US 6882793

I'll search for this specific patent across USPTO sources, litigation databases, and the CAFC docket.

Now let me pull the actual claim text and check for litigation / CAFC activity.

Let me get the exact claim language and verify the litigation record for this specific patent number.

Summary — US 6,882,793

Scope of what I could verify: I searched for the literal number 6882793 across Google Patents, USPTO-linked mirrors (uspto.report, PubChem/NCBI patent record, Unified Patents portal, Justia, FreePatentsOnline), the Stanford NPE litigation database, and general web/CAFC docket queries. I found a full claim text in none of the retrieved sources in this session, so my claim discussion below is derived from the patent's own Summary of the Invention and is explicitly flagged as unverified verbatim. I did not find any CAFC 2026 docket entry for this patent.

Bibliographic data (high confidence — consistent across sources)

Abstract (verbatim, per USPTO/Google Patents)

"A method and apparatus for producing video content. The method includes acquiring video data from a source. If the video data is not digitized, then the video data is digitized. The method includes generating scene indexes for the video data including a representative still image for each scene and combining the video data and scene indexes along with a media player on a video disc. The video player is operable to play the video data in accordance with the scene indexes including playing a scene from the video data on a client computer while displaying the representative stills for other of the scenes available for display on the video disc."

Overview of the independent claims — with an explicit uncertainty note

I was not able to retrieve the verbatim claim set of US 6,882,793 in this session (the full-text sources I reached were truncated before the claims). What follows is reconstructed from the Summary of the Invention, which in this patent is worded in claim-like "the invention provides…" language and therefore very likely mirrors the independent claims. Treat the claim count and exact limitations as unverified.

The Summary discloses two independent aspects, which most likely correspond to two independent claims (a method claim and possibly a method/apparatus claim; the title and abstract say "method and apparatus," so an apparatus/system independent claim is plausible but unconfirmed):

1. Method for producing a video disc — acquire video data from a source; digitize it if not already digitized; generate scene indexes for the video data that include a representative still image for each scene; and combine the video data + scene indexes + a media player onto a video disc, where the media player plays the video data in accordance with the scene indexes, including playing one scene while concurrently displaying the representative stills for the other scenes available on the disc. Dependent/described features include: analog or digital source capture; detecting a frame-to-frame transition (color difference and/or motion difference versus a preset threshold); cropping frames before comparison to remove boundary/camera-noise effects; determining a scene break by comparing frames to the last frame of the preceding scene; selecting a representative frame as the first frame or a frame from a "segment intro" best matching the segment's average color distribution; a printed contact sheet of the representative stills; and the disc being a CD or DVD.

2. Method for producing a video-based product — acquire video data; generate temporal indices by analyzing the video data, the indices dividing the video data into distinct segments; provide a media player operable to play the video data on a client computer in accordance with those temporal indices; and package the video data, temporal indices and media player on a physical medium for delivery. Described additions: digitizing prior to packaging; representative stills per segment displayed by the media player during playback; a media editor that generates edit lists defining operations to be performed on the video data by another computer (so edits defined on one machine can be replicated elsewhere); editing in accordance with those edit lists and distributing to user-designated distributees; packaging as a physical manifestation (e.g., video disc); and producing a streaming/webcast version in accordance with the temporal indices for delivery to a requestor.

Family / related filings (relevant to the scope of the disclosed subject matter)

• PCT/US2001/019130 → WO 2001/099403 A2 (published 2001-12-27); EP 1 310 086 B1; JP 4942276 B2; DE 60143663 D1. Note that WO 01/99403 A2 was later cited as prior art against an unrelated third-party application (EP 1 818 938 A1 search report), citing "page 17, line 25 – page 18, line 24."
• US 2005/0281535 A1 (published 2005-12-21) — continuation, issued as US 7,668,438 B2.
• Later continuations in the same family: US 8,630,529 B2, US 8,867,894 B2, US 9,390,755 B2 (per the Google Patents "Priority to" entries and the Unified Patents family list).

Litigation and CAFC status (2026)

• CAFC 2026 dockets: I found no docket entry for US 6,882,793. My CAFC-specific query returned no results, and nothing in the retrieved docket-style sources ties a 2026 Federal Circuit appeal to this patent. I cannot affirmatively rule out a 2026 appeal; I simply have no authoritative record of one.
• Distinguishing the litigation record: The Google Patents page displays a "Family has litigation – First worldwide family litigation filed" pointer to Darts-IP family 24383971. I could not open the underlying Darts-IP litigation record, so I cannot state which family member, venue, or party is involved. This is a family-level flag, not confirmation that the 6,882,793 patent itself was asserted.
• The district-court hits I retrieved belong to the YesVideo enforcement campaign recorded in the Stanford NPE Litigation Database: YesVideo, Inc. v. iMemories, Inc., No. 2:15-cv-00809 (E.D. Tex.) and YesVideo Incorporated v. IMR16 Incorporated, No. 2:16-cv-00865 (D. Ariz.). The database page I retrieved links those two cases to patent 8,867,894 (a continuation in this family), not to 6,882,793. Whether 6,882,793 was also pleaded in those complaints is unconfirmed by my sources.
• Given the recorded status "Expired – Fee Related, expires 2021-10-27," the patent appears to be unenforceable for failure to pay maintenance fees, which is consistent with the absence of any post-2021 or 2026 appellate activity.

Anomalies and cautions (interpreted literally, not auto-corrected)

1. A separate document carries the string "6882793" as a US reference: the EPO publication of EP 0 653 136 B1 lists priority data including "US 6882793 A 19930528." A US patent issued 2005-04-19 from an application filed 2000-06-16 cannot be the same document as a 1993-05-28 reference, so that entry refers to a different identifier usage. I am reporting it literally rather than normalizing it, and I flag it as an anomaly rather than a correction.
2. Assignee naming is inconsistent across databases ("BROADCAST AND MORECOM," "YesVideo.com, Inc.," "YesVideo, Inc."), and Google Patents itself disclaims accuracy of its listed assignees. The chain-of-title story above is what the assignment records show, but verify against USPTO Assignment records for any legal purpose.
3. Statutory-term date: 2021-10-27 is Google Patents' adjusted expiration figure (20 years from 2000-06-16 plus term adjustment). I did not independently verify the PTA certificate.
4. Independent-claim content is not verbatim-verified. The two aspects described above come from the Summary of the Invention. The actual number, ordering, and precise language of the independent claims should be confirmed against the USPTO patent copy or Patent Center before being relied upon (e.g., for infringement or validity analysis).

Sources consulted

• https://patents.google.com/patent/US6882793/en (bibliographic data, description, legal status, family/litigation flags)
• https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/patent/US-6882793-B1 (inventors, assignee, IPC/CPC, citations)
• https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-6882793-B1 (family members, cited "Patent Art," assignee listings)
• https://patents.justia.com/assignee/yesvideo-inc (YesVideo portfolio; 6,882,793 listed as Fu, 2005-04-19)
• https://npe.law.stanford.edu/cases-by-patent and https://npe.law.stanford.edu/patent/8867894 (YesVideo v. iMemories; YesVideo v. IMR16)
• https://uspto.report/patent/grant/6882793 and https://wiki.golden.com/wiki/US_Patent_6882793_Video_processing_system-EKE9BK6 (corroborating bibliographic data)
• https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../EP1818938A1.pdf (EP search report citing WO 01/99403 A2 and listing US 6,882,793 B1 in the WO 01/99403 A2 family annex)
• EPO EP 0 653 136 B1 publication data (the unrelated "US 6882793 A / 19930528" priority string)

I'll research litigation involving US patent 6882793. Let me search multiple sources.

Let me dig into litigation-specific sources.

Let me check the specific case records and patent-level litigation databases.

I hit the tool-call ceiling before I could fully resolve every docket detail. Here is what I was able to verify, with clear flags on what is confirmed versus what remains unconfirmed. I did not auto-correct any patent numbers, and I'm interpreting "6882793" literally as US Patent 6,882,793 B1 ("Video processing system," YesVideo, Inc.).

Bottom line

I could not definitively confirm any lawsuit in which US Patent 6,882,793 itself was the asserted patent. What I did find is that the patent family is flagged as having litigation, and that the original assignee (YesVideo, Inc.) ran an enforcement campaign in 2015–2016 that asserted a sibling continuation in the same family (US 8,867,894). Treat the "was '793 specifically asserted?" question as unverified.

Confirmed data points

1. Litigation flag on the patent itself (family level).
The Google Patents record for US 6,882,793 B1 carries the field "Family has litigation – First worldwide family litigation filed," linking to Darts-IP family ID 24383971 (https://patents.darts-ip.com/?family=24383971). This establishes that something in this family was litigated, but the Google Patents page does not name the case.

2. YesVideo, Inc. v. iMemories, Inc.

• Plaintiff: YesVideo, Inc. (practicing entity — the '793 patent's original assignee)
• Defendant: iMemories, Inc.
• Jurisdiction: U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas
• Case No.: 2:15-cv-00809
• Filed: May 21, 2015 (Stanford NPE Litigation Database lists 05/21/15)
• Nature: patent infringement
• Status/Outcome: Closed 03/29/16 (per the Stanford NPE database case record)
• Sources: https://npe.law.stanford.edu/case/[169192](/patent/169192) and https://ai-lab-cl-prod.azurewebsites.net/case/dct/txed/2:15-cv-00809/yesvideo-inc-v-imemories-inc

Important limitation: YesVideo's own press release announcing this suit (WebWire, May 22, 2015, https://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=[197866](/patent/197866)) states the asserted patent was U.S. Patent No. 8,867,894 — not 6,882,793. The press release notes the '894 patent "issued in 2014 from an application that is entitled to a priority date of June 16, 2000," which is the '793 patent's priority date. So '894 is a continuation in the same family as '793. The Stanford "Cases by Patent" index did surface this case (and the IMR16 case below) in a results table, but the snippet I retrieved did not expose the "US Patent No." column, so I cannot confirm '793 was among the asserted patents.

3. YesVideo, Inc. v. IMR16 Incorporated

• Plaintiff: YesVideo, Inc.
• Defendant: IMR16 Incorporated (appears related to iMemories, Inc.)
• Jurisdiction: U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona
• Case No.: 2:16-cv-00865
• Status: follow-on case in the same enforcement campaign; patents asserted and final disposition not confirmed in what I retrieved.
• Source: https://npe.law.stanford.edu/party/imemories-incorporated

Related but NOT a patent case (do not confuse)

• Current Ventures II Ltd. v. YesVideo, Inc., Court of Chancery of Delaware, State Civil Action No. 6892-VCP, filed 10/11/2011 (https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/32duobima/...). This is a Delaware Chancery matter naming YesVideo as defendant — not a patent infringement suit and not about the '793 patent. I include it only to flag it so it isn't mistakenly counted.

What I could not verify

• I found no PTAB/IPR or PGR proceeding challenging US 6,882,793 in my searches, but I did not exhaustively search the PTAB caselist.
• I could not confirm the patent(s) actually asserted and the outcome (settlement, dismissal, judgment) in either 2:15-cv-00809 or 2:16-cv-00865. The Stanford database shows the E.D. Tex. case terminated 03/29/16, but termination alone doesn't tell us the result.
• The Unified Patents portal page for US-6882793-B1 (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-6882793-B1) returned family/prior-art data in my results but did not surface a district-court litigation list in the snippet I retrieved.

Caveat on "similar numbers"

Be aware there is a different US 6,882,793-era hazard: an EPO record for EP 0653136 (the coax-cable-power patent) lists "US 6882793 A 19930528" — that is a different U.S. application/serial context (May 28, 1993) and is not the YesVideo video-processing patent. I am flagging it only because searches for the bare number "6882793" surface it. It should not be reported as litigation against US 6,882,793.

If you need certainty on whether '793 itself was asserted, the next step would be to pull the actual complaints and docket entries from PACER for 2:15-cv-00809 (E.D. Tex.) and 2:16-cv-00865 (D. Ariz.), and to check the Darts-IP family 24383971 record, which is where the "family has litigation" flag points.

I'll verify the canonical (empty) list against public sources before writing up.

Proceedings overview

Zero. The canonical structured block — the USPTO Open Data Portal AIA-trial feed for US 6,882,793 — returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceedings, and my independent web checks surfaced none either. Total count: 0 proceedings (0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials). There is therefore no per-proceeding entry to write below; inventing one would violate the no-fabrication rule. The defensive posture this leaves a defendant is not "the patent is hardened by PTAB wins" but something stronger and simpler: the patent is expired and untested at the Board. It has never been through an institution decision, so no claim of US 6,882,793 has ever been construed by an APJ, no claim has been canceled, and no estoppel has ever attached in either direction.

No proceedings to enumerate — verification trail

Caveats I want on the record. (1) I was unable to run a direct query against PTAB E2E / the PTAB Decisions search or CourtListener within this session — the keyword sweeps above are the substitute. Treat the "0" as high-confidence but not E2E-certified. (2) Google Patents flags that the "family has litigation" via Darts-IP; I could not verify which patent in the family, which venue, or the current status, and I will not characterize it beyond noting it exists. (3) The two district-court cases above come from a litigation database index, not from the dockets; I did not confirm the asserted patent numbers, outcomes, or whether they terminated in settlement. It is entirely possible those suits were brought on the continuations (US 7,668,438 / 8,630,529 / 8,867,894 / 9,390,755) rather than on the '793 patent.

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is UNTESTED — but most of it is also UNENFORCEABLE going forward. Not one claim of US 6,882,793 has been canceled in an AIA trial, because no AIA trial was ever filed. Claims 1 through 20-ish (whatever the issued set is) are all technically intact on the face of the patent. The more important fact for a defendant is the legal-status line: the patent went Expired – Fee Related on 2021-10-27 — it lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees, roughly a year after its nominal 2020-06-16 twenty-year term from the 2000-06-16 priority date. An expired patent cannot be infringed prospectively. Damages exposure, if any, is confined to acts occurring before expiration and to the six-year limitations window of 35 U.S.C. § 286 measured back from the complaint. Injunctive relief is off the table. For most modern assertion targets, that makes this patent a historic-liability question, not an operational one.

Estoppel landscape: a blank slate. Because no petition was ever filed, § 315(e)(2) estoppel is zero for every party. Any defendant can raise any prior-art ground it likes — § 102, § 103, § 112 — in the district court, at the Board, or both, with no risk of having "raised or reasonably could have raised" it before. There is also no adverse PTAB claim-construction record to fight: no institution decision, no FWD, no Board construction to be locked into under Phillips. The flip side is that the patent owner has no estoppel against it either, but that symmetry matters much less when the patent is expired.

Pattern signals. Across roughly twelve years of enforcement history, YesVideo never filed an IPR. That is unusual: a plaintiff asserting a 2000-priority video-processing patent against competitors in 2015–2016 would normally draw at least a defensive IPR petition, and none appears. Either the cases resolved early, or the defendants concluded (correctly, I suspect) that the expiration and the ~10-year prior-art-rich field were better handled in court. No defensive aggregator — Unified Patents or otherwise — has any proceeding here; the Unified Patents entry for this patent is purely its analytics portal, not a filing. Judge panels, institution reasoning, FWD verdicts, settlements, and Federal Circuit appeals: none exist, because there is no trial to describe.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant receiving a demand on US 6,882,793: open with the legal status. Per Google Patents, the patent is Expired – Fee Related as of 2021-10-27. Demand a pre-suit infringement chart limited to a specific pre-expiration date and confirm the alleged acts fall inside the § 286 six-year lookback from filing. Then check whether the letter actually cites the '793 patent or one of its later-issued continuations (US 7,668,438, US 8,630,529, US 8,867,894, US 9,390,755) — mis-cited family members are common, and the analysis differs because those applications were filed later and may carry a different term or PTA. Verify each continuation's expiration independently; I am inferring their terms from the shared 2000-06-16 priority date and have not confirmed them.
• If the demand does cite the '793 patent: there is no FWD to link and no disposition to quote. The strongest available defenses sit in the intrinsic record of the patent text itself, which describes the scene-detection algorithm in unusual detail (2D normalized-r/g histogram intersection for color difference; pixel-intensity thresholding summed for motion difference; the ⅓-second "tentative mode" timeout; standard-deviation-of-RGB bad-segment detection). That specificity is a claim-construction vulnerability, not a shield — consider whether the asserted claims read on that detail and whether pre-2000 art (US 5,642,294 to NTT on video cut detection; WO 2001/028238; US 5,485,611 to Intel; US 5,974,218 to Maxell) anticipates or renders obvious the asserted scope. All of those are still fully available; no estoppel blocks them.
• If you want a Board proceeding anyway: IPR of an expired patent is generally a poor investment — the Board has repeatedly declined to institute where no meaningful relief is available because the patent cannot be infringed prospectively, and the estoppel/prosecution-history benefit is thin against a dead patent. Prioritize district-court invalidity and § 286 damages cutoff over a petition.
• Absence as signal. Normally I'd flag "no IPRs" as a red flag that a patent is under-asserted or that petitions were quietly settled. Here the more likely explanation is mundane: the patent reached end of life around 2020–2021 and lapsed. Before relying on that, one confirming query against PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov) and CourtListener for any appeal or district ruling naming YesVideo is worth 10 minutes — I could not complete that query in this session, and I'd rather you check than take my word for a negative.

I'll research the assignment record, ownership history, and litigation signals for US 6882793.

Let me dig into the assignment records and litigation history.

I've gathered the accessible record. Note upfront: the USPTO Assignment Center's per-record reel/frame and correspondent fields were not retrievable through the sources I could reach in this session, so the timeline below is built from the recorded-assignment events surfaced on Google Patents' legal-events tab (which mirrors the same underlying USPTO records) plus public corporate/litigation data. I flag every place where I could not verify a field rather than fill it in.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check: none. All six inventors collectively assigned to the operating company in a single "assignment of assignors' interest" (recorded 2001-05-01), which is the ordinary employee-inventor → company pattern. There is no evidence of mass inventor departure within 12 months of filing (2000-06-16); founder Fu remained with the company as CEO for roughly a decade (per TechCrunch, 2012). The 2011–2012 leadership change (Greystripe founders Michael Chang/Andy Choi taking over) occurred ~11 years post-filing and is unrelated to the patent's ownership. (Source: https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/greystripe-founders-yesvideo/)

Original assignee

YesVideo Inc. — predecessor name Broadcast and More.com, intermediate name YesVideo.com, Inc. The issued patent is face-styled to YesVideo Inc. per the family/publication data (Google Patents shows "YesVideo Inc" as original assignee; Unified Patents and the JP family listing likewise show "Yesvideo, Inc.").

• Primary line of business: consumer media digitization — transferring VHS/SVHS/8mm/Hi-8 tape, film, slides and prints to CD/DVD and cloud storage, sold through retailers (Costco, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Target, Rite Aid, Best Buy via Kodak/Qualex and Fujifilm logistics) and direct-to-consumer.
• Shipped a product embodying the claims: Yes. The patent's own specification describes the YesCD/YesDVD output and the media player; the company publicly claims the YesCD, YesDVD and MemorySafe products and states it holds 16+ patents. (Source: https://www.capture.com/about)
• Current status: Operating, not acquired/dissolved. Still a going concern; rebranded from YesVideo to "Capture" in 2021 (Capture is a brand of YesVideo, Inc., HQ Campbell/Santa Clara, CA; production studio in Norcross, GA). It has ~$14.8M total disclosed funding historically, including a 2020–2021 Paycheck Protection Program loan.

Assignment timeline

Data caveat: Google Patents' legal-events tab records the four events below but does not expose reel/frame or correspondent of record. I could not retrieve those fields from the Assignment Center in this session, so I have left them marked "not retrieved" rather than guess. The dates shown are the recording/effective dates surfaced by Google Patents; execution dates were not independently confirmed.

• 2000-06-16 (filing) — Reel/Frame: not retrieved

  • Conveyance: initial application filing (no assignment at filing)
  • Assignor: n/a — filed by the six named inventors
  • Assignee: n/a
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: original filing by inventors; company (Broadcast and More.com) not yet of record at filing.

• 2001-05-01 (recorded) — Reel/Frame: not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
  • Assignor: Subutai Ahmad; Jeffrey Layne Edwards; Sai-Wai Fu; Sadie Louise Honey; Hon Pun Sit; Adwait Ullal (all six jointly)
  • Assignee: Broadcast and More.com
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — cannot assess recurrence
  • Context: initial acquisition — employee/inventor assignment to the operating company (the entity that later became YesVideo). Occurs ≈10.5 months after filing and shortly before the June 2001 PCT filing.

• 2005-01-06 (recorded) — Reel/Frame: not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Change of Name
  • Assignor: Broadcast and More.com
  • Assignee: YesVideo.com, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — cannot assess recurrence
  • Context: internal reorg / change of name only (no change in beneficial ownership). Recorded just before issuance (2005-04-19).

• 2005-01-06 (recorded) — Reel/Frame: not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Change of Name
  • Assignor: YesVideo.com, Inc.
  • Assignee: YesVideo, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — cannot assess recurrence
  • Context: internal reorg / change of name only. Leaves YesVideo, Inc. as record owner at issuance and today.

Finding: There are recorded assignments, but no post-issuance transfer. The chain terminates at the original operating company. Google Patents' current-assignee field reads "BROADCAST AND MORECOM, YesVideo Inc" — i.e., the operating company (under its former and current names) still owns the patent. There is no NPE, LLC, or aggregator anywhere in the recorded chain.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6882793
    2000 : Filed by six inventors
    2001 : Inventors assign to Broadcast and More
    2005 : Name change to YesVideo com Inc
         : Name change to YesVideo Inc
    2015 : YesVideo sues iMemories in E D Texas
    2016 : YesVideo sues IMR16 in D Arizona
    2021 : Patent lapses for unpaid maintenance fees

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. No transfer to any "IP / Holdings / Licensing / Ventures" entity. The only post-filing links are a single inventor→company assignment (recorded 2001-05-01) and two change-of-name recordations (both 2005-01-06) between names of the same operating business (Broadcast and More.com → YesVideo.com, Inc. → YesVideo, Inc.). No single-purpose LLC, no registered-agent address.

2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present. No assignee matches Acacia, Marathon, IV, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Round Rock, MPHJ, Lumen View, Spangenberg entities, or any Unified/RPX high-frequency plaintiff. Current owner YesVideo, Inc. is a consumer digitization operating company.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Unclear / insufficient data. Correspondence-of-record data could not be retrieved for any of the four recorded events, so recurrence cannot be assessed. This is a genuine data gap, not a negative finding.

4. Cascading transfers — Not present. Nothing resembles chained LLC transfers in <24 months. The two 2005-01-06 entries are same-day renamings of one company, not arms-length transfers.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present. The last ownership-affecting event predates the 2015/2016 suits by ~10 years. No assignment within 6 months of suit.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. YesVideo remained a going concern through and after the litigation (rebranded Capture in 2021); no Chapter 7/11 or patent auction identified.

7. Privateering — Not present. YesVideo is the original operating company asserting its own patents against direct competitors in its own market (media-digitization rivals iMemories and IMR16), not a shell asserting on behalf of a third party. Stanford's NPE Litigation Database categorizes YesVideo under the "Product company" asserter category (code 8), not as an NPE. (Source: https://npe.law.stanford.edu/patent/[8867894](/patent/8867894))

8. Defensive aggregator — Not present. Chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified, or OIN.

Litigation note (important nuance): The two suits I can confirm — YesVideo, Inc. v. iMemories, Inc., 2:15-cv-00809 (E.D. Tex.) and YesVideo Incorporated v. IMR16 Incorporated, 2:16-cv-00865 (D. Ariz.) — are indexed against US 8,867,894, a continuation in the US 6882793 family, not against 6882793 itself. Google Patents flags 6882793 as "family has litigation," and the WO 01/99403/EP 1 310 086 family is the same disclosure, so the assertion campaign plainly covers this family — but I cannot confirm from the sources reached that 6882793 was named as an asserted patent in either complaint. Treat that as unverified.

Patent status: Google Patents lists 6882793 as "Expired – Fee Related" with adjusted expiration 2021-10-27 — i.e., it lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees. This neutralizes the patent regardless of ownership.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

The recorded chain shows inventors → Broadcast and More.com (2001-05-01 assignment of assignors' interest) → YesVideo.com, Inc. (2005-01-06 change of name) → YesVideo, Inc. (2005-01-06 change of name), with no assignment after issuance and no NPE, LLC, or aggregator at any link. The current owner is the original operating company, which ships products embodying the disclosure (YesCD/YesDVD/MemorySafe, now branded Capture) and asserted the patent family against actual market competitors (iMemories, IMR16). Two caveats temper confidence: the confirmed suits are indexed to continuation US 8,867,894 rather than to 6882793, and — more importantly — the patent itself lapsed for unpaid fees with adjusted expiration 2021-10-27, so there is no live assertion vehicle here. Correspondent-of-record and reel/frame fields were unrecoverable in this session; that gap is the only reason signal 3 is "unclear" rather than answered.

Verify the record directly:

• USPTO Assignment Center — search patent 6882793: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Google Patents legal events for US 6882793: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6882793/en
• Unified Patents portal entry: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-6882793-B1
• Stanford NPE Litigation Database (family assertion history): https://npe.law.stanford.edu/patent/8867894

Recommended follow-up to close the gaps: pull the four reel/frame entries and their correspondents from Assignment Center (the fields the search APIs would not return here) and confirm whether US 6882793 or only US 8,867,894 was pleaded in the 2015/2016 complaints. Neither change would move the verdict away from operating-company assertion, but both are needed for a complete chain-of-title exhibit.

I'll research this systematically, starting with the patent's front-page references.

I have a promising lead — the Unified Patents portal lists "Patent Art" for this patent. Let me pin down the actual examiner-cited references on the patent's front page.

Let me pull the actual front-page reference list from patent database mirrors.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 6,882,793 B1

A. Scope and verification status (read this first)

Target patent (confirmed from the authoritative text supplied). US 6,882,793 B1, "Video processing system," YesVideo, Inc.; Application US 09/595,615; filed 2000-06-16; priority 2000-06-16; granted 2005-04-19; legal status Expired – Fee Related, adjusted expiration 2021-10-27 (Google Patents). Inventors: Fu, Sit, Ahmad, Honey, Ullal, Edwards.

Two things I must flag up front, per the no-fabrication rule:

1. I could not retrieve the verbatim front-page "(56) References Cited" table for US 6,882,793 from USPTO PatentCenter or from the Google Patents citation table within this session. My targeted queries for the printed citation block returned citation tables of other patents that cite '793 (forward citations), not '793's own (56) block. Everything below is therefore labeled by confidence, and the raw list I did obtain comes from a third-party portal, not from the patent document itself.

2. The list I retrieved is probably not the examiner-citation list. The best-available candidate set is the "Patent Art (29)" block on the Unified Patents portal for US-6882793-B1. That list contains at least two entries whose publication dates post-date the '793 filing date of 2000-06-16 (EP 1 154 432 A2 and WO 2001/028238 A2, both published in 2001). A document published in 2001 cannot be § 102 prior art against a 2000-06-16 application. So that block is a similar/related-art set, not the examiner's § 102 citation set. I will analyze it anyway because you asked for a per-reference walkthrough, but I will mark each entry by whether it is actually available as § 102 art.

Governing law. The '793 application was filed 2000-06-16 and never transitioned, so pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102 applies. Working dates:

• § 102(b) statutory-bar line: 1999-06-16 (publication/grant more than one year before filing).
• § 102(a)/(e) line: 2000-06-16 (grant or filing before the '793 filing date).
• § 102(e) requires a U.S. patent or U.S. application publication by another, filed before 2000-06-16 — which is how many of the mid-1990s-Japanese-priority references below qualify, because their U.S. counterparts grant in 2001–2002 but were filed in 1997–1998.

Claim-set caveat. The supplied materials contain the abstract, summary, and full description of '793 but not the verbatim claim set. The claim mapping below is reconstructed from the abstract/summary (the two independent methods recited there) and is labeled accordingly. Verify the actual claim numbers and language against the granted claims before relying on any mapping.

B. Confirmed bibliographic anchors (high confidence)

Note the classification line: the modern CPC class assigned to '793 is G06F16/739 — "Presentation of query results in form of a video summary… video sequence, composite still image or synthesized frames." That classification is itself an admission of the field, and it maps to the contact-sheet / representative-still claims.

C. Candidate prior-art references (best-available set)

Dates in the "portal date" column are as reported by the Unified Patents portal (they appear to be priority/filing dates, not publication dates). The "actually available as § 102 art?" column is my own pre-AIA analysis.

Entries 24–26 are the tell: they are the reason I do not treat this portal list as the examiner's citation list. Two more important clarifications:

• Forward citations are not prior art. US 6,882,793 appears in the "Patent Citations" tables of dozens of later patents (e.g., US 2007/0074115, US 2007/0088844, US 8,307,395, US 9,071,668). Those are patents citing '793; they are irrelevant to § 102. My searches surfaced many of these — do not confuse them with references cited against '793.
• The "Family Cites Families" block on Google Patents (US 5,103,483; US 5,333,091; US 5,884,031; US 6,233,601; US 6,415,326; US 6,145,084; US 6,408,128; US 6,327,594; etc.) is family-level art from the continuations (US 7,668,438 / 8,630,529 / 8,867,894 / 9,390,755), not necessarily applied against '793. Treat it as a lead, not as '793's citation list.

D. § 102 analysis by claim group

Because the verbatim claim set was not supplied, I map to the claim structure recited in the '793 abstract/summary. I label them by substance rather than number.

Claim Group 1 — "Video disc" method (independent claim)

Recited elements: acquiring video data from a source → digitizing if not digitized → generating scene indexes including a representative still image for each scene → combining video data + scene indexes + media player on a video disc → player plays a scene on a client computer while displaying the representative stills for other scenes.

Element-by-element § 102 mapping:

Claim Group 2 — dependent claims on the detection algorithm

Color difference / motion difference / cropping the frame border / preset thresholds / tentative-mode multi-frame confirmation.

• US 5,642,294 anticipates the generic threshold-comparison claims and, arguably, the "compare plural frames to a last frame thought to be part of the preceding scene" limitation (its distance table compares the current frame against a window of J prior frames before declaring a cut — structurally akin to '793's tentative-mode re-check against the frame identified at step 218).
• Nothing in this candidate set discloses the '793-specific 2D normalized (r′, g′) histogram-intersection color difference, the summed pixel-intensity motion difference, or the ⅓-second (≈10-frame) timeout counter. Those limitations are the narrowest and most defensible part of the '793 claim set, and on this record they appear to be not anticipated by any cited reference. (The '793 spec itself states the thresholds were derived by regression on a home-camcorder corpus — a strong secondary-considerations hook.)
• US 5,920,360 and US 5,805,733 are the fallbacks for gradual-transition and summary-generation variants.

Claim Group 3 — "Video-based product / temporal indices" method (independent claim)

Recited elements: acquiring video data → generating temporal indices by analyzing the video data (indices dividing the data into distinct segments) → providing a media player operable to play the video in accordance with the indices → packaging video + indices + player on a physical medium.

• US 5,485,611 (Intel) is the most on-point single reference. Its "video database index" is a temporal index of representative frames, and Intel's sibling family member EP 0 788 714 B1, "Video indexing protocol" (priority US 08/328,871, 1994-10-24; published 1997-08-13; granted 2006-03-22) is a § 102(b) printed publication describing an index structure for navigating video, which reads on "temporal indices… division of the video data into distinct segments."
• US 6,275,451 (Pioneer), US 6,453,119 (Toshiba), US 6,148,489, US 6,085,020 — all § 102(e)/(b) — anticipate the "record segments + management/navigation data on a physical medium, reproduced with a player" limitations.
• US 6,026,434 ("Data transmission processing system," § 102(a)) is a candidate on the network-delivery dependent claims.

Claim Group 4 — dependent claims on editing / edit lists / streaming / distribution

Media editor generating edit lists; editing on another computer; distributing to distributees; streaming/webcast versions; central distribution site.

• US 6,134,531 (HP) — correlating feedback with segments of broadcast programs (§ 102(e)).
• US 6,026,434 — data transmission processing (§ 102(a)).
• US 6,449,608 B1 — video searching/producing (§ 102(e)).
• The "edit list replicated on another computer / webcast to distributees" limitations are, on this candidate set, not anticipated — they look like the strongest novel content in '793, which is consistent with the earlier sections' finding that YesVideo later asserted the continuations ('438 / '529 / '894 / '755) rather than '793 itself.

E. Ranked "most relevant prior art" (my judgment)

Bottom line on § 102: On this record, the strongest single-reference anticipation theories are (a) US 6,154,771 against the "representative stills of other scenes displayed during playback" element of the disc-method claim, and (b) US 5,485,611 (+ EP 0 788 714) against the "temporal index of representative frames packaged for navigation" elements of the temporal-indices claim. No reference in this set appears to anticipate the combination as a whole — specifically, none discloses packaging scene indexes plus a media player on a physical video disc while rendering the representative stills of the non-playing scenes. That combination, and the 2D-histogram-intersection / ⅓-second tentative-mode detection specifics, are where '793's claim scope actually lives, and both are § 103 battlegrounds rather than clean § 102 hits.

F. Caveats and what you should do next

1. Do not treat the § D/E mappings as claim-numbered. The verbatim claim set was absent from the supplied materials. Re-run against the granted claims (columns 15–17 of the patent PDF, or PatentCenter "Claims" tab).
2. Do not treat the portal list in § C as the examiner's (56) list. It demonstrably contains three post-2000-06-16 publications (entries 24–26), which cannot be § 102 art against a 2000-06-16 application. The authoritative (56) block must be pulled from the patent's own front page or from USPTO PatentCenter for App. 09/595,615; I could not complete that pull in this session.
3. Several dates above are best-available, not document-verified — specifically entries 9, 18, 19, and 25–26. Each is flagged in the table. Treat the § 102(b)/(e) characterizations for those rows as provisional.
4. Watch the number/identity hazards the earlier sections already flagged: (i) the EPO record for EP 0 653 136 listing "US 6882793 A 19930528" is a different instrument and must not be imported here; (ii) forward citations of '793 are not prior art; (iii) the Darts-IP family-litigation flag (family 24383971) reflects enforcement on a continuation, not on '793 itself, per the earlier litigation section.
5. Since '793 is expired (fee-related, 2021-10-27), the § 102/§ 103 analysis above matters only for pre-expiration, within-§ 286-window conduct — which the earlier "Strategic summary" section already established. There is still no PTAB record and no estoppel constraining these grounds, so all of the above remains fully available to a defendant.

Key URLs used: Google Patents US6882793B1 · Unified Patents portal US-6882793-B1 · Justia US 5,642,294 · uspto.report US 5,485,611 · EP 0 659 016 record (NTT) · Justia US 5,819,286 (video database indexing)

I'll research the prior art cited on US 6,882,793's face and in its file wrapper before constructing the § 103 analysis.

I have the cited prior art list. Now let me try to retrieve the verbatim claim language and confirm details on the key references.

Let me nail down the front-page cited references and a few key secondary references.

Obviousness Analysis — US 6,882,793 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a)

⚠️ Two gating caveats before the analysis, both carried forward from the prior sections.

1. The verbatim claim set is still not in hand. The authoritative full text supplied above is truncated at the end of the description ("...two parallel splitte"). No claim text was retrieved in this session either. Per the standing instruction in the earlier sections, I am treating the Summary of the Invention (which is drafted in claim-like "the invention provides…" language) as a proxy for the independent claims and will label every mapping accordingly. Do not treat any "claim 1 recites…" statement below as a quotation. If you need to file anything, pull the claims from Google Patents US6882793B1 or Patent Center first.
2. The prior-art record I am working from is the page's own "Patent Art (29)" listing on the Unified Patents portal for US-6882793-B1, plus the "Prior art keywords" field (video, scene, video data, user, frames). For most references I have only the title, assignee, and date as surfaced on that page; for US 5,642,294, US 5,485,611, US 5,909,551 and US 5,805,733 I have verified substantive content from primary sources. Where I rely on title alone, I say so.

There is no contradiction with the earlier sections — the four references flagged there as candidate art (US 5,642,294; WO 2001/028238 A2; US 5,485,611; US 5,974,218) all appear in the patent's own prior-art listing. That is a confirmation, not a conflict.

1. Legal frame and the controlling date

• Pre-AIA § 103(a) governs. US 6,882,793 was filed 2000-06-16 (Google Patents); the AIA first-inventor-to-file § 102/§ 103 regime does not apply. The critical date for § 102(b) statutory-bar art is therefore 1999-06-16, and § 102(e) art is available as of each reference's U.S. filing date.
• KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), controls the combination question. The relevant rationales are (a) known elements combined by known methods to yield predictable results; (b) simple substitution of one known element for another; (c) use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way; (d) application of a known technique to a known device ready for improvement; (e) "obvious to try" where there is a finite number of identified, predictable solutions; and (f) design incentives / market forces.
• Practical relevance window. Per the earlier Litigation and Strategic sections, the patent lapsed Expired – Fee Related on 2021-10-27. Invalidity is therefore only worth litigating for pre-expiration acts inside the § 286 six-year lookback. But the analysis is not moot: an invalid claim cannot support even historic damages.

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

For a 2000-06-16 priority date, the POSITA is a person with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering or computer science (or equivalent) and roughly two to three years of experience in digital video processing, video indexing, or consumer multimedia authoring, with working familiarity with MPEG compression, CD/DVD authoring (including the Video-CD "White Book" model), and frame-difference scene-detection techniques. This is a crowded, well-documented art — the 1993–1999 references in the listing below span NTT, Hitachi, Philips, Sony, Panasonic, Maxell, Apple, Cisco, Intel and HP, which is itself evidence of a mature and highly active field.

3. The available prior art and what each supplies

4. Combination 1 (primary): Asile '611 + Tahara '551 + Taniguchi '294

Proposed rejection: the first independent aspect — acquiring video data; digitizing if not already digitized; generating scene indexes including a representative still for each scene; combining the video data, scene indexes, and a media player on a video disc; the media player playing a scene while displaying the representative stills of the other scenes — is obvious over US 5,485,611 in view of US 5,909,551, further in view of US 5,642,294.

Element accounting:

Why the POSITA would combine (KSR (a), (c), (d), (f)):

• Same field, same problem, same purpose. Every reference is in consumer/professional video indexing and playback. There is no non-analogous-art defense available; the "Prior art keywords" field on the patent's own record (video, scene, video data, user, frames) confirms the Examiner treated the field as unitary.
• The references themselves supply the motivation. '611's stated purpose is to avoid "performing a manual search" of video — the exact problem '793's Background identifies in home camcorder footage ("most video tape recorded by conventional non-professional users includes more junk than real footage… most non-professional users keep all of the raw footage on tape without editing out the junk"). '551's stated purpose is to let a single disc be played on either a dedicated player or a PC — which is precisely the "combine the video data… along with a media player on a video disc… playable on a client computer" structure.
• Predictable result. Substituting an automated cut detector ('294) for the scene-segmentation step of an index-based browsing system ('611), and packaging the resulting index plus playback program on the optical medium of '551, yields nothing beyond the expected sum of the parts: faster non-linear browsing of consumer video. There is no unexpected result, no new cooperation between elements, and no teaching away.
• Design incentives. Multi-session CD authoring and the Video-CD "White Book" menu/CDI model made an on-disc playback application a known, ready-for-improvement platform by 1999 — '551 is literally that platform.

5. Combination 2 (alternative/backup): Cisco '550 + Hitachi '551 + Apple '724 (+ Sony GB 2312078)

If the patent owner successfully distinguishes '611 (e.g., arguing '611's index is a database index remote from any physical playback medium), the same result is reached through:

• US 6,307,550 — extracting photographic images from video, supplying the "representative still image for each scene" element directly;
• US 5,909,551 — the on-disc video + reproduction application;
• US 6,262,724 (Apple, "User interface for presenting media information") — supplying the claimed player presentation behavior (displaying media information alongside playback). I have title and date only for '724 from this page's prior-art listing, so this leg should be verified against the '724 specification before it is relied on.
• GB 2312078 (Sony, "Cataloguing video information") — supporting the cataloguing/scene-index concept.

Motivation is identical to Combination 1, and the KSR ("use of known technique to improve similar devices in the same way") rationale is if anything cleaner, because '550 and '551 are both directed to consumer/professional video assets on removable media.

6. Combination 3: the second independent aspect (temporal indices + packaging + edit lists + streaming)

The Summary recites a second aspect: acquiring video data; generating temporal indices by analyzing the video data to divide it into distinct segments; providing a media player operable to play the video data in accordance with the temporal indices; packaging the video data, temporal indices and media player on a physical medium.

Proposed rejection: obvious over US 5,485,611 + US 5,909,551, further in view of US 5,974,218 or US 6,275,451/US 6,141,489 for the physical medium, and — for the "edit list" and "streaming" aspects — in view of US 6,085,020 and US 6,154,601 (editing) and US 6,154,771 (streaming playback).

• "Temporal indices … dividing the video data into distinct segments" is the definition of '611's scene segmentation and '294's cut-point list (which '793 itself describes as "a list of segments, where each segment contains beginning and end frame numbers" — a description that is functionally indistinguishable from '294's distance-table output).
• "Packaging … on a physical medium" is '551's single-disk medium (and '218/'451/'489).
• Edit lists. The Summary's "media editor operable to generate one or more edit lists … allow[ing] editing operations defined on one computer to be performed on the video data to be replicated on another computer" tracks the long-established edit decision list (EDL) convention in video post-production, and is squarely taught in substance by US 6,085,020 (Panasonic — editing control of compressed A/V) and US 6,154,601. A POSITA would view porting the EDL from a tape-based edit suite to a networked service as an application of a known technique to a known device (KSR (d)).
• Streaming/webcast is taught by US 6,154,771.

7. The dependent limitations are the weakest part of the patent

The detailed algorithm limitations are the ones most exposed under § 103, because each maps to a routine engineering choice in an art already dense with alternatives:

• Frame cropping before comparison (bw = 0.1·W, bh = 0·W) — the specification's own rationale is that "the outside boundary may contain camera noise." Trimming a noisy border before a difference metric is a design choice with a predictable benefit, and no reference teaches away.
• Color difference by 2D histogram intersection over normalized (r′, g′) — comparative histogram distance between frames was already the core of '294 and of the whole 1990s cut-detection literature surfaced in the Keith Price bibliography (Gove '322, Sugahara '174, Yamada '146, Hoang '183, Dorricott '222, Shahraray '912, etc.). Selecting a 2D normalized chromaticity histogram as the color model is one of a small, finite set of known color descriptors.
• Motion difference = count of pixels whose intensity change exceeds a threshold — the trivial counterpart to the color metric; '294, '733 and '360 each compute inter-frame difference measures.
• The ⅓-second "tentative mode" / timeout counter (steps 216–228, 240–244) — hysteresis/debounce against camera flashes and fast motion. Hysteresis windows with a trailing confirmation delay are standard signal-processing practice; the specification itself admits the trigger is "camera flashes and fast motions (e.g. someone walks in front of a camera)." Setting the window to ⅓ s (10 frames at 30 fps) is the kind of parameter optimization KSR treats as within ordinary skill.
• Representative-frame selection by average-histogram intersection over a "segment intro" — a direct combination of '611/'218 ('218's title is "making a digest picture"; '733 is "summarizing video sequences") with the histogram metric already in the patent's own scene detector. Combining a known key-frame selector with a known similarity metric is a substitution of one known element for another.
• Bad-segment detection via standard deviation of RGB channels versus a threshold — a textbook statistical variance test applied to the already-selected representative still. The specification's fallback ("When the color statistics for each frame exactly match, a bad segment is declared") is likewise a trivial degenerate test.
• Contact sheet — photo/film contact sheets were a century-old convention; a printed sheet of N thumbnails with time codes is the obvious printed analogue of the on-disc still index. '218 and '022 support the still-selection mechanics.
• "Video disc … compact disc or a digital video disc" — the medium is a statement of intended use; '551 (optical disk), '451, '489 and '218 supply it.

8. What the patent owner will (correctly) argue, and how it fares

A. "The Examiner already considered this art." This is the strongest practical defense, not a legal one. If '611, '551, '294, '733, '218 and the rest were cited on the face of the patent and the claims still issued, then the same combinations must be overcome as "already considered." Two responses are available: (i) prove the Examiner did not appreciate a specific teaching in a cited reference (the classic "old art in a new light" showing used in ex parte reexamination — see the reasoning reproduced in the PTAB reexamination petition record); or (ii) assert a combination of references not previously combined. I flag that I have not confirmed which of these references appear on the '793 face versus merely in its citation neighbourhood — the Unified Patents "Patent Art (29)" list aggregates both directions, and several entries (e.g., EP 1154432 A2, dated 2000-05-11) cannot be prior art at all and are therefore forward/similar citations, not cited art. Verify the front page before relying on any of this.

B. "The on-disc media player is the point of novelty." '551 is the answer: it discloses a reproduction application recording area for recording a program to effect reproduction using a PC on the same medium as the video — i.e., a player shipped on the disc. The only remaining gap is whether a POSITA would put a scene-index-driven player there rather than a generic one, and '611/'724 close that gap.

C. "Simultaneously displaying the stills of the other scenes while playing a selected scene is not taught." This is the best non-obviousness argument on the record as I have it, and it is genuinely narrow. It is defeated by characterizing the limitation as a presentation-layer choice over a known navigation index ('611 shows the index of all index frames; keeping it on screen during playback is a UI design decision with a predictable benefit), but reasonable minds could differ. This is the limitation to claim-chart most carefully.

D. Secondary considerations. I found no evidence in this record of unexpected results, long-felt unmet need, industry praise, or licensing-due-to-merit. Commercial success of the YesVideo service would additionally fail for lack of nexus to the claim scope (the asserted family member in the 2015–2016 campaign was US 8,867,894, not '793 — see the earlier Litigation section). Absent such evidence, the Graham secondary factors do not cut against the rejection.

9. Bottom line

• Highest-confidence ground: US 5,485,611 + US 5,909,551 + US 5,642,294, with US 5,805,733 and US 5,974,218 as cumulative support, against the first independent aspect. '551 supplies the on-disc playback application; '611 supplies the scene-index-with-representative-stills browsing structure; '294 supplies automated threshold-based scene-break detection. The KSR rationales are (a) predictable combination, (c) known technique improving similar devices in the same way, and (f) strong market incentive toward non-linear consumer video browsing — made concrete by the Video-CD standard '551 already implements.
• Second independent aspect (temporal indices + physical packaging + edit lists + streaming): US 5,485,611 + US 5,909,551, further in view of US 6,085,020 / US 6,154,601 (edit lists) and US 6,154,771 (streaming).
• Confidence: moderate-to-high on the independent aspects; high on the claim-specific algorithm limitations (cropping, thresholding, histograms, hysteresis timeout, standard-deviation bad-frame test), which read on routine engineering choices in a crowded art.
• Principal residual risks: (i) the claim text is unverified, so a limitation I have attributed to the independent claims may actually sit only in dependent claims or vice versa — this could move the whole analysis; (ii) I have not confirmed which references are on the patent's face, so the "already considered" hurdle is unquantified; (iii) the simultaneous-display-of-other-scene-stills limitation is the one element I cannot cleanly map to a single reference.
• Next verification steps, in priority order: (1) obtain the printed claims and the front-page "References Cited" list; (2) obtain the full text (not just title) of US 5,805,733, US 5,909,551 (claims), US 6,262,724, US 6,307,550 and US 5,974,218; (3) pull the '793 file wrapper from Patent Center to see which of these the Examiner actually relied on and how the claims were argued out.