "a bar code depicted with red spaces and blue bars… is more easily accepted by a scanner than a bar code depicted on a black and gray LCD display." Caveat: I could not confirm a pre-2001 reference for a color bar code tuned to a scanner's filter, so claims 19/34/52 are the group where my evidence is thinnest.

Combination E — Combination A + existing IR transceiver art (for claims 5, 18, 23, 42)

Requiring detection of the incoming scan beam and matching the emission rate to the measured scan rate is, structurally, just using the receiver half of the device's existing IR transceiver pair — the exact hardware '093's FIG. 6 PDA has — to detect a light signal, and feeding the measured period into the emission timing. Motivation: synchronization to a periodic stimulus is a conventional engineering response, and '093's own fallback (a default/approximated 30–60 scans-per-second rate, or a swept variable rate) shows that precise synchronization was an optimization, not a precondition. Moderately strong.

5. Claim-group conclusions

One drafting observation worth noting for claim construction. The patent's claims require encoding "in the mobile phone," while the specification (FIG. 3 discussion) expressly contemplates the server performing the encoding and transmitting the array downstream. If claims 1/7/20/24/35 are construed broadly enough to cover server-side encoding, WO 00/03328's server/messaging-system architecture maps onto them almost directly — which raises both a § 112 written-description concern and makes the § 103 case materially easier.

6. What the patent owner would argue, and the rebuttal

Patentee's case. (i) Teaching away — the entire industry (WO 00/03328, Aeritas) was pursuing better static bar codes; nothing suggested abandoning the static paradigm. (ii) Recognition as the inventive act — no reference taught that a scanner's photodetector would accept an emitted pulse train as a real scan; that insight is the invention. (iii) Secondary considerations — a long-felt, acknowledged need (the low-contrast LCD problem is admitted in the background), failure of others to solve it, unexpected reliability across scanner models without any infrastructure change, and the family's commercial adoption plus 145 forward citations and the Mobeam-family characterization of '093 as the "light-simulated bar code" foundation (US 8,794,529; US 9,558,437; EP 2 118 814 B1 all describe '093 this way).

Rebuttal. The "teaching away" is weak because active emission and static display are not mutually exclusive — the patent's own dependent claims (3/10/22/27/51) claim both, so the prior art's static-display direction cannot be read as disparaging the active mode. The "unexpected result" is weak because the scanner's behavior on a correctly timed light train is the inherent, expected behavior of known scanner electronics; on KSR's reasoning, the inventor's contribution is the recognition that a known structure can be used for its known capability, which is within the artisan's ordinary creativity. The forward-citation and "foundational" evidence has no established nexus to the claimed subject matter as distinct from the general commercial concept. And the price of the whole package is that secondary evidence must be weighed against a very short distance from WO 00/03328 + a handheld IR/LED emitter.

7. Bottom line and confidence

• Strongest § 103 theory: WO 00/03328 (Motorola SCR — wireless receipt, on-device bar-code rendering, alphanumeric/representative display, host/server, POS scanner) in view of the Aeritas cellular-telephone proposal and the device's own IR/IrDA transceiver, LED, and backlight; optionally reinforced by wand-emulation/synthetic-scanner-waveform art (Combination B) and Motorola selective-call-receiver display art (Combination C).
• Confidence: High that this combination establishes obviousness of every claim element except the simulate-reflection generating step; moderate that the simulate-reflection step itself would have been obvious as of the critical date; low-moderate on the color claims (19/34/52) absent a confirmed pre-2001 filter-matched color reference. I found no anticipating reference, so § 102 is not a viable theory on the material available.
• Practical relevance: per the prior sections, the patent is "Expired – Lifetime," anticipated expiration 2021-09-25, so this is a retrospective/hypothetical invalidity analysis; no live validity challenge is on foot (and none was found).
• To firm this up, I would need: (1) the actual front-page "References Cited" list and the US 2003/0057284 A1 file wrapper, neither of which the supplied page or my retrieval returned; (2) the EP 1 442 416 B1 / WO 03/028273 search report, which would show the examiner's chosen art; (3) confirmation of the true effective filing date given the 2001-09-25 vs. 2000-11-20 conflict; (4) a verified publication date for the Aeritas proposal; and (5) a targeted search for pre-2001 "scanner signal simulation"/"wand emulation" art, which is the single most decisive gap in the analysis above.