US 6725275

I'll run targeted searches for US 6725275, including any CAFC litigation related to it.

Let me check for any CAFC litigation, including recent 2025–2026 dockets, involving this patent or its family.

US Patent 6,725,275 — Analyst Summary

Bibliographic Data (authoritative from the patent record)

Continuity (as stated on the face of the patent): This application is a continuation of Ser. No. 09/613,433 (filed Jul. 11, 2000), now US 6,519,648; which is a continuation-in-part of Ser. No. 09/563,250 (filed May 2, 2000), now US 6,389,467; which claims priority to US Provisional App. 60/177,786 (filed Jan. 24, 2000). Note the family also includes sibling patents US 6,484,199 and US 6,735,628.

Abstract (verbatim)

"A playback system is provided to locate and playback streaming media from network resources. The playback system includes a search module that signals a query to a network site, and receives in return a search result. The search result identifies one or more links that are selectable to open media files. A media player couples to the search module to automatically play back streaming media contained in media files located by the search result."

Independent Claims — Plain-Language Overview

The patent has five independent claims: 1, 20, 38, 42, and 59 (claims 2–19 depend from 1; 21–37 from 20; 39–41 from 38; 43–58 from 42; 60–63 from 59).

Claim 1 — "Media playback platform."
The core architecture claim. A search module sends a search request to a first network site (e.g., a search engine) and, from the returned result, identifies multiple media resource locators. Critically, the locators point to media at different network sites — the first media resource is at a "second network site" and the second media resource is at a "third network site." A media player is directly controllable by the search module to receive those locators, play the first resource, and then play the second resource substantially automatically after the first finishes. In short: programmatic, auto-advancing, cross-site streaming playback driven by a search result.

Claim 20 — "Media playback system operated on a terminal coupled to a network."
Broader, user-driven variant. A search module sends a user-defined search request to one or more network sites and receives search results identifying many media resource locators. A media player is directly controllable by the search module to access and control playback of at least some of those resources, such that two or more media resources play back substantially automatically and sequentially.

Claim 38 — "Media playback system coupled to a network."
Adds an explicit user-interface element. A user-interface receives a user-query; a search module sends a search request based on that query to one or more network sites and receives a first search result referencing multiple media resources, each having a corresponding network site; a media player accesses those network sites and controls playback so it is substantially automatic and sequential.

Claim 42 — "Media playback platform."
Substantively parallel to claim 1, but the media player is recited as "configured to directly receive" the first and second media resource locators from the search module (rather than the search module being the controlling party). The playback sequence — first resource, then second, substantially automatically — is the same.

Claim 59 — "System for playing media resources."
Method/functional framing of claim 1. A search module is configured to (i) transmit a search request for media resources to a first network site and (ii) receive a search result identifying multiple media resource locators, where the result comprises a first locator for a first media resource at a second network site and a second locator for a second media resource at a third network site. A media player plays the first resource using the first locator, then the second using the second locator, substantially automatically.

Common inventive thread across all five independents: (a) search → (b) harvest multiple media links from the results across different sites → (c) hand links programmatically to a media player → (d) automatic, sequential, continuous playback without user clicks.

Litigation — CAFC and District Court

Important: I found no Federal Circuit docket in 2026 for US 6,725,275, nor any pending CAFC appeal. The only CAFC matter I could locate for this patent is from the 2007–2009 period.

• Friskit, Inc. v. RealNetworks, Inc. and Listen.com, No. 2007-1583 (Fed. Cir.), decided January 19, 2009 (opinion by Judge Bryson; nonprecedential), reported at 306 F. App'x 610. URL: http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-orders/07-1583.pdf

  • The appeal covered US 6,389,467 ('467), US 6,725,275 ('275), and US 6,735,628 ('628).
  • For the '275 patent, the asserted claims on appeal were claims 6 and 16. The court affirmed the district court's summary judgment that those claims were invalid for obviousness (KSR-driven), and declined to reach indefiniteness ("substantially automatic") or non-infringement.
  • The court held the "directly controllable" limitation was met or rendered obvious by prior-art Winamp with its integrated mini-browser and playlist construction, and that IUMA Radio (HTML/JavaScript programmatic control of an embedded RealPlayer) supplied "programmatic control." The panel did find the district court erred in one respect (no genuine dispute resolved on the "direct control" point), but affirmed overall.
  • Google Patents lists this as a "Critical" litigation entry: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Court%20of%20Appeals%20for%20the%20Federal%20Circuit/case/07-1583

• District court: Google Patents lists an earlier case as California Eastern District Court, case 3:03-cv-05085 (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/California%20Eastern%20District%20Court/case/3%3A03-cv-05085). Note a discrepancy worth flagging: the Federal Circuit opinion and the N.D. Cal. summary-judgment order (Judge William W. Schwarzer) indicate Friskit's June 27, 2003 action against RealNetworks/Listen.com was filed in the Northern District of California. I am reporting both as found rather than reconciling them; the docket-number format 3:03-cv-05085 is itself consistent with N.D. Cal. Treat the Google Patents court label with caution.

• Later family activity (not this patent): IPR petitions concerning US 8,825,887 cite Eyal's '467 patent as prior art (Ex. 1005) — this is a different patent using this family as a reference, not an attack on the '275 patent.

Uncertainty / Caveats

1. Claim-numbering discrepancy worth noting. The Federal Circuit describes "claims 6 and 16 of the '275 patent" as reciting "a media player directly controllable by the search module." In the granted claim text I retrieved, claim 6 is directed to first/second media resources on "a common server that is remote to a terminal upon which the media player resides," and the "directly communicate" language appears in claim 8. I cannot reconcile this from the sources at hand — possibilities include claim amendments/reissue-type changes during the litigation, or loose judicial characterization. I am flagging it rather than assuming which text controls.
2. No 2026 CAFC docket exists for this patent to my knowledge. If a 2026 filing were made, it would be unusual given the patent's expired status (anticipated expiration May 2, 2020) — though expired patents can still be litigated for past damages.
3. Assignee history nuance: a December 24, 2003 assignment record shows a security agreement in favor of George Aposporos (assignor: Friskit, Inc.), separate from the inventor-to-Friskit assignment. This does not change the listed assignee but may affect chain of title.
4. No reexamination certificate was surfaced for this patent in my searches; the granted text above is the authoritative version I relied on.

Sources

• Full patent text (authoritative): https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6725275B2](/patent/US6725275B2)/en
• Claim text and abstract: https://uspto.report/patent/grant/6725275
• CAFC opinion 2007-1583: http://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-orders/07-1583.pdf
• Case summary: https://www.morelaw.com/verdicts/2007-1583/CA/38727/
• N.D. Cal. summary judgment order (PDF): http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/friskit.pdf

I'll research litigation involving US patent 6725275. Let me search multiple sources.

Let me dig deeper into the specific cases and any additional defendants.

Let me verify additional details — the initial filing venue, any Microsoft dispute, and other cases.

Litigation Involving U.S. Patent No. 6,725,275

Short answer: I identified one true patent-infringement action in which U.S. Patent No. 6,725,275 ("the '275 patent") was actually asserted and adjudicated — Friskit, Inc. v. RealNetworks, Inc. and Listen.com — plus its Federal Circuit appeal. A later Friskit-family case (Bluebonnet v. Pandora) is often mentioned alongside it, but the '275 patent itself was not asserted there. Details below, with confidence flags on the points I could not fully verify.

1. Friskit, Inc. v. RealNetworks, Inc. and Listen.com (primary case)

Substance of the ruling (on the '275 patent):

• Claims 6 & 16 ("media player directly controllable by the search module") were held obvious over the "minibrowser" feature of the prior-art Winamp player (interacting with mp3.com / IUMA.com).
• Claim 38 ("media player controls playback … substantially automatic and sequential") was held obvious as an "identified, predictable solution," citing KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc.
• The court held Friskit's inventions merely "glued" known elements (media players, search engines, streaming media, playlists) together with predictable results.

Federal Circuit appeal (same case):

Sources: CourtListener docket for 3:03-cv-05085 (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/[4165499](/patent/4165499)/friskit-inc-v-realnetworks-inc/); CAFC opinion 07-1583 (http://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-orders/07-1583.pdf); Friskit v. Real Networks, 306 F. App'x 610; Google Patents litigation entries for US 6,725,275 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6725275/en).

2. A note on venue (discrepancy flagged)

Two sources describe the filing location differently, and I could not fully reconcile them:

• Google Patents lists the district-court entry for the '275 patent as "California Eastern District Court," case 3:03-cv-05085.
• The actual court records (CourtListener/PACER and the district-court orders) show the case captioned and decided in the Northern District of California (Judge Schwarzer), case 3:03-cv-05085 WWS.
• An InfoWorld news report from 2003 describes Friskit as having filed "in a Chicago, Illinois, court." This suggests the suit may originally have been filed elsewhere (N.D. Ill.) before ending up in N.D. Cal.

Best reading of the record: the case was litigated to judgment and appealed out of the Northern District of California. I flag the E.D. Cal. label on Google Patents as likely a data-labeling error, and the "Chicago" reference as possibly an initial filing venue — but I cannot confirm the transfer mechanics with the sources retrieved. Treat the N.D. Cal. identification as the reliable one.

3. Related Friskit-family litigation that did NOT assert the '275 patent

Bluebonnet Internet Media Services, LLC v. Pandora Media, LLC is frequently discussed as "Friskit litigation," and Bluebonnet is Friskit's successor-in-interest — but the '275 patent was not among the asserted patents.

Sources: Morrison Foerster (https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/[220930](/patent/220930)-tailoring-music-to-your-tastes); Billbnerd/Billboard (https://www.billboard.com/pro/pandora-sued-playlist-technology-patents-invalid-ruling/); Fenwick (https://www.fenwick.com/insights/experience/fenwick-helps-pandora-media-defeat-patent-infringement-suit); Fed Circuit Blog, Mar. 29, 2024 (https://fedcircuitblog.com/2024/03/29/opinions-orders-march-29-2024/).

Why this matters for your query: the asserted Pandora patents are descendants in the same Friskit priority family (priority to Jan. 24, 2000), which is why commentators conflate the cases — but the '275 patent was not in suit in Bluebonnet v. Pandora.

4. Possible Microsoft-related dispute (unverified as to the '275 patent)

• During Friskit v. RealNetworks, the defendants argued that inventor Aviv Eyal developed the technology while employed by Microsoft (May 1998–Dec. 1999), and that Microsoft — not Friskit — owned the patents. The court rejected this standing challenge because Eyal's agreement was an agreement to assign, not an assignment (Arachnid v. Merit). A discovery dispute also arose over Real's settlement with Microsoft.
• A Digital Music News report on the Bluebonnet/Pandora suit states that Friskit's predecessor "was involved in a dispute with Microsoft Corporation" that produced "a confidential settlement agreement in 2011."
• Caveat: I could not confirm which specific patents were at issue in that Microsoft dispute, and thus cannot verify that the '275 patent was asserted there. The 2011 settlement is plausibly the resolution of a Friskit-v-Microsoft infringement action, but this is inference, not verified fact.

Summary table

Bottom line: The only confirmed litigation that actually put U.S. Patent No. 6,725,275 at issue is Friskit, Inc. v. RealNetworks, Inc. and Listen.com (N.D. Cal. 3:03-cv-05085), which invalidated the asserted '275 claims for obviousness in 2007 — a ruling affirmed by the Federal Circuit in 2009. There were no confirmed IPRs, and I found no other infringement suits naming the '275 patent as an asserted patent. (I could not run a final check on possible IPR/PTAB proceedings before exhausting my search budget — treat "no IPRs" as unverified.) The '275 patent has since expired (anticipated expiration May 2, 2020; status "Expired – Fee Related").

I'll start by checking the canonical PTAB data and then probing for any proceedings the ODP hasn't indexed.

Let me probe specifically for AIA trial numbers and any litigation-adjacent PTAB activity.

No AIA trial numbers surfaced yet. Let me confirm with targeted queries on the patent number and family, plus any reexamination or CBM activity.

US 6,725,275 — AIA Trial Proceedings on File

Canonical source: USPTO Open Data Portal structured block — "The USPTO ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest." I ran independent web sweeps (PTAB E2E, PTAB Decisions, CourtListener, Federal Circuit docket, PTAB petition exhibits) and found no IPR, PGR, CBM, or derivation proceeding naming US 6,725,275 as the challenged patent. I did not invent any proceeding numbers to fill the gap.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 (0 IPR, 0 PGR, 0 CBM) — no institutions, no denials, no final written decisions, no settlements, no PTAB appeals; the bottom-line defensive posture is therefore not "the patent survived IPRs and is hardened," but rather the opposite: the '275 has never been tested at the PTAB because it never needed to be — its asserted claims were held invalid for obviousness by a district court in 2007, affirmed by the Federal Circuit in 2009, and the patent expired on 2020-05-02, so a defendant facing a demand letter citing the '275 is looking at an expired, judicially-invalidated patent rather than a PTAB-hardened one.

PTAB proceedings on file

(NONE) — no petitioner v. Friskit, Inc. AIA trial docket exists on US 6,725,275

• Type: N/A — no Inter Partes Review, no Post-Grant Review, no Covered Business Method review.
• Filed: N/A.
• Status: N/A. (Contrast with the patent's file history/legal status, which is verbatim "Expired - Fee Related" with an "Anticipated expiration" event dated 2020-05-02.)
• Judge panel: N/A.
• Petition grounds: N/A.
• Institution decision: N/A.
• Final Written Decision: N/A — no PTAB FWD exists for this patent.
• Settlement / termination: N/A.
• Appeal: There is a Federal Circuit appeal associated with this patent, but it is not a PTAB appeal and must not be reported as one: Friskit, Inc. v. RealNetworks, Inc., No. 2007-1583 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 12, 2009) (nonprecedential) — an appeal from the N.D. Cal.'s summary-judgment invalidity ruling (CAFC opinion PDF; CourtListener).
• Defensive value: A defendant gets no § 315(e) estoppel leverage from any PTAB proceeding, because none exists — but it also faces no surviving PTAB claim set, because the claims were killed in court and the patent is expired.

The closest analogue on file (not a PTAB proceeding — do not cite it as one)

Friskit, Inc. v. RealNetworks, Inc. — N.D. Cal. No. C 03-5085 (WWS/FMS) → Fed. Cir. 2007-1583

• Type: District court patent infringement action (invalidity via summary judgment), not an AIA trial.
• Filed: 2003-06 / transferred to N.D. Cal. 2003-11-17 (docket recap).
• Status: Concluded; judgment of invalidity affirmed.
• Claim-level outcome for the '275: The court addressed "the '275 Patent … claims 6 and 16" (media player directly controllable by the search module) and "'275 Patent, claim 38" ("wherein the media player controls playback of the at least some of the media resources to be substantially automatic and sequential"); the record states "The '275 Patent has three claims in issue." All were held invalid for obviousness — the court reasoned that "if Friskit's patent differs from the prior art, it is only because in the prior art the search module and media player are provided by separate entities rather than the same one," which is "simply a predictable result[] of integration," and that "once the playlist had been loaded" the media player "was controlling playback to be sequential, and therefore this limitation was found in the prior art." (Friskit v. RealNetworks SJ opinion, CourtListener 1871910).
• Key date: On 2007-07-26 Judge William W. Schwarzer granted RealNetworks' KSR-based summary judgment motion invalidating the claims of the four asserted Friskit patents (RealNetworks press release, 2007-07-31).
• Appeal: No. 2007-1583 (Fed. Cir.) — affirmed 2009-01-12; the panel held that "a system employing 'programmatic control' and 'direct control' of the media player by the network-based server would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art," and that Friskit's secondary-considerations evidence (commercial success, copying, long-felt need) did not overcome the strong obviousness showing. Disposition: AFFIRMED.
• Settlement / termination: None — litigated to final judgment and appeal.
• Defensive value: This is the single most useful item in the file for a defendant today, precisely because it is not a PTAB proceeding: a full Article III validity judgment, affirmed on the merits, covering the asserted '275 claims (6, 16, 38), plus collateral estoppel exposure for any privies of RealNetworks/Listen.com.

Strategic summary

Canceled vs. sustained vs. untested. At the PTAB: nothing is canceled, nothing is sustained — no claim of the '275 has ever been adjudicated in an AIA trial, so every claim is formally "untested" before the Board. In court: the asserted claims — claims 6, 16, and 38, the three claims the N.D. Cal. described as "in issue" — were held invalid for obviousness and that holding was affirmed by the Federal Circuit in 2007-1583. The remaining claims (1–5, 7–15, 17–37, and 39–63, per the printed claim set) were never litigated and never PTAB-tested; treat them as untested, not as "sustained." Critically, the patent itself carries a legal-status entry of "Expired - Fee Related" with an anticipated expiration of 2020-05-02 (the 20-year date running from the 09/563,250 filing of 2000-05-02), so the enforcement window has closed regardless of claim validity.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(1) or § 315(e)(2) estoppel from this patent, because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted. That cuts both ways for a current defendant: no petitioner is estopped, but also no petitioner has cleared the field — you would be litigating validity from scratch. Practically, the estoppel that matters is issue preclusion from Friskit v. RealNetworks: RealNetworks and Listen.com (and their privies) cannot relitigate the invalidity of claims 6, 16, and 38, and a well-positioned defendant can argue defensive collateral estoppel or at minimum ride the KSR-based reasoning as persuasive authority. Grounds not previously adjudicated (e.g., art against claims 1–5, 7–15, 17–37, 39–63) remain fully available — but with the patent expired, the only reason to run them is to defeat a stale pre-2020 damages theory or to kill an injunction threat premised on an expired patent.

Pattern signals. No repeat-petitioner pattern because there is no petitioner at all — notably, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) ever filed an IPR on the '275, which is consistent with the patent's practical death in 2007 rather than any failure of the aggregator model. Friskit, Inc. itself was an active but short-lived enforcer: it filed in N.D. Ill. (03-CV-4505, 2003-06-27) and N.D. Cal. (03-5085, 2003-11-17), lost on validity, and the family's continuation assets later surfaced in Bluebonnet/Pandora litigation (W.D. Tex. 6:20-cv-00731) where Friskit co-inventor George Aposporos appears as Bluebonnet's corporate representative and Aviv Eyal as a non-party witness — but the court there expressly noted "the patents at issue in Friskit are not the same patents at issue presently" (transfer order). One "pattern" worth knowing: the sibling Friskit patent US 6,389,467 ("Eyal") has been used as prior art by third parties against other companies' streaming patents, including in IPR2021-00158, Hulu LLC v. SITO Mobile R&D IP LLC (see Exhibit 2007 listing "U.S. Patent No. 6,389,467 and systems by the original assignee Friskit, Inc." as invalidating art) — i.e., the Friskit family now functions more as prior art than as an assertion asset (PTAB petition exhibit).

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant being asserted against: the operative facts are that the '275 expired on 2020-05-02 ("Expired - Fee Related") and that its three litigated claims (6, 16, 38) were held obvious and the judgment affirmed in Friskit, Inc. v. RealNetworks, Inc., No. 2007-1583 (Fed. Cir. 2009-01-12) — quote the disposition: "we agree with the district court that a system employing 'programmatic control' and 'direct control' of the media player by the network-based server would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art." Link the CAFC opinion and the CourtListener version in your Rule 11 / motion-to-dismiss correspondence. Note the § 286 six-year damages bar: with expiry in 2020, any recovery window is at best a sliver and likely empty.
• If a demand letter cites claims 1–5 or other untested claims: there is no PTAB FWD to cite, so don't pretend there is. Instead, your affirmative path is (a) the expiry bar, (b) the affirmed obviousness reasoning as persuasive/issue-preclusive authority against privies, and (c) if you truly need a merits kill, an IPR is technically still available against an expired patent — but expect the Board and your client to question whether it's worth the fee given the 2020-05-02 expiry.
• If active proceedings are pending: they are not. Confirm for yourself in PTAB E2E and PTAB Decisions; there is no institution deadline, no oral hearing, and no statutory 1-year FWD deadline to calendar for this patent.
• The signal in the silence: a patent asserted in two districts and appealed to the Federal Circuit in 2009 never attracted a single IPR after the AIA's 2012-09-16 effective date. Here that absence is explained by the patent losing on validity in court and expiring in 2020 — not by any strength on the merits. Treat the file as a dead patent with a live-looking claim list, and be careful that any opposing demand premised on the '275 is either stale (pre-expiry activity) or built on claims a court has already invalidated.

Caveat on sourcing: PTAB E2E and the ODP AIA-trial dataset are the authoritative sources for the proceeding count, and both return zero for this patent. The claim-level invalidation details above come from the district court and Federal Circuit records, not from any PTAB final written decision — because none exists. I found no reexamination certificate or ex parte reexamination proceeding either; if one exists, it would not be an AIA trial proceeding and would not appear in the ODP AIA-trial feed.

I'll research the assignment chain for US 6,725,275. Let me start with the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-reference sources.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 6,725,275 ("Streaming media search and continuous playback of multiple media resources located on a network")

Sourcing caveat, up front: I was unable to retrieve the USPTO Assignment Center reel/frame numbers or the correspondent of record for this patent before exhausting my search steps. The USPTO Assignment Center / Patent Assignment Search interfaces (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) are JS-driven and were not directly queryable from my tooling. What follows is built from the Google Patents legal-events reels for this patent and from the litigation/contemporaneous-press record. Where I lack a reel/frame, I say so rather than invent one. Verify each entry at the search page below before relying on it.

Verification link: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/searchResults?q=[6725275](/patent/6725275)

Inventors

Unusual pattern — flag: The earliest priority filing (Provisional 60/177,786, filed 2000-01-24) post-dates the end of Eyal's Microsoft employment (Dec 1999) by roughly one month. An inventor departing a large technology employer and filing a streaming-media provisional within ~30 days is exactly the footprint that generates later ownership disputes (and here it did — the Microsoft ownership challenge in Friskit v. RealNetworks, plus a reported confidential 2011 Friskit–Microsoft settlement). This is a real, court-documented fact, not an inference from naming.

Note on a common misread: George Aposporos is not a named inventor on the '275. He is Friskit's co-founder/CEO and appears as a named inventor on later family members (the Bluebonnet v. Pandora transfer order calls him "the second named inventor of the Asserted Patent," i.e., US 9,405,753/'650/'095 — a different patent). Do not list him as a '275 inventor.

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: Friskit, Inc. (San Francisco, CA). Original assignee of record; also listed as current assignee on Google Patents.
• Product activity: Friskit was a real operating company turned pure licensor. It released a beta streaming-media search engine in 2000 (press reports cite ~100,000 beta users) that executed the claimed "search → sequential continuous playback" flow as a consumer product — but removed the service in early 2001 (music-industry opposition and inability to raise capital). By the time of enforcement (2003) founder Aposporos stated the company had been "unable to find any customers for its technology" and had "changed its business strategy from a consumer service to a technology licensing model."
• Primary line of business at assertion: Patent licensing / enforcement only — no product in commerce.
• Current status: Not verified. Friskit appears defunct as an operating entity; the family's later assets were prosecuted/asserted by Bluebonnet Internet Media Services, LLC (Friskit's successor-in-interest per Bluebonnet v. Pandora). I found no bankruptcy filing for Friskit.

Assignment timeline

The Assignment Center record for the '275 is thin: two recorded events, both with a recording date of 2003-12-24, plus the original inventor-to-company transfer. I could not retrieve the reel/frame numbers — treat the entries below as dates-and-parties verified from Google Patents legal events, with reel/frame unverified.

• Execution date not stated; recorded 2003-12-24 — Reel/frame NOT RETRIEVED

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: EYAL, AVIV
  • Assignee: FRISKIT, INC.
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved
  • Context: Standing/chain-of-title cleanup — the classic original inventor assignment, but recorded roughly six months after Friskit filed suit (see "Pre-litigation transfer," below).

• Execution date not stated; recorded 2003-12-24 — Reel/frame NOT RETRIEVED

  • Conveyance: Security Agreement
  • Assignor: FRISKIT, INC.
  • Assignee: GEORGE APOSPOROS (Friskit's co-founder/chairman/CEO)
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved
  • Context: Securitization / founder debt — the company's own principal taking a security interest in the patent, consistent with a capital-starved startup pledging IP as collateral. (Confirms the note in the previously generated Patent Summary; no contradiction.)

• No further recorded assignment on the '275. In particular, I found no recorded assignment of the '275 from Friskit → Bluebonnet Internet Media Services, LLC, despite Bluebonnet's status in the family. Whether the '275 tracks with the Bluebonnet assets is unverified.

Note on the "copies" micro-format: the two 2003-12-24 recordings came in back-to-back with identical recording dates, which is typical of a single filing session (both likely submitted together), reinforcing the "clean-up in connection with litigation" read.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6725275
    2000 : Provisional filed Jan 24
         : Friskit beta product launched
    2001 : Consumer service removed
    2002 : Application 10 251 238 filed
    2003 : Suit v RealNetworks filed Jun 27
         : Assignment Eyal to Friskit recorded Dec 24
         : Security Agreement to Aposporos Dec 24
    2004 : Patent issued Apr 20
    2007 : Claims 6 16 38 invalidated Jul 26
    2009 : Affirmed by Federal Circuit
    2020 : Patent expired May 2

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present (for the recorded '275 chain). The only recorded transferee is Friskit, Inc., the original operating assignee, and the only other recorded event is a security agreement to an individual principal (Aposporos), not a transfer to an "IP/Holdings/Licensing/Ventures" LLC. No single-purpose Delaware/Texas LLC appears on the face of the '275 record. (Bluebonnet Internet Media Services, LLC — a Texas NPE-style entity — is a family successor, but no '275 assignment to it is recorded; that leg is unclear, not a finding.)

2. Known asserter in the chain — Unclear / partial. Friskit does not appear on the enumerated public NPE lists (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, etc.), and Bluebonnet does not either by name. However, Friskit's own contemporaneous self-description — a "technology licensing company" with no customers and no product at assertion time — is functionally NPE conduct. I flag the substance, not the list match.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Not determinable. I could not retrieve the correspondent of record for either 2003-12-24 recording. With only two records and no correspondent data, no recurrence can be shown. (This is the single highest-value missing field — a re-run of USPTO Assignment Search filtered to Friskit/Bluebonnet family patents is the recommended next step.)

4. Cascading transfers — Not present. Only two recorded events, both on 2003-12-24, and only one is an ownership transfer. There is no chain of LLC-to-LLC hops.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present as defined (inverse present). The inventor→Friskit assignment was recorded 2003-12-24, i.e., ~6 months after Friskit's first infringement suit (filed 2003-06-27). The signal as defined anticipates pre-suit transfers arranged to clean standing; here the recording is post-suit, which reads as belt-and-suspenders standing proof for the pending case rather than venue engineering.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. No Friskit Chapter 7/11 or asset sale found; the company wound down via licensing strategy, not a court-supervised sale.

7. Privateering — Not present. Friskit asserted its own patents against direct streaming-rivals (RealNetworks, Listen.com); there is no operating-company patron transferring the '275 to a shell to sue competitors on the patron's behalf.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — Not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. (In fact, US 6,389,467, a sibling in this same family, has been reused as prior art by defendants like Hulu — inverse of a defensive purchase.)

Verdict

NPE — moderate confidence.

Justification: The '275 record shows only one ownership transfer — inventor Aviv Eyal → Friskit, Inc., recorded 2003-12-24, with a second same-day entry being a Security Agreement from Friskit, Inc. to George Aposporos — and Friskit at the time of assertion was a non-practicing licensing entity: it had withdrawn its only product in early 2001, stated it had no customers, described itself as a "technology licensing company," and sued direct streaming competitors (RealNetworks/Listen.com) in the N.D. Cal. 3:03-cv-05085 action filed 2003-06-27. That is one strong non-practicing-enforcer signal (satisfying the "1 strong signal" threshold for moderate), but the absence of any shell-entity transfer, cascading LLC chain, identified asserter, or retrieved correspondent data on the '275 record keeps this short of high confidence. The ruling is reinforced — but not independently proven for the '275 — by the family's later flow into Bluebonnet Internet Media Services, LLC, a Texas NPE, per the Bluebonnet v. Pandora record (no recorded '275 assignment to Bluebonnet found).

Two hard caveats for the verdict: (i) verify the current '275 owner at the Assignment Center, because if an unrecorded/again-recorded assignment to Bluebonnet or another entity exists, this flips toward NPE — high confidence; and (ii) reel/frame and correspondent were not retrieved, so the chain as stated rests on recording dates and parties only.

Link for verification: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/searchResults?q=6725275

I'll research the prior-art citations on US 6,725,275. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me pull the full citation lists from the patent record and the examiner-cited references.

Let me retrieve the remainder of the examiner-cited reference list.

Prior Art of Record for U.S. Patent No. 6,725,275 — Examiner-Cited References

Method note / confidence. I could not query the USPTO Patent Public Search or PatentCenter API directly in this session; the searches returned secondary sources. The list below is the "References Cited — U.S. Patent Documents" block as reproduced for the '275 patent (SumoBrain's faithful reproduction of the granted front page at https://sumobrain.com/patents/us/Streaming-media-search-continuous-playback/6725275.html), cross-checked against Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6725275B2](/patent/US6725275B2)/en). All entries are for the exact number US 6,725,275; no similar-numbered patents are included.

Two honest caveats up front — please read before relying on this:

1. This list is truncated. I retrieved the U.S.-patent portion from US 4,870,579 (Hey) through US 6,009,459 (1999-12-28); the title of that last entry and any further U.S. entries, plus the "Foreign Patent Documents" and "Other Publications" sections, were not retrievable with the search budget available. Treat the list as substantially complete but not certified.
2. None of these references is a § 102 rejection. These are references of record — the '275 patent issued over all of them (granted 2004-04-20). The examiner's incentive was § 103, and no single reference was applied to anticipate. I therefore map each reference element-by-element to the claims it most closely reads on, and flag explicitly that a true § 102 anticipation requires a single reference disclosing every element of the claim — which none of these alone did. I am not aware of any specific § 102 rejection based on these references, and I have not fabricated rejection grounds.

Critical cross-reference to the previously generated sections: the art that actually invalidated this patent was non-patent prior art — Winamp's minibrowser and IUMA Radio — relied on in Friskit, Inc. v. RealNetworks, Inc., N.D. Cal. 3:03-cv-05085 (KSR-based SJ of obviousness, 2007-07-26), affirmed at 306 F. App'x 610 (Fed. Cir. 2009) (No. 2007-1583). The patent citations below were not the basis of that invalidation. Do not conflate the two sets.

A. Examiner-cited U.S. patent references

Foreign / non-patent references of record: not retrieved. Nothing in the sources I obtained showed a foreign patent document or NPL citation on the '275 front page, but I cannot certify their absence.

Family / "Related US Application Data" (NOT prior art): the '275 is a continuation of Ser. No. 09/613,433 (now US 6,519,648), a CIP of Ser. No. 09/563,250 (now US 6,389,467), claiming priority to Provisional 60/177,786 (2000-01-24). These are the same-inventor/same-family documents and are not § 102 art against the '275.

B. What this means for § 102

Because the '275 issued over every reference above, the honest analytical posture is:

• No single listed reference discloses all elements of any independent claim. Each independent claim (1, 20, 38, 42, 59) requires the combination of (a) a search module that harvests multiple media resource locators across different network sites and (b) a media player directly controllable by / directly receiving from the search module that plays them substantially automatically and sequentially. The references most capable of an element-level § 102 attack are US 5,873,080 (Coden — multiple search engines searching multimedia), US 5,996,015 (Day — seamless/continuous multimedia presentation), US 5,583,868 (Rashid — combining multiple servers into one continuous stream), and US 5,659,732 (Kirsch — client-side multi-database search with ranking) — but each supplies only one side of that combination.
• The anticipation risk is thus low on this record; the obviousness risk (as the courts found) is high. The Friskit/RealNetworks courts disposed of claims 6, 16, and 38 on § 103 using non-patent art (Winamp minibrowser; IUMA Radio) — not these patent citations. See the previously generated sections for the full procedural history and the Fed. Cir. disposition ("a system employing 'programmatic control' and 'direct control' of the media player by the network-based server would have been obvious…").
• Forward citations are not prior art. Google Patents shows a "Cited By" set (e.g., the Aposporos dynamic-ratings patents, and foreign office actions citing US 6,725,275 such as CN 110740376 B). These postdate the '275 and are not § 102/§ 103 art against it. I exclude them deliberately.

C. Explicit uncertainties

1. List incompleteness — truncated at US 6,009,459; titles for that entry and any subsequent U.S., foreign, or NPL references are unretrieved.
2. Source quality — SumoBrain is a secondary reproduction. The authoritative citation list is the granted patent's front page and the file wrapper in USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Public Search, which I could not query here. Verify against the original.
3. No § 102 rejections identified — I found no evidence the examiner applied any of these references under § 102; the patent issued, indicating allowance over them. Where I say a reference "reads on" a claim, that is element-level relevance, not an assertion of anticipation.
4. The real invalidating art is non-patent (Winamp / IUMA Radio) and is documented in the litigation sections already generated — not in this citation list.

Recommended verification step: pull the '275 file wrapper (PatentCenter) and the "References Cited" and "Foreign Patent Documents" pages of the printed patent to complete and certify this list, and check the examiner's reasons for allowance to confirm none of the above was applied under § 102.

I'll ground this §103 analysis in the actual prior-art record for the '275 patent — both the references cited on its face and the art relied on by the district court and Federal Circuit — then build the combination analysis. Let me pull the cited references and the litigation's prior-art findings.

I have the litigation record and a partial cited-reference list. Let me complete the "References Cited" list (patents and any NPL) so the combination analysis rests on the actual art of record.

Obviousness Analysis of U.S. Patent No. 6,725,275 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Building on the prior bibliographic, litigation, and PTAB sections. I do not repeat the claim overview or litigation history there; I extend them into a formal Graham/KSR invalidity analysis.

1. Legal framework and standard of proof

The controlling rubric is Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), as sharpened by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 551 U.S. 398 (2007). The four factual inquiries are: (1) scope and content of the prior art; (2) differences between the prior art and the claims; (3) level of ordinary skill; and (4) objective indicia of nonobviousness. As the Federal Circuit stated when it applied this framework to this exact patent:

"Under § 103(a) '[a] patent may not be obtained … if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains.'"
— Friskit, Inc. v. Real Networks, Inc., 306 F. App'x 610, 613 (Fed. Cir. 2009) (quoting the SJ order), http://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-orders/07-1583.pdf

Two points of threshold importance for any current analysis:

• Clear and convincing evidence is required to invalidate (35 U.S.C. § 282). The '275 enjoys the statutory presumption of validity.
• The patent is expired (anticipated expiration 2020-05-02, status "Expired – Fee Related"). Invalidity remains fully litigable (and the § 103 analysis is unchanged by expiry), but any assertion is limited to pre-expiration past damages, subject to the § 286 six-year bar.

2. Critical date and the person of ordinary skill in the art ("POSITA")

Critical date. The '275 claims priority to U.S. Provisional 60/177,786 (filed 2000-01-24), through Ser. No. 09/563,250 (filed 2000-05-02) and Ser. No. 09/613,433 (filed 2000-07-11). Its own filing was 2002-09-20. For § 103 purposes the operative window is therefore on or before January 24, 2000 — the earliest priority date — unless the applicant could swear behind it. All of the prior art discussed below comfortably predates January 2000.

Flag: one third-party aggregator lists the '275 with "Priority Date: 2000-01-23" while the patent face and Google Patents list 2000-01-24. I treat 2000-01-24 as controlling (patent face + litigation record).

POSITA. A person with a bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent, plus roughly 1–2 years of experience in network application programming — specifically, familiarity with (i) HTTP/HTML web clients and servers, (ii) browser-embedded media-player plug-ins and their APIs, (iii) playlist formats (M3U/RAM) and streaming protocols (HTTP, PNM/RTSP), and (iv) server-side scripting (JavaScript, Java applets, ActiveX). This is consistent with the district court's treatment of the field, which it populated with working systems (Winamp, mp3.com, IUMA.com, RealPlayer 4.0) rather than with paper references alone.

3. The prior art of record — two tracks

The '275 record contains two distinct bodies of prior art, and a robust § 103 case uses both.

Track A — References cited on the face of the patent ("Patent Citations (37)")

These are the references the examiner and applicant of record marshalled. Nineteen are pertinent; the most probative are:

Caveat on completeness: Google Patents prints "Patent Citations (37)," but the portion retrievable in my searches enumerated roughly two dozen. I have not verified the remaining ~13 references, and I cannot confirm whether non-patent literature was cited on the '275 (the sibling US 9,547,650 cites NPL, but that is a different patent). Treat the table as the identified subset of the cited art, not the full citation list.

Track B — System art proved in Friskit v. RealNetworks (the art that actually invalidated claims)

This is the art with the most persuasive force, because a federal court and the Federal Circuit already found it sufficient to invalidate the asserted '275 claims:

• Winamp (Nullsoft) with its integrated "minibrowser" — a client module that let a user "navigate to sites such as mp3.com or IUMA.com, create a playlist of desired music files, download the music files, and play them back in their designated order." (Fed. Cir. slip op. at 8.)
• mp3.com and IUMA.com — web sites where users could search a music database and where "simply clicking on the search results … would download the music and create a playlist." (Id.)
• M3U/RAM playlist files — downloaded to the client; media files at the network addresses "specified by the M3U files would then be automatically played back in the predetermined sequence." (Id. at 8–9.)
• IUMA Radio — the server "transmitted a program consisting of Javascript and HTML code, which caused a local browser window to open and controlled the embedded media player." (Id. at 10.) This is the court's found "programmatic control."
• RealPlayer 4.0 plug-in bundled with Internet Explorer 4.0 — a browser-embedded media player "controlled from web pages through Java and other technologies." (SJ order, § II.A.)
• RealPlayer's public API (as advertised by October 1995) — content providers could "plug their own interface" into the player, "embed instructions" into the stream, and let users "browse, select and play back … content on demand, in real time." (Fed. Cir. slip op. at 10–11.) The court held that "[f]acilitating 'programmatic' and 'direct' control of the media player by networked software modules was the intended purpose of exposing the application programming interface."
• Java, JavaScript, and ActiveX — "in widespread use" at the critical date, making "the benefits of network control of local processes and the methods for implementing such control … well known." (Id. at 10.)

4. Decomposition of the independent claims into elements

For § 103 mapping, each independent claim reduces to four functional elements:

Key observation: Elements [A] and [B] are squarely met by the patent's own cited art (Coden '080 for multi-engine search over multimedia; Rapaport '152 for automatically locating media files; Burrows '863/'409 for web search/parse). Elements [C] and [D] are met by the system art (IUMA Radio for programmatic control; Winamp/minibrowser+M3U for playlist-driven sequential playback). Neither element is novel in isolation, and the Federal Circuit has already held the combination predictable.

Scope caveat (repeat of the flag in the Patent Summary). Only claims 6, 16, and 38 were litigated and invalidated. Claims 1, 20, 42, and 59 — the broadest independent claims — were never adjudicated and are, as a matter of record, untested. My analysis below demonstrates that these too are obvious, but a defendant relying on issue preclusion alone can only reach claims 6, 16, and 38; for claims 1, 20, 42, 59 (and all remaining dependents) the argument must be made affirmatively. (And note the numbering tension flagged earlier: the litigation described claims 6 and 16 as bearing the "directly controllable" limitation, whereas the granted text places that language in claims 1, 8, 20, 42, and 59 and describes claim 6 as first/second resources on a common remote server. I do not reconcile that here.)

5. Combination 1 (primary) — Winamp + mp3.com/IUMA.com + M3U playlist + streaming player

Refs combined: Winamp (minibrowser); mp3.com and IUMA.com (search); M3U/playlist files; RealPlayer (or Winamp with streaming plug-in).

Mapping to claim 1:

Motivation to combine (KSR factors):

1. Predictable use of known elements for their established functions. Search engines search; media players play; playlists order. Combining them "according to their established functions" is the KSR paradigm. The Federal Circuit so held: Friskit's own characterization was that its patents "deliver the glue to put existing technologies together into a single application," which "did not overcome the showing of obviousness."
2. Market/design incentive. Users wanted continuous, radio-like music without clicking each result. Winamp's minibrowser was built to close the gap between browsing and playing. Extending the minibrowser's playlist-and-play to results drawn from multiple portals is a natural, incremental step.
3. Finite number of predictable solutions. On the SJ record, "Each of Friskit's claims achieved sequential playback by choosing one of three options — the network server module, the search module, or the media player module — to control the client." The claimed selection of "search module control" is one of three "identified, predictable solutions" (quoting KSR, 127 S.Ct. at 1742).
4. No teaching away. The art pointed toward, not away from, integration: Winamp's integrated minibrowser and RealPlayer 4.0's bundling with IE 4.0 are affirmative integration teachings.

Conclusion: Combination 1 renders claim 1 obvious, and likewise claims 20, 38, 42, and 59 (each differs only in the locus of the user-interface element or the framing of the control relationship — all within the "predictable integration" rationale).

6. Combination 2 — IUMA Radio + Winamp/minibrowser + a search-enabled portal (attacks the "directly controllable by the search module" limitation head-on)

Combination 1 handles the "same entity provides search and playback" theory. But claims 1/20/42/59 recite the media player being directly controllable by the search module (or receiving locators directly from the search module), which a defendant must also meet where search and playback are separate.

Refs combined: IUMA Radio (programmatic control via HTML/JavaScript driving an embedded RealPlayer through its API) + Winamp's minibrowser (client-side search interface) + mp3.com/IUMA.com search (result harvesting).

Mapping:

Motivation to combine. (i) The two references address the same problem — automating discovery→playback — and IUMA Radio's server-driven play-list refresh is a modular feature readily bolted onto Winamp's client-side search interface. (ii) The Federal Circuit's holding is directly on point: "server control was plainly the alternative to the client-server model," and "with programming tools such as Java, Javascript, and ActiveX in widespread use, the benefits of network control of local processes and the methods for implementing such control were well known at the time of the invention." (iii) Real's 1995 API announcement establishes that "programmatic" and "direct" control of the media player by networked software modules was the intended purpose of exposing the player API — an express teaching, satisfying "reason to combine."

Conclusion. Combination 2 supplies the "directly controllable" element for claims 1, 20, 42, and 59, and reinforces claim 38.

7. Combination 3 — the patent-based combination (Coden '080 + Rapaport '152 + Day '015 + Kouloheris '094)

Because the system art (Track B) was proved by video/expert testimony that a future challenger must re-assemble, a paper-only combination drawn from the '275's own cited references is strategically valuable — the references are already "of record" on the patent and are therefore hard to dismiss as non-analogous art.

Primary reference: US 5,873,080 (Coden, IBM) — plural search engines querying a multimedia corpus and merging results. Discloses element [A] and the "first network site" + multi-source harvesting of element [B].

Secondary references:

• US 5,890,152 (Rapaport) — a preference-observing browser agent that automatically obtains media files. Supplies the "user-query / user-selection based search request" of claims 9–13, 20, and 38, and the automatic (no-click) retrieval that underpins "substantially automatic."
• US 5,996,015 (Day) — assembling and concatenating multimedia segments for "seamless and continuous" presentation. Supplies element [D] (continuous, sequential playback).
• US 5,915,094 (Kouloheris, IBM) — on-demand delivery of multimedia over wide-area networks. Supplies the streaming, cross-site delivery environment and confirms that cross-domain sources were conventional.
• US 5,920,856 (Syeda-Mahmood) — selecting among plural remote multimedia databases. Reinforces the cross-site/multi-locator element.

Motivation to combine. All five references sit in the same field of endeavor (networked retrieval and playback of multimedia) and address complementary, non-overlapping sub-problems: find (Coden, Syeda-Mahmood), personalize (Rapaport), deliver (Kouloheris), sequence continuously (Day). A POSITA integrating a "network radio/jukebox" in 1999–2000 would combine them because each supplies a piece the others lack, with no change in their respective principles of operation — the classic KSR "combination of familiar elements according to known methods … yields predictable results." Coden's multi-engine merge in particular supplies exactly what the '275 specification claims as its advantage: aggregating "different collections of streaming media" across engines.

Conclusion. Combination 3 renders claim 1 (and with Rapaport, claims 20 and 38) obvious using only references on the '275's face.

8. Combination 4 — Hazenfield '374 + Rapaport '152 for the programmatic-control element

US 5,991,374 (Hazenfield) discloses "a programmable messaging system for controlling playback of messages on remote music-on-hold-compatible telephone systems and other message output devices." That is, a controller that programmatically drives a remote playback device through a designated sequence of media items.

Pairing Hazenfield with Rapaport ('152, automatic media retrieval) and any of Kouloheris/Day yields all four elements: a controller (search/retrieval logic) that programmatically commands a remote player to run a sequence of media items. The motivation is the same one the Federal Circuit endorsed: "programmatic … control of the media player by networked software modules" was the recognized design goal, and "[f]acilitating" it "was the intended purpose" of the player API. A POSITA looking to build a hands-free network music service would find in Hazenfield the abstract idea of remote, programmatic, sequenced playback and in Rapaport the mechanism for automatic selection — predictable application, no unexpected results.

Conclusion. Supports claims 1, 20, 42, 59 and, in combination with the playlist art, claim 38.

9. Dependent-claim groups — additional § 103 combinations

The '275's dependent claims add little that is not separately taught. The relevant pairings:

Note on the specification as prior art. The '275's "Description of the Related Art" is itself an admission of the pre-existing environment (computers accessing streaming media; search engines displaying links; users manually traversing link chains). This materially narrows the field of what the claims could have added, and it is the sort of applicant admission a challenger should front-load.

10. Rationales to combine — consolidated KSR table

11. Secondary considerations (objective indicia)

Friskit advanced commercial success, copying, and long-felt need. The Federal Circuit held them unavailing:

"With respect to commercial success, … Friskit failed to show that the success of those products was attributable to the subject matter that it contends is nonobvious — programmatic control of the media player by the server module and direct control by the search module." (slip op. at 11–12.)

The copying evidence was given "limited probative value in the absence of evidence of failed development efforts by the infringer." (Id.) The SJ order similarly found the choice of design path did not demonstrate long-felt need or failure of others. No secondary consideration on this record rebuts the strong prima facie case.

12. Claim-level conclusions

Reasoning is materially the Federal Circuit's own, extended to the unlitigated claims: "a system employing 'programmatic control' and 'direct control' of the media player by the network-based server would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art," and "with the insignificant differences between the prior art media players and the claims, the advanced state of the art at the time, and the lack of persuasive secondary evidence …, we affirm the district court's summary judgment that the claims at issue would have been obvious."

13. Caveats and open items (do not treat as settled)

1. Only claims 6, 16, and 38 carry a final, affirmed invalidity judgment. Claims 1, 20, 42, 59 and all other dependents are untested; a challenger must prove them obvious affirmatively. Issue preclusion reaches only RealNetworks/Listen.com and their privies, and only as to the adjudicated claims.
2. The full "Patent Citations (37)" list and any NPL were not fully retrievable in this analysis. The Track A table is the verified subset of roughly two dozen references; ~13 remain unverified. I cannot confirm whether NPL was cited on the '275 itself.
3. The claim-numbering discrepancy flagged in the earlier Patent Summary persists: the litigation attributes the "directly controllable by the search module" limitation to claims 6 and 16, but in the granted text claim 6 is directed to first/second resources on a common remote server (with the "directly … communicate" language in claim 8). I am not assuming which text controls; any § 103 chart should be built against the printed claim text and cross-checked to the litigation's claim-construction order.
4. Priority-date labeling differs across secondary sources (2000-01-23 vs. 2000-01-24). I use the patent face (2000-01-24). This does not change any conclusion, as all cited art predates both.
5. Expiry is not validity. The 2020-05-02 expiration does not void the claims; it limits remedies. The § 103 analysis stands on its own and was unaffected by the ~16-year gap between the 2004 grant and the 2020 expiry.
6. The § 101 overlay (from the sibling family). In Bluebonnet v. Pandora the descendant Friskit patents were held invalid under Alice (aff'd 2024) — that case did not involve the '275, so it is not binding on it, but it signals that a parallel § 101 attack on the '275's "search-then-play" claims may also be available. § 103, however, remains the stronger and already-proven ground.

Sources

• U.S. Patent No. 6,725,275 B2, full text, claims, and Patent Citations (37): https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6725275B2](/patent/US6725275B2)/en ; https://uspto.report/patent/grant/6725275 ; https://SumoBrain.com/patents/us/Streaming-media-search-continuous-playback/6725275.html
• Friskit, Inc. v. Real Networks, Inc., No. 2007-1583 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 12, 2009) (nonprecedential), 306 F. App'x 610: http://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-orders/07-1583.pdf ; https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[209377](/patent/209377)/friskit-inc-v-real-networks-inc/
• N.D. Cal. SJ order, Friskit, Inc. v. RealNetworks, Inc., No. C 03-5085 (July 26, 2007): https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[1871910](/patent/1871910)/friskit-inc-v-realnetworks-inc/ ; http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/friskit.pdf
• RealNetworks press release, "RealNetworks Wins Complete Victory in Patent Suit" (July 31, 2007): http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/RNWK/6212936780x0x123521/[5569163F](/patent/5569163F)-3579-409A-A631-114882E4A9B5/RNWK_News_2007_7_31_General.pdf
• KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 551 U.S. 398 (2007); Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966).