Invalidity dossier
US 6976090
Differentiated content and application delivery via internet
Current assignee: Cisco Technology Inc
Added 9/23/2026, 6:52:48 PM
Active provider: DeepSeek · deepseek-flash
Patent summary
Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.
Patent Overview: US 6,976,090 B2
Title: "Differentiated content and application delivery via internet"
Patent number: US 6,976,090 B2
Application number: US 09/785,977
Inventor(s): Israel Ben-Shaul; Israel Cidon; Ilan Kessler; Itai Lev-Ran; Oren Unger
Original assignee: Actona Technologies Ltd. (later recorded assignments to Versedge Technologies Ltd., Actona Technologies, Ltd., Actona Technologies Inc., and current assignee listed as Cisco Technology, Inc.)
Priority date: 2000-04-20 (noted as an assumption, not a legal conclusion)
Filing date: 2001-02-16
Publication date: 2005-12-13
Legal status: Expired – Fee Related, adjusted expiration 2023-05-15
Purpose (per the excerpt): The invention "relates to the transmission of data across an internet," and more particularly to "content and application level distribution and customization of data and applications across an internet, utilizing an integrated combination of origin servers and spatially distributed controlled edge servers to efficiently deliver content differentiated electronic content or data from content providers to various classes of consumers."
Plain-language scope from the supplied text: The excerpt indicates use of a network of geographically dispersed caches (a "CDD" provider) and DNS-based redirection, where the DNS server authoritative for a requested site redirects a request to a CDD cache chosen based on proximity to the requester and availability of the requested resource at the cache. It references an enhanced DNS mapping server returning an IP address of a CDD provider server near the client, and describes BIND name-server configuration, zone files, and resource records (A, NS, CNAME, SOA, PTR, HINFO, MX) as background.
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6976090/en (fetched 2026-09-23)
What the excerpt does not establish: It does not set out the issued claims or their exact scope; it does not provide the full specification, detailed description, or drawing content; and it does not establish the complete list of cited prior art. Dates and statuses shown are flagged in the source itself as assumptions or non-legal conclusions. No litigation, ownership-transfer validity, or prior-art analysis is offered here.
Generated 10/1/2026, 9:42:28 PM
Cases on file (0)
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Litigation summary
Past and pending lawsuits — plaintiffs, defendants, jurisdictions, outcomes, and notable rulings.
Proceedings on file (0)
All PTAB activity →AIA trial proceedings (IPR / PGR / CBM) filed at the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board against this patent. Sourced from the USPTO Open Data Portal and refreshed every six hours; each proceeding number deep-links to the PTAB E2E docket.
No PTAB proceedings on file. This patent has not been challenged via IPR, PGR, or CBM. The absence is itself a signal — well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs. The LLM analysis below may surface filings the ODP feed hasn’t indexed yet.
PTAB challenges
AIA trial proceedings at the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board — IPR, PGR, and CBM. Petitioners, judge panels, claim-level invalidation outcomes from Final Written Decisions, and Federal Circuit appeals. The single most important defensive datapoint after litigation history.
Assignment history
Inventors, original assignee, and the chain of ownership recorded with the USPTO — including the correspondent attorney who recorded each assignment, since shell-LLC chains often share one repeat-player attorney even when the entity names look unrelated. Surfaces NPE / patent-troll patterns: shell-entity transfers, known asserters in the chain, repeat correspondent fingerprints, pre-litigation assignments, and bankruptcy fire-sales.
Prior art
Earlier patents, publications, and products that may anticipate or render the claims unpatentable.
Obviousness
Combinations of prior art that suggest the claimed invention would have been obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103.
Extensions
Patent term adjustments, term extensions, continuations, divisionals, family members, and expiration dates.
Derivative works
Defensive disclosure: derivative variations of each claim designed to render future incremental improvements obvious or non-novel.