US 6923467

I'll run targeted searches for this exact patent number.

US Patent 6,923,467 B2 — Analyst Summary

Note on identifiers: All numbers below are reproduced literally as they appear in the record; none have been normalized or "corrected." Where sources disagree, I say so.

1. Bibliographic data

Sources: Google Patents US6923467B2; patentimages PDF of the printed patent; Justia; PubChem patent page; Patents-Review listing.

One flag for the requester: the maintenance-fee lapse (2009) and the "anticipated expiration 2021-10-18" entry are inconsistent descriptions of the same patent's end-of-life. Literally, the patent went abandoned-for-fee-nonpayment in 2009; the 2021 date appears to be a calculated statutory term that never ran.

2. Abstract (verbatim)

"A stroller, which incorporates with a car seat fastening arrangement, includes a stroller frame for substantially supporting a car seat thereon. The car seat fastening arrangement includes a holding belt extended from the stroller frame and a connecting unit securely locked up the two ends of the holding belt to form a holding loop, having a predetermined length, for encirclingly holding the car seat on the stroller frame through the fastening slot. Therefore, the car seat is securely supported on the stroller frame and firmly fastened by the two ends of the holding belt connecting with each other through the fastening slot of the car seat."

3. Plain-language overview of the claims

There is exactly one independent claim (claim 1). Claims 2–6 all depend from it (2 and 3 from claim 1; 4 from 2; 5 from 3; 6 from 4).

Claim 1 (independent) — the whole invention

A stroller designed to securely carry a car seat (the type having a slot through which a vehicle seat belt normally passes). It has three required parts:

1. A stroller frame — a supporting frame with two front legs, a boundary frame extending forward from the supporting frame, and a handle frame extending upward.
2. A regular seat — a seat support held horizontally by the supporting frame with a back support rising from a rear portion of the seat support. A receiving cavity big enough to hold the car seat sits between the boundary frame and the regular seat.
3. A car seat fastening arrangement — the point of novelty: a connecting unit on the rear side of the back support that includes at least one "unit connector," plus a holding belt whose first end is connected to that connecting unit and whose second end carries a belt connector that detachably fastens to the unit connector. When fastened, the belt forms a holding loop large enough to encircle the car seat through the car seat's own fastening slot, retaining the car seat on the stroller in a rearward-facing position (baby facing the person pushing).

Practical reading: the stroller reuses the car seat's existing vehicle-belt slot as the anchor point and threads a stroller-mounted strap through it, buckling at the back of the stroller seat. Claim 1's distinguishing limitations versus the parent patent are the explicit "rear side of said back support" location of the connecting unit and the explicit rear-facing orientation of the retained car seat.

Dependent claims on the buckle type

• Claim 2 — the unit/belt connectors are a buckle plug on the belt's second end and a buckle socket at the unit connector (i.e., the fastening arrangement is a buckle pair).
• Claim 4 — combines claim 2 with the adjustability means of claim 3.

Dependent claims on adjustability

• Claim 3 — adds means for selectively adjusting the size of the holding loop so the car seat is held tightly.
• Claim 5 — specifies that adjustment means as at least one adjusting member coupled on the holding belt that locks the belt connector at a position along the belt, so loop size changes as the length between the belt connector and the belt's first end changes.
• Claim 6 — same adjusting-member structure as claim 5, but tied to the two-connector (claim 2/4) version, with loop size adjusted by controlling the length between the two belt connectors.

Drafting note: claims 3–6 are in means-plus-function form ("means for selectively adjusting"), which under 35 U.S.C. § 112(f) would be construed to cover the corresponding structure in the specification (the slotted adjusting member 22) and equivalents. Also of note, the granted text contains visible typographical errors — claim 4 recites "means far selectively adjusting" and claims 5/6 recite "when said length of between said belt connector and said first end…". A reissue or certificate of correction does not appear in the record I retrieved.

4. Family and the sibling patent

• Parent: US 6,702,316 B2, "Stroller with car seat fastening arrangement," filed 2001-10-18, issued 2004-03-09 (also Hsia). Its pre-grant publication is US 2003/0075903 A1.
• The divisional (this patent) was filed 2003-08-18 while the parent was pending; both were issued and both were abandoned for non-payment of maintenance fees (both shown as "Expired – Fee Related").
• Claim-text difference from the pre-grant publication: the published application's claim 1 (US 2004/0032103 A1) recites a "securing arrangement for a seat belt" and lacks the "rear side of said back support"/"facing rearward" language. The granted claim 1 adds the rear-side and rearward-facing limitations. Anyone treating the publication and the grant as interchangeable claims text would be mistaken.
• References cited on the face of the patent include US 4,921,261; US 4,989,888; US 5,676,386; US 5,794,951; US 5,947,555; US 6,189,914; US 6,209,892; US 6,241,274; US 6,286,844; US 6,302,412; US 6,331,032; US 6,398,233; US 6,409,205; US 6,641,164; US 6,702,316; US 2001/0040357 A1; US 2002/0093177 A1; US 2003/0075903 A1; and DE 422812 C.

5. USPTO / CAFC and litigation check — what I did and did not find

I searched specifically for this patent number in connection with USPTO records and with Federal Circuit / 2026 docket activity.

• CAFC 2026 dockets: no results returned. My searches for "6923467" patent CAFC 2026 docket and "6923467" Federal Circuit appeal returned empty result sets. I found no authoritative evidence of any Federal Circuit appeal, IPR/PGR, reexamination, or 2026 docket involving US 6,923,467. I cannot affirmatively certify that none exists — absence from my search results is not proof of absence. However, given that the patent lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees with an effective date in 2009, appellate activity in 2026 would be highly improbable.
• Litigation / infringement suits: none found. I found no district-court or ITC case naming this patent in the sources retrieved. Do not rely on that as a clearance conclusion — a Westlaw/Lexis/Docket Navigator or PACER/PTAB-API query would be needed for a definitive litigation check, and I did not run one.
• Assignment history: Google Patents shows no recorded assignment to a corporate entity; the patent is listed as original and current assignee "Individual." USPTO PatentCenter and the USPTO Assignment database links are present in the record but I was unable to retrieve their contents, so assignment data should be verified directly.

6. Notable third-party use of this patent as prior art

Independently of the patent's own prosecution, US 6923467 B2 was used as prior-art document "D1" in a UK Intellectual Property Office opinion (Opinion 23/17, issued 22 February 2018) under s.74A of the Patents Act 1977. The requester (Barker Brettell LLP) argued that claim 1 of EP 1 826 094 B1 (proprietor: Maxi Miliaan B.V., a stroller connectable to first and second child seats) lacked novelty and inventive step over US 6923467. The hearing officer disagreed, holding claim 1 novel over US 6923467 and inventive over it, on the reasoning that "the movement of the adapters of D1 from the first to the second position has no consequence on, and is independent of the connection of the second seat to the connecting pieces." This is a rare instance of an affirmative, reasoned third-party construction of US 6923467's disclosure. Source: UK IPO Opinion 23/17 (PDF).

7. Uncertainty disclosure

• I have high confidence in the bibliographic data, abstract, claim set, and legal-event history, because the full patent text was supplied authoritatively in the request and is corroborated by the Google Patents, Justia, PubChem, and patentimages PDF results.
• I have low confidence / no evidence regarding: (a) any 2026 CAFC docket activity; (b) any litigation history; (c) any current ownership or assignment record, including whether the "Individual" designation was ever updated after 2005.
• The two end-of-term dates (2009 lapse vs. 2021 "anticipated expiration") conflict on their face; I have reported both literally rather than reconciling them.
• The patent's face does not name an assignee. If an "assignee" is required for a form or database field, the correct literal entry is the inventor, Ben M. Hsia, as an individual.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 6923467 specifically.

Let me dig deeper with targeted searches.

Let me search the litigation-specific databases directly.

Litigation Search — US Patent 6,923,467

Bottom line: I found no evidence of any litigation involving US Patent 6,923,467.

What I searched

• General web searches keyed on the literal number 6923467 and the exact string "6923467" combined with litigation/case/complaint/defendant terms.
• Searches aimed at litigation aggregators (Unified Patents litigation portal, PACER/CAFC-oriented queries) and at the patent's own family.
• The patent's bibliographic record, family, citation and "cited by" data (Google Patents, Justia, FreePatentsOnline, PubChem, Patents‑Review).

What the results actually showed

Every hit was a prosecution/technical record, not a litigation record:

No Unified Patents litigation entry, no PACER docket, and no CAFC appeal naming US 6,923,467 surfaced.

Why this outcome is plausible

The Google Patents legal‑status record for this patent shows:

• 2009‑02‑09 – Maintenance fee reminder mailed
• 2009‑08‑02 – Lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees
• 2009‑08‑31 / 2009‑09‑22 – Patent expired due to nonpayment of maintenance fees (37 CFR 1.362), effective 2009‑08‑02

A patent that lapsed in 2009, with only a short ~4‑year enforceable window (granted 2005‑08‑02), an individual (non‑corporate) assignee, and an unrelated divisional parent (US 6,702,316), is an unlikely candidate for reported infringement litigation — consistent with the absence of any dockets.

Important caveats

• I could not directly reach the Unified Patents litigation caselist page or PACER dockets within this session; my "no litigation" conclusion rests on the indexed web results and the patent's own legal‑status record, not on an exhaustive PACER/CAFC docket sweep.
• Absence of indexed results is not proof of absence of litigation. Small, settled, or voluntarily dismissed suits — particularly in the 2005–2009 window before this patent lapsed — may never appear in public aggregators. To be conclusive, a PACER docket search across all districts (and a CAFC docket check) would be required.
• Per the strict numbering rule, I treated 6923467 literally and did not substitute any similar number. Note that search results did surface an unrelated French application FR6923467A (a 1969 helicopter rotor-control filing) and unrelated US numbers such as 6,442,467 and 7,032,922 — none of these are US 6,923,467 and I excluded them.

Conclusion: Based on the available information, no litigation involving US Patent 6,923,467 is known. If you need a definitive answer, the next step would be a fee‑based PACER/CAFC docket search (and a Unified Patents / Docket Navigator litigation query) restricted to that exact patent number.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings: 0. Breakdown: 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block supplied with this prompt shows no AIA trial proceedings on file for US 6,923,467, and my independent web searches (Google Patents family/"Cited By" tables, PTAB-oriented blogs, and PTAB E2E–derived document hits) surfaced no IPR/PGR/CBM docket number naming this patent. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is unusual: there is no PTAB record to work from at all — but that is because the patent is not a live threat. US 6,923,467 lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees with an effective date of 2009-08-02 (USPTO legal events: REMI 2009-02-09, LAPS 2009-08-02, STCH 2009-08-31 "PATENT EXPIRED DUE TO NONPAYMENT OF MAINTENANCE FEES UNDER 37 CFR 1.362", FP 2009-09-22). Inter partes review did not exist until 2012-09-16, roughly three years after this patent died. No proceeding was ever filed, and all six claims remain legally untested — none canceled, none sustained.

Proceedings

None on file. There is no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, institution decision, final written decision, settlement, or Federal Circuit appeal to report for US 6,923,467. I am not going to manufacture one, and the rules of this task forbid it. Specifically:

• No IPR (IPR20xx-xxxxx) naming 6,923,467.
• No PGR (PGR20xx-xxxxx) — note a PGR would have been unavailable anyway; the patent's 2001-10-18 priority predates the AIA's post-grant review regime.
• No CBM (CBM20xx-xxxxx) — likewise unavailable here; the claims are directed to a mechanical stroller/car-seat structure, i.e. a "technological invention" outside CBM-eligibility under § 18(d)(1).
• No ex parte reexamination certificate appears in the legal-events record either (REMI, LAPS, STCH, FP are the only post-grant events listed between 2005-08-02 and today).
• No CAFC appeal. Nothing to appeal — with no PTAB FWD and no District Court judgment of record in the sources I searched, there is no appellate docket to cite.

Caveat on completeness, stated honestly: the ODP ingest is my canonical source and it reports zero; my web verification was a keyword-level sweep, not a Docket Navigator or LexisMachine pull. I did not unearth any public record of litigation asserting this patent, but I also did not run a full district-court docket search, so I cannot affirmatively certify that no demand letter or complaint has ever issued. What I can certify is that no AIA trial proceeding exists on any source I can reach.

Patent status snapshot (the fact that actually decides the case)

This is a two-patent family. US 6,702,316 (the parent) is the sibling to check when evaluating a demand letter; the two share the 2001-10-18 priority date and the same "Stroller with car seat fastening arrangement" title. Confirming which of the two is being asserted should be step one of any defense.

Strategic summary

Canceled vs. sustained vs. untested. There is no PTAB-narrowing history at all. All of claims 1–6 are UNTESTED. Nothing is canceled, so nothing is "dead" in the way an IPR petitioner would normally deliver; and nothing is sustained, so the patent owner cannot point to a PTAB win for "hardening" either. Claim 1 recites, in substance: a stroller frame with two front frame legs plus a frontwardly extended boundary frame and a handle frame; a regular seat with a seat support and back support defining a receiving cavity sized to receive the car seat; and a car seat fastening arrangement comprising a connecting unit at the rear side of the back support with "at least a unit connector," plus a holding belt whose first end is connected to the connecting unit and whose second end carries a belt connector detachably fastened to the unit connector to form a loop "encirclingly holding said car seat ... through said fastening slot," retaining the car seat with the child "facing rearward." Claims 2 and 4 add buckle plug/socket detail; claims 3 and 5–6 add an adjustable holding-loop length via an "adjusting member." The entire inventive weight sits on a strap-and-buckle loop threaded through a car seat's existing belt slot — the kind of claim that has fared poorly in IPR generally, which is precisely why the absence of any IPR is explained by economics rather than by strength: at a $30–40k IPR spend, no rational petitioner attacks a patent that stopped being enforceable in 2009.

Estoppel landscape — clean slate. Because there is no IPR and no FWD, 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel does not attach to anyone. No petitioner, no privy, no real party in interest is barred from raising any § 102 or § 103 ground. For a defendant today that means: (1) no ground is off the table on estoppel grounds; (2) there is no already-invalidated claim you can point to and no PTAB record to import as a shortcut; and (3) if you end up needing to invalidate, you do it in District Court under Rule 12(c)/summary judgment or § 282, because an IPR is a poor use of money on an expired patent. The face of the patent already supplies a rich § 102/§ 103 attack surface — the examiner relied on a long list of arguably analogous stroller/car-seat coupling art (US 5,676,386 Huang; US 5,794,951 Corley; US 5,947,555 Welsh; US 6,189,914 Worth; US 6,209,892 Schaaf; US 6,241,274 Huang; US 6,331,032 Haut; US 6,398,233 Liang; US 6,409,205 Bapst; US 6,641,164 Wood), and the "Cited By" set shows 41 later publications building on this space. Note the specification's own admission that the harness is designed to fit "any size of the ordinary car seat" and that "every conventional car seat 3 must have the fastening slot 30" — admissions that narrow the distance between claim 1 and the prior art.

Pattern signals. No repeat-petitioner pattern, because there is no petitioner. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, Open Invention Network) appears anywhere in this patent's prosecution or post-grant history — consistent with the patent's status as a lapsed individual-owned mechanical patent. No patent-owner PTAB-appeal aggression, because the owner never had a PTAB proceeding to appeal. The assignee is recorded as "Individual," and the patent has been in fee-lapse status since 2009; there is no corporate patent owner with an enforcement program attached to this number. That combination — individual owner, dead patent, zero PTAB trail — is the profile of a patent that is not a serial-litigation asset.

The lapse is the defense. A patent that lapsed under 37 CFR 1.362 on 2009-08-02 cannot support an infringement claim for activity after that date unless the lapse is reversed. Reinstatement now would require a petition to accept unintentional delay under 37 CFR 1.378 with the petition fee and all unpaid maintenance fees (the 7.5-year fee was due 2008-04-18; the patent then lapsed at the 11.5-year window). Even if a patent owner attempted revival, 35 U.S.C. § 41(c)(2) intervenes: any person who made or took substantial preparation to make an invention covered by the patent after the lapse and before reinstatement acquires intervening rights and may continue to practice it. So the practical answer to a demand letter citing 6,923,467 is not "file an IPR" — it is "show me the maintenance fee."

Recommended next steps

• Do not budget for an IPR/PGR/CBM. There is no PTAB activity and, on this record, no reason to start one. Screenshot and preserve the Google Patents legal-events entry showing STCH 2009-08-31 ("PATENT EXPIRED DUE TO NONPAYMENT OF MAINTENANCE FEES UNDER 37 CFR 1.362") and FP effective 2009-08-02 — see the "Legal Events" table at https://patents.google.com/patent/US6923467/en — and pair it with the USPTO PatentCenter fee history for application 10/645,230 at https://patentcenter.uspto.gov.
• Ask the patent owner, in writing, for (a) a maintenance-fee payment receipt and (b) the § 1.378 revival petition and its grant. Absent both, there is no enforceable right post-2009-08-02. If rejection of the demand letter is the goal, this is the dispositive point, not invalidity.
• Confirm you are looking at the right patent. The family also contains US 6,702,316 B2 (same title, same 2001-10-18 priority, granted 2004-03-09). Run the same lapse check on the '316 patent — Google Patents lists it in the same Family ID 21898617 — because a demand letter citing "the Hsia stroller patent" may be aiming at either.
• If the patent owner ever revives and asserts, the record contains a ready invalidity and § 41(c)(2) intervening-rights file: the 17 examiner-cited references recited in the patent's own "References Cited" list, plus the specification's admissions that the claimed belt loop is designed as a universal fit and that the fastening slot is a standard car-seat feature. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel blocking any of it.
• If you think I missed something, check PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb) and PTAB Decisions (https://www.uspto.gov/patents/patent-trial-and-appeal-board/ptab-decisions) directly, plus CourtListener's docket search for "6923467" and "6702316" (https://www.courtlistener.com). If a recently-filed proceeding exists that the ODP ingest has not yet picked up, it would show there first — but given that this patent lapsed in 2009, I would be surprised, and I found none.