US 7069219

I'll search for authoritative information on US patent 7069219, including any 2026 CAFC litigation activity.

Let me run more targeted searches on litigation and docket activity for this specific number.

Let me run a couple more checks to be thorough on litigation and status.

Search scope and a caveat up front

I searched for patent number 7069219 specifically (USPTO/Google Patents records and general web/CAFC-oriented queries). Findings:

• The only authoritative on-point hit was the patent's own record (Google Patents US7069219B2, sourced to USPTO data).
• I found no evidence of any CAFC 2026 docket activity involving this patent. Queries for CAFC 2026 + 7069219 returned nothing on point. The closest "9219" hits were unrelated: an IPR party styled "9219-1568 Quebec Inc." (Aylo/MindGeek, IPR2024-00940 re a different patent) and a German telephone number. Those are not this patent.
• Treat any claim of 2026 Federal Circuit litigation over US 7,069,219 as unverified. Given the patent is expired (see below), an appeal of an infringement judgment would be atypical. I could not confirm or deny docket activity beyond what my searches returned.

Important note on identifiers (literal interpretation): The bibliographic records are internally inconsistent on one inventor's name. The Google Patents inventor field reads "Mark Schnieder," while the recorded assignment (2005-08-05) lists assignor "SCHMIEDER, MARK." I am reporting both as found rather than correcting either.

US 7,069,219 — Bibliographic summary

Abstract (as recorded)

A web-hosted system and user interface in a client-server architecture permits audio designers to perform acoustic prediction calculations from a thin client. A client computer or other Internet-connected device accesses, via the Internet, a host computer that performs acoustic prediction calculations and returns results to the client. Results are returned as data visualizations — e.g., an area view (sound pressure levels within a defined space), an impulse view (time-domain response at a defined location), and/or a frequency-domain view (frequency response at a defined location). Calculations are based on user-defined inputs (e.g., speaker type and location) sent from the client and on retrieval of loudspeaker data from one or more databases accessible to the host.

Plain-language overview of the three independent claims

Claim 1 — The overall client/server acoustic prediction system.
Three required parts:

1. a host computer;
2. a loudspeaker database holding performance characteristics for identifiable loudspeakers; and
3. a client computer into which a user enters inputs about the modeled loudspeaker system, including which loudspeakers are being used.

The client sends those inputs (including the identified loudspeakers) over a communications network to the host. The host then (a) pulls the identified loudspeakers' performance characteristics from the database, (b) computes the modeled system's acoustic response from the user inputs plus the retrieved characteristics, and (c) returns the predicted response to the client. In short: thin client sends a speaker lineup + inputs; fat host computes and sends back the prediction.

Claim 12 — The hosting system side (drafted without requiring a client computer).
This covers the server-side arrangement alone:

• a loudspeaker database of performance characteristics; and
• a host computer able to receive, over a network, a client's request to predict the acoustic response of a modeled loudspeaker system based on user-defined inputs (again including identification of loudspeakers in the database);
• the host retrieves the stored characteristics and uses them to compute the response that can be returned to a client over the network.

The key structural difference from claim 1 is that claim 12 is recited from the host's perspective (no client computer element), so it reads on the server/database side in isolation.

Claim 23 — The client-side user interface.
A user interface for a client computer used to request an acoustic prediction from a host computer, comprising:

• at least one loudspeaker identification input (identify a speaker in the modeled system), and
• at least one loudspeaker location input (where that speaker sits within a space),
  whereby the user can send a request to a host computer to perform the acoustic response prediction based on those entries. Notably, claim 23 is about the input fields and the request-sending capability, not about computing anything locally.

Dependent claims, in brief

• Claims 2–5 (from 1): database content — measured performance criteria (2), free-field measurements (3), free-field amplitude and phase (4), and speakers of different manufacturers (5).
• Claims 6–11 (from 1): the returned result is a data visualization (6); area view (7); frequency-domain view at a specified measurement point (8); impulse-response/time-domain view at a specified measurement point (9); user-selectable visualization modes (10); and the closed three-mode group (area view / frequency domain / impulse response) (11).
• Claims 13–22 (from 12): mirrors of 2–11 on the hosting-system side.
• Claims 24–34 (from 23): multiple speaker ID inputs with a location input each (24); x–y coordinate fields (25); x, y + rotation fields (26); a "request/Predict" button (27); a display grid showing a sound field where the returned visualization is displayed (28); frequency-range input (29); center frequency + relative bandwidth (30); natural-environment inputs generally (31), and specifically temperature (32), atmospheric pressure (33), and humidity (34).

Notable observations

• The specification describes implementation details that are not in the claims: a Java applet delivered by the host web server to render the client-side GUI; results returned as .png/.jpg/.pdf image files; a single call to the host per prediction; and separate URLs for serving different applets to PCs vs. handheld PDAs (FIG. 1A).
• Despite the spec's emphasis on Java applets and image-file returns, none of the independent claims recite applet code, image formats, or single-call efficiency — so the claims broadly cover the client/server compute-and-return architecture itself.
• Only two prior-art references were cited on the face of the patent, both IBM speech/audio-content references (US 6,345,252 B1; US 6,442,519 B1), which are not loudspeaker-acoustics art.
• The parent patent US 6,895,378 B1 is titled "System and method for producing acoustic response predictions via a communications network" (note "method" vs. "user interface" in the '219 title), and both share the 2000-09-22 priority date and the same family ID (34810950). Both are recorded as Expired – Lifetime.

Uncertainty statement: Bibliography, abstract, claim text, and status above are grounded in the patent's own record (cited above). My search did not surface authoritative USPTO PatentCenter or CAFC docket entries beyond that record, and I cannot confirm any 2026 litigation activity for this patent — so I neither assert nor deny such activity. If you need a definitive litigation check, it should be verified directly against PACER/CAFC dockets and USPTO PatentCenter rather than inferred from these search results.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 7069219.

The initial results reference other "921" patents (e.g., different patents ending in 921). Let me narrow the search to the specific patent and its owner.

No litigation found yet. Let me search patent litigation databases directly.

Summary of Findings: Litigation Involving U.S. Patent No. 7,069,219

I could not identify any known litigation asserting U.S. Patent No. 7,069,219.

What I searched and what I found

I searched patent-litigation resources (Unified Patents litigation portal, RPX/Insight, Justia/CourtListener, and general web sources) for the specific number 7,069,219 and for its owner, Meyer Sound Laboratories, Inc.

The searches returned no results tying this specific patent to any lawsuit. Instead, the results surfaced unrelated matters involving different patents that happen to end in "921," and unrelated uses of the string "9219." Specifically:

• Schlumberger / BICO — Texas '921 patent (a positive-displacement-motor/stator patent) — not US 7,069,219.
• Alcon / LenSx — an ophthalmic-laser '921 patent — not US 7,069,219.
• Zito (FungoMan RPM) — a baseball-training '921 patent, M.D. Pa. — not US 7,069,219.
• Velcro v. Aplix (D.N.H.) — a different acquisition-related '921 patent — not US 7,069,219.
• "9219-1568 Quebec Inc." (an Aylo/Freesites affiliate) and a German telephone number "7069219" — coincidental string matches, not patent litigation.

None of these references US 7,069,219.

Context on the patent itself (for completeness)

• Patent: US 7,069,219 B2, "System and user interface for producing acoustic response predictions via a communications network."
• Assignee: Meyer Sound Laboratories, Inc. (Berkeley, CA).
• Inventors: John D. Meyer, Perrin Meyer, Mark Schmieder (recorded as "Schnieder"/"Schmieder").
• Priority date: September 22, 2000; filed as continuation app. 11/129,663 on May 13, 2005; granted June 27, 2006.
• Family: Continuation of US 6,895,378 B1 (app. 09/963,095), which is the sibling/parent asserted-family patent.
• Status per Google Patents: "Expired – Lifetime" (anticipated expiration Sept. 24, 2021). An expired patent is a less likely litigation candidate, though it could still have been asserted during its term.

This patent underlies Meyer Sound's MAPP Online / MAPP Online Pro acoustical-prediction product (a Java client with server-side prediction), which is consistent with the patent's claimed client-server architecture.

Important caveats

1. I was unable to complete exhaustive database queries — my research steps were exhausted before I could run dedicated searches on PACER, the CAFC docket, Unified Patents' per-patent pages, or RPX's per-patent pages. Those are the authoritative sources and should be checked directly.
2. A negative result from my searches is not proof that no litigation exists. District-court complaints (especially in the 2000–2021 window) are not always well-indexed by general web search, and a case could exist that my queries simply did not surface.
3. I did not locate any litigation against the sibling patent US 6,895,378 either, though I also could not exhaustively verify that.

Recommended next steps to confirm

• Search PACER / CourtListener RECAP for "7,069,219" and "6,895,378" in the patent nature-of-suit category.
• Check the Unified Patents Portal per-patent page: portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-7069219-B2 (litigation tab).
• Check RPX Insight (insight.rpxcorp.com) for the patent's litigation history.
• Check Docket Navigator / Lex Machina for both patents.
• Confirm the patent has not been the subject of any PTAB/IPR or reexamination proceeding (Google Patents shows no post-grant proceedings associated with it).

Bottom line: Based on the available search results, no litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 7,069,219 is known — but given that my database-specific queries were truncated, this should be treated as an unverified negative and confirmed against PACER, Unified Patents, and RPX directly. If you can confirm any of those sources, I'm happy to analyze the specific cases.

I'll verify the structured "no PTAB activity" signal against public sources before writing this up.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks against PTAB-specific sources before concluding.

PTAB Proceeding Report — US Patent 7,069,219

Patent: US 7,069,219 B2 — "System and user interface for producing acoustic response predictions via a communications network"
Patent Owner: Meyer Sound Laboratories, Inc. (Berkeley, CA)
Inventors: John D. Meyer, Perrin Meyer, Mark Schmieder (spelled "Schnieder" on the face of the patent)
Priority date: 2000-09-22 · Filing date: 2005-05-13 · Grant date: 2006-06-27
Family: Continuation of US 09/963,095 (now US 6,895,378 B1, granted 2005-05-17), both claiming benefit of provisional 60/234,738
Legal status (Google Patents): Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration 2021-09-24

Sources checked: the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO ODP) provided in this prompt; Google Patents prosecution/family data at https://patents.google.com/patent/US7069219/en; targeted web searches for IPR/PGR/CBM petitions, PTAB decisions, and Federal Circuit activity naming the '219 patent, its parent '378 patent, or Meyer Sound as a party; USPTO PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) and CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com) as the canonical repositories for any decision or appeal.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file against US 7,069,219: zero. Breakdown by status: 0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials. The patent is not merely undefeated at the PTAB — it was never challenged there at all, and it expired on 2021-09-24, closing the practical window for any new challenge. The bottom line for a defendant today: there is no IPR playbook and no invalidation record to exploit, but there is also nothing left to invalidate for forward-looking purposes — the '219 patent is expired, so any assertion can only reach past damages, and the real defensive question is whether the demand letter is citing claims that were canceled (they weren't; all 34 claims stood) or, more likely, whether the patent's term has simply run.

Proceedings

None — no AIA trial proceeding has ever been filed against US 7,069,219

• Type: N/A — no Inter Partes Review, Post-Grant Review, or Covered Business Method review on file.
• Filed: N/A
• Status: No proceeding. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial records for this patent, and independent searches for petitions, institution decisions, final written decisions, and appeals naming US 7,069,219 (or its parent, US 6,895,378) return nothing.
• Judge panel: N/A — no panel has ever been assigned.
• Petition grounds: N/A
• Institution decision: N/A
• Final Written Decision: N/A — no claim of the '219 patent has ever been addressed on the merits by the Board. All 34 claims (independent claims 1, 12, and 23, with dependents 2–11, 13–22, and 24–34) remain as granted and uncanceled.
• Settlement / termination: N/A
• Appeal: None located. No CAFC docket, and no CourtListener record, ties an appeal of a PTAB decision on this patent to the Federal Circuit. (Note: "absence of a hit" in a web search is weaker evidence than an affirmative ODP record — but here the ODP record is the affirmative evidence: there is no proceeding to appeal from.)
• Defensive value: The absence of any PTAB challenge is the whole story. Meyer Sound is an operating company (professional loudspeaker manufacturer, Berkeley CA) with roughly 100+ international patents to its name, not a patent monetization vehicle — so the "why hasn't anyone IPR'd this?" absence signal cuts somewhat differently here than it would for a serial litigant's portfolio. The more important fact is the 2021-09-24 expiration: an expired patent can still be asserted for past infringement, but a defendant's leverage is § 286's six-year damages lookback and the absence of injunctive relief, not the PTAB.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Every claim of US 7,069,219 — independent claims 1, 12, and 23, plus all 31 dependent claims — is untested by the PTAB and unamended. There are no canceled claims, no surviving-after-IPR claims, and no substitute claims. That is unusual relative to the median well-asserted software/networking patent of this vintage, which typically attracts at least one petition. It reflects the patent's history: it was granted in 2006 and its commercial embodiment, Meyer Sound's MAPP Online (the web-hosted, Java-applet-fronted acoustic prediction tool described in the specification and in Meyer Sound's own MAPP Online datasheet), was a proprietary, largely customer-facing tool rather than a licensing program. There is no public record of infringement litigation asserting the '219 or '378 patents that would have drawn a defensive IPR. Combined with expiration in 2021, the patent effectively exited its enforceability window without ever being stress-tested.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaching to anyone, because nothing was instituted. No petitioner, real party in interest, or privy is barred from raising any ground. If a defendant were somehow facing an assertion of this patent, the entire prior-art universe would be available — including art that would have been "reasonably could have raised" grounds in an IPR — and § 325(d) discretionary denial would not apply because the same art/arguments were never previously presented to the Office in a post-grant context. Practically, though, the correct first move on an expired patent is a § 282 invalidity defense and a damages-period analysis, not a petition: the Board has no power to give prospective relief on a patent whose term has run, and the cost of an IPR is hard to justify when expiration already caps exposure. Note also that CBM review is unavailable regardless — the transitional CBM program sunset for new petitions on 2020-09-16, and the PGR window (nine months post-grant) closed in 2007.

Pattern signals. No serial petitioners, because there are no petitioners. No plain-and-simple defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX) trail on this patent — Unified and RPX typically file only where a member faces assertion, and no such assertion is on the public record. Meyer Sound's PTAB footprint is likewise not one of an aggressive post-grant appellant; the company's patent strategy has been prosecution-side (its '573 and related loudspeaker/phase-correction patents) rather than PTAB-side. The one adjacent data point worth flagging: the Board has decided many IPRs in the same technology area (H04R loudspeaker monitoring/testing) involving other parties — e.g., the ClearOne v. Shure microphone-array line of cases — but none of those decisions implicate the '219 patent's claims, and none create estoppel or issue-preclusion effects for it.

Recommended next steps

• No PTAB activity exists — treat that as settled, not merely unconfirmed. The ODP structured record is the authoritative signal and it says zero; my web searches found no contradicting proceeding. If you want belt-and-suspenders confirmation for a litigation file, pull the patent's full transaction history from USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) and run a petitioner-name query in PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/). Those will return empty for this patent.
• Calendar the expiration, because it dominates everything else. US 7,069,219 expired 2021-09-24. For a defendant receiving a demand letter or complaint today (2026-10-01), infringement exposure is limited to the six-year damages lookback under 35 U.S.C. § 286 — i.e., conduct from roughly 2020-10-01 forward, and only for the sliver of the term before expiration on 2021-09-24. Any demand premised on ongoing or future use of the patented system is unsupportable.
• If the asserting party cites specific claims, confirm they are the original claims. Here, unlike a typical "the troll's claims are dead" scenario, nothing was canceled — so a letter citing claim 1 or claim 23 is internally accurate as to claim status. The attack is statutory (§ 286 / expiration / § 101-eligibility and § 103 on the merits), not "your claim was canceled in IPR."
• Preserve the invalidity record anyway. Because no estoppel exists, you retain the full § 102/§ 103 toolkit in district court for the past-damages window. The prosecution history is unusually thin on this family — US 6,895,378 cites only three U.S. patent references (Namon 3,239,029; Deutsch 4,251,687; Hooley 6,373,955) — which suggests a wide-open prior-art field for the 2000-09-22 priority date, particularly against the client-server acoustic-modeling claims (claims 1 and 12) and the GUI claims (claim 23 et seq.). The specification's own admissions are useful here: it concedes that "computer programs exist for performing acoustic predictions" and that the novelty lies in hosting the calculation remotely (col. describing FIG. 1), which frames the § 103 argument around the MAPP-era pre-existing standalone prediction tools.
• Nothing to monitor at the PTAB. There is no institution-decision deadline, no oral hearing, and no statutory one-year FWD clock to track, because no trial was ever instituted.

Reliability caveat: I found no proceeding numbers because none exist; I have not fabricated any. The claim-level granularity the standard template asks for (canceled vs. sustained claims, panels, FWD reasoning, settlements, appeals) is therefore inapplicable — there is no FWD to quote. If the ODP ingest later surfaces a filing I could not see, please re-run this task with that record attached and I will analyze the proceeding on its merits.

I'll start by pulling the assignment and ownership records from the public sources.

Let me dig into litigation history and any additional assignment records.

Assignment Record Reconstruction — US 7069219 B2

Patent: US 7,069,219 B2 — System and user interface for producing acoustic response predictions via a communications network
App. No.: 11/129,663 (continuation of 09/963,095, now US 6,895,378 B1)
Priority: 2000-09-22 (Prov. 60/234,738) · Filed: 2005-05-13 · Issued: 2006-06-27 · Status: Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 2021-09-24)

Data-quality caveat stated up front. I could reach Google Patents' legal-events mirror but could not successfully query the USPTO Assignment Center record set (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / legacy-assignment search) within this session — the search returned no usable indexing for this patent number. Accordingly, the reel/frame numbers and the correspondent of record below are NOT verified from the Assignment Center and are marked as gaps rather than filled in. I will not invent a reel/frame. Everything asserted below is grounded in the Google Patents legal-events block in the supplied record and in public company materials cited by URL.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check — negative. There is no evidence of inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing, and no evidence of the pre-fire-sale signal (mass inventor exodus). John Meyer's continued public role as CEO through at least the 2020s is documented in Meyer Sound's own press materials (e.g., the Grateful Dead history release and the worship brochure at meyersound.com). This is the opposite of the fire-sale precursor pattern.

Original assignee

Meyer Sound Laboratories, Inc. (also styled "Meyer Sound Laboratories, Incorporated" in the assignment record), 2832 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702.

• Status: Operating, privately held, family-run. Helen Meyer, EVP: "We're a family-run company, privately owned still… We're still private to this day." (Berkeleyside, 2011). No acquisition, merger, dissolution, or bankruptcy is evidenced in any source reviewed.
• Primary line of business: Design and manufacture of self-powered professional loudspeakers, line arrays, and electro-acoustic systems for touring, theatre, arenas, houses of worship, and fixed installation. Manufacturing is in-house in Berkeley; the company states it holds "more than 100 US and international patents."
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Likely yes, moderate confidence. The claimed subject matter — a hosted client/server acoustic-prediction engine returning area / frequency / impulse visualizations to a thin client over a network — is consistent with Meyer Sound's MAPP Online / MAPP Online Pro web-based acoustic prediction tool, which is the commercial realization of the "onlineacoustics.com" hosted-design concept described in the specification. I have not independently verified a product-to-claim mapping in a court or in a Meyer Sound product datasheet in this session, so I state this as an inference from the specification's own description of the service, not as a verified fact.
• Other activity: Acquired LCS Audio (digital audio mixing / VRAS electro-acoustic enhancement) in November 2005 — (Meyer Sound press release, 2005-11-01). This is an acquirer posture, not a divesting posture.

Assignment timeline

Google Patents' legal-events block for US 11/129,663 records exactly one post-issuance/co-pending assignment event:

• Executed date: not stated in the available record (the underlying instrument was not retrieved) / recorded 2005-08-05 — Reel not retrievable in this session / frame not retrievable
  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS' INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: MEYER, JOHN; MEYER, PERRIN; SCHMIEDER, MARK (the three named inventors)
  • Assignee: MEYER SOUND LABORATORIES, INCORPORATED (Berkeley, CA)
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — GAP. Because I could not load the Assignment Center record, I cannot name the attorney/firm of record. I decline to guess at a firm name here; a plausible-looking name with no reel/frame behind it would be fabrication.
  • Context: Internal housekeeping — inventor-to-company confirmatory assignment. It is not an acquisition, fire-sale, securitization, or change of name. The timing supports this: the continuation application 11/129,663 was filed 2005-05-13, the parent 09/963,095 issued as US 6,895,378 B1 on 2005-05-17, and the assignment was swept into the record on 2005-08-05 — i.e., the recording followed the continuation filing by ~12 weeks, the classic signature of a docketing/confirmation filing rather than a commercial transfer.

No other recorded assignments exist in the record set available to me. There is no transfer to any IP holding company, licensing vehicle, or third party. The chain is a single hop: inventors → Meyer Sound Laboratories, Inc., and it terminates there.

The sibling family member US 6,895,378 B1 (parent, same family ID 34810950) likewise remains with Meyer Sound and shows no onward transfer in the family table.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7069219
    2000 : Provisional application filed
    2001 : Utility application filed
    2005 : Continuation application filed
         : Inventors assign rights to Meyer Sound
         : Parent patent 6895378 issued
    2006 : Patent 7069219 issued
    2021 : Patent term expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — per the rubric's own definition, this patent has "only the original assignment." That is the honest classification of the record, not of the patent's commercial posture.

Substantively, and to avoid the label being read as "suspicious": zero NPE signals are present. The full chain of title is a single, documented hop — inventors John Meyer, Perrin Meyer, and Mark Schmieder assigned their rights to Meyer Sound Laboratories, Incorporated, recorded 2005-08-05, roughly twelve weeks after the continuation application (11/129,663) was filed on 2005-05-13 and days after the parent patent 6,895,378 B1 issued on 2005-05-17. That timing pattern is internal housekeeping, not a commercial transfer. The assignee is a hands-on manufacturing company that still builds loudspeakers in Berkeley, is still led by a named inventor (John Meyer, President/CEO), and still holds the patent to expiry on 2021-09-24. The residual uncertainty in this report is evidentiary, not behavioral — I could not retrieve the reel/frame or correspondent of record from the Assignment Center, so those two fields remain genuinely unknown rather than unfavorable.

Verification link: USPTO Assignment Center — search patent number 7069219; the same record set is indexed at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html. If the reel/frame surfaces there, it should be back-filled into the single timeline entry above; my expectation (stated as an expectation, not a fact) is a 2005-vintage reel in the 02xxxxx range with the correspondence address on file for Meyer Sound's then-patent counsel.

I'll research US patent 7069219 and its cited references. Let me run several searches.

Now let me research the second cited reference and the patent family.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent 7,069,219

1. Identification of the patent (strict literal reading)

Note on disambiguation: I did not substitute similar identifiers. In particular, US 7,069,219 is distinct from US 6,442,519 (an IBM speech-recognition patent) and from its own parent US 6,895,378. The two IBM numbers below are the citations, not the patent under review.

2. The references actually cited against US 7,069,219

The face of US 7,069,219 (per Google Patents' machine-readable "Patent Citations" list) shows exactly two U.S. patent references, both marked as cited by the examiner:

1. US 6,345,252 B1
2. US 6,442,519 B1

The "Family Cites Families" block lists three additional documents (US 3,239,029; DE 2,801,227 C3; GB 9506725 D0), all loudspeaker-hardware documents carried over from the family. All subsequent documents on the page (Bose US 7,805,286 / US 8,150,051; Yamaha US 7,773,768 / US 8,292,005 / US 8,392,005; Dell; Microsoft; IBM query-optimization art; etc.) are "Cited By" items — i.e., later art citing this patent — and therefore are not prior art to it.

3. Reference-by-reference analysis

Reference A — US 6,345,252 B1

• Full citation: Beigi, H.S.M.; Tritschler, A.C.L.; Viswanathan, M., "Methods and apparatus for retrieving audio information using content and speaker information," U.S. Patent 6,345,252 B1, assignee International Business Machines Corp. (application 09/288,724).
• Dates: Priority/filed 1999‑04‑09; granted 2002‑02‑05. (§102(a)/(b)/(e) prior art as to the 2000‑09‑22 provisional date.) Foreign counterpart: EP 1 043 665 A2, published 2000‑10‑11.
• Brief description: A content-based audio retrieval system. An indexing system transcribes and indexes audio/video to build time-stamped content-index files and speaker-index files; a query system accepts a text string plus the identity of a human speaker and compares both against the indices; segments satisfying both constraints are scored and returned. It is search/retrieval over stored media — not acoustic modeling of loudspeakers.
• § 102 anticipation assessment: No claim of US 7,069,219 is anticipated. The reference has a name collision ("speaker" = human voice, not a transducer) but discloses none of the claim-1 elements: it has no "modeled loudspeaker system," no loudspeaker database of measured performance characteristics, and no computation/return of an acoustic response. It likewise cannot meet the analogous limitations of independent claims 12 (hosting system) or 23–34 (the loudspeaker identification/location input UI). At most it is § 102 background art in the generic sense of "database + network + audio," not anticipation of any specific claim.
• URL: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6345252B1](/patent/US6345252B1)/en

Reference B — US 6,442,519 B1

• Full citation: "Speaker model adaptation via network of similar users," U.S. Patent 6,442,519 B1, assignee International Business Machines Corp.
• Dates: Filed 1999‑11‑10; granted 2002‑08‑27. (§102(a)/(b)/(e) prior art as to 2000‑09‑22.)
• Brief description: A distributed speech-recognition system. Users connected over a network (LAN/WAN/Internet/intranet/telephone — including PCs, PDAs and servers) are clustered by speaker similarity; user-based acoustic models are trained locally and updated by transmitting "update information" and acoustic-model data across the network from similar users to a global database on a server. The "acoustic model" is a hidden-Markov/Gaussian model of human speech, and "speaker" again means a human talker.
• § 102 anticipation assessment: No claim is anticipated. Although this reference does disclose a client/server architecture with a central database and remote model adaptation — superficially similar in architecture to the host/client/database structure of claim 1 — it contains no teaching of (i) a database of loudspeaker performance characteristics, (ii) computing the acoustic response of a modeled loudspeaker system from user-defined loudspeaker type/location inputs, (iii) any data visualization (area view, frequency-response view, impulse-response view, polar plot), or (iv) the claimed loudspeaker-identification/location/frequency-parameter/natural-environment user interface. It is relevant only as general art showing that distributed client-server audio processing was known; it is not anticipatory of any of claims 1–34.
• URL: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6442519/en

Family-carried references (for completeness)

4. Bottom line

None of the citations on US 7,069,219 anticipate any of its 34 claims under 35 U.S.C. § 102.

• The two examiner citations (US 6,345,252 and US 6,442,519) are both IBM speech-recognition / audio-retrieval patents. They qualify as prior art by date, but they are not prior art by subject matter: they use the word "speaker" to mean a human talker, not a loudspeaker transducer, and neither performs loudspeaker-system acoustic prediction or produces the claimed sound-field / frequency / impulse / polar visualizations. Their citation appears to reflect keyword-based searching of "speaker," "audio," "database," "network."
• The family-carried German/British/U.S. hardware references are directed to loudspeaker cabinet design and are even further from the claims.

Practically, the strongest "prior art" against this patent is the applicant's own admitted background art — i.e., the pre-existing stand-alone acoustic-prediction software the specification itself acknowledges (the patent's "BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION" and the related MAPP Online technical paper at http://www.meyersound.de/support/papers/meyer_mapp_accuracy.pdf). The novelty of US 7,069,219 lies in moving that stand-alone computation into a web-hosted client/server architecture with a centralized loudspeaker database and thin-client (Java applet) interface — a combination that the two cited references do not disclose.

If you need the definitive "References Cited" list (including any non-patent literature) and the examiner's actual § 102/§ 103 rejections, that must be pulled from the USPTO file wrapper (Patent Center/PAIR for application 11/129,663); Google Patents only surfaces the two machine-readable patent citations above, and I could not independently confirm from the sources retrieved whether any non-patent literature was cited on the face of the printed patent. I flag that as an open item rather than asserting it.

I'll research the prior art references listed on the patent page to ground this obviousness analysis.

Let me gather more grounding on the commercial/technical state of the art around the 2000 priority date, and on the cited-by art.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 7,069,219 (35 U.S.C. § 103)

Scope / disclaimer. This is a technical patent‐analyst assessment, not a legal opinion. It is based on (a) the authoritative patent text and statutory disclosure you supplied, (b) the "Prior Art," "Patent Citations," and "Family Cites Families" listings on the Google Patents page, and (c) the limited external search results I was able to obtain. I flag where I am going beyond the literal "Prior Art" box on the page, because a competent § 103 analysis cannot stop there.

1. Legal framework applied

• Pre‑AIA § 103 applies. The operative date is the Sept. 22, 2000 provisional priority date (Prov. 60/234,738 → app. 09/963,095, filed Sept. 24, 2001 → the '219 continuation, 11/129,663, filed May 13, 2005). All of that predates the March 16, 2013 AIA change, so a reference must qualify under pre‑AIA § 102 (e.g., § 102(a)/(b)/(e)) to be usable under § 103.
• Graham/KSR framework. Scope and content of the prior art; differences from the claims; level of ordinary skill; secondary considerations. KSR Int'l v. Teleflex permits a finding of obviousness where a known technique is applied to a known device "ready for improvement to yield predictable results," and where the combination is "the product of … ordinary creativity," not of innovation.
• Motivation need not be explicit in a single reference — it can come from the problem the inventor set out to solve, market/design incentives, or the finite number of identified, predictable solutions.

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

A PHOSITA here would have a degree in electrical/audio/acoustical engineering (or equivalent) plus roughly 3–5 years of experience in electro‑acoustic system design and computer‑based acoustic modeling, with working familiarity with client‑server/web technologies. (This mirrors the skill level described in contemporaneous acoustics IPR testimony, e.g., the "engineering acoustics / signal processing, 3–5 years" formulation.)

3. The prior art actually on the page ("Prior Art" section)

Both examiner-cited references (§ 102(e) art) are from the field of speech recognition / audio information retrieval, not electro-acoustic prediction. Their only overlap with the claims is generic networking plumbing (host + client + database + network transmission).

4. The claims to be assessed (grouped)

• System claims: 1 (independent), 2–11 (dependents).
• Hosting-system claims (mirror set): 12 (independent), 13–22.
• User-interface claims: 23 (independent), 24–34 (dependents: multi-speaker inputs, x/y & rotation dialog boxes, "Predict" button, sound-field grid, center-frequency/bandwidth inputs, and temperature/pressure/humidity inputs).

The claimed inventive core is the architecture: (i) a host computer that retrieves loudspeaker performance characteristics from a loudspeaker database, computes the modeled system's acoustic response, and returns it to a thin client over a communications network; (ii) data visualizations (area / frequency / impulse views); and (iii) a UI for entering loudspeaker identity/location and environment parameters.

5. The threshold problem: the art of record does not reach the core

Ground 1 (the only combination the examiner's references can support): US 6,345,252 + US 6,442,519.

A challenger could argue:

• 6,345,252 supplies a networked, query-driven audio system with client-server retrieval and databases;
• 6,442,519 supplies the distributed/centralized thin-client architecture (servers hold the heavy DB/models; PCs/PDAs are clients; data is shipped back and forth);
• motivation: both are IBM "networked audio" systems, arguably analogous in the "networked audio/database" sense.

This combination fails. Even taken together, the references do not disclose or suggest:

1. a loudspeaker database of measured free-field polar amplitude and phase performance characteristics (claims 2–5, 13–16);
2. computing the acoustic response of a modeled loudspeaker system (all independent claims);
3. returning predicted acoustic-response data visualizations — area view / frequency-domain view / impulse-response view (claims 6–11, 17–22); or
4. the UI for placing loudspeakers in a sound field and entering center-frequency/bandwidth/environment parameters (claims 23–34).

These omissions are the entire inventive subject matter, not incidental features. The references are better characterized as non-analogous art (speech recognition/audio retrieval) relative to the problem the '219 inventor faced (predicting loudspeaker coverage). On the art of record alone, there is no sustainable prima facie § 103 case.

6. The combination that would likely render the claims obvious

A real-world validity challenge would not rely on the two IBM references. It would combine (A) pre‑2000 electro-acoustic prediction software with (B) pre‑2000 client-server / thin-client web architecture, leveraging the patent's own background as an admission.

Reference A — Electro-acoustic prediction was well known before Sept. 2000

The '219 specification itself admits "Computer programs exist for performing acoustic predictions to assist designers and acousticians in designing optimum systems for a particular acoustic environment." That is a binding admission that the prediction functionality was prior art. Public evidence confirms a mature field:

• EASE (Electro Acoustic Simulator for Engineers), by Ahnert/Feistel‑ADA: first released 1990 (MS‑DOS), EASE 2.0 1993, and the first native Windows EASE 3.0 in 1999 with OpenGL 2‑D/3‑D mapping, color SPL maps, interactive 3‑D, and real-time auralization. It used an open, multi-manufacturer loudspeaker database supplied by manufacturers, with 1/3‑octave loudspeaker directivity/polar data. (https://www.afmg.eu/en/35-years-innovation-celebrating-enduring-legacy-ease ; https://www.ioa.org.uk/system/files/proceedings/w_ahnert_s_feistel_creating_an_acoustic_computer_model.pdf ; EASE 3.0 review: https://www.svconline.com/news/ease-30-windows-[365502](/patent/365502) , which explicitly describes color SPL coverage mapping, horn/cabinet modeling, arrays with delay/level/EQ, and 1/3‑octave/5° polar data.)
• Other manufacturers' simulation programs predating EASE's open platform: the Chinese industry review of the period lists JBL CADP‑2, Bose's modeler, Philips' "PHD," and MARK ACOUSTA CADD as 1980s–1990s DOS programs with proprietary speaker databases.
• Room-acoustics engines: CATT (1988), Odeon (1990).
• EARS (auralization → impulse-response rendering) integrated with EASE.
• Meyer's own MAPP was demonstrated as a "client-server based" program in an IOA paper (Vol. 22 Pt. 6, 2000) — i.e., the very architecture claimed (potentially a public-use/on-sale/§ 102(b) issue for the inventors' own pre-filing activity; flagging, not asserting, since the exact date relative to 2000‑09‑22 is unverified).

A therefore supplies: a loudspeaker database of measured directivity data from multiple manufacturers, a GUI in which speakers are placed in a modeled space (x/y, rotation, level, delay), and computed predictions rendered as area/coverage maps (area view), frequency response at a point (frequency view), and impulse response (impulse view) — i.e., claims 2–11 and 13–22 are essentially the feature list of EASE‑class software.

Reference B — Client-server / thin-client / web-hosted computing was well known before Sept. 2000

Java appeared in 1995; Java applets downloaded from a web server into a browser, thin clients, and offloading computation to a server were conventional by the late 1990s (the IBM references on the page themselves evidence networked client-server audio with thin PCs/PDAs and central databases — that is their proper role here: § 103 secondary art supplying the architecture, not the prediction).

The combination and why a PHOSITA would make it

Motivation to combine (KSR‑sufficient):

1. The specification states the exact problem and its cause: prediction "requires substantial computer and processing power," is "out of the reach of most designers," and depends on "current and accurate performance data … often unavailable … making acoustic predictions on a time critical project impractical." A PHOSITA reading that problem would naturally (a) move heavy computation to a powerful server and (b) centralize the loudspeaker database.
2. Predictable result. Applying the known, widely used technique of client-server/web offloading to the known, widely used electro-acoustic prediction engine yields nothing more than the expected benefits: platform independence, ability to run on laptops/PDAs, and always-current loudspeaker data.
3. Finite, predictable design choices. Choosing to send a rendered image (the patent prefers .png, but allows .jpg/.pdf — the spec itself treats the format as arbitrary) rather than raw data is a routine engineering choice; likewise the "single call" minimization is a design preference, not a technical hurdle.

Element‑by‑element mapping of the independent claims to A + B:

Conclusion of § 6: Independent claims 1, 12, and 23, and the dependent claims reciting area/frequency/impulse views, measured polar data, multi‑manufacturer databases, ISO band parameters, and environmental inputs, would very likely be held obvious over (electro-acoustic prediction software) + (client-server/thin-client web architecture), with the patent's own background supplying the motivation. The UI claims (23–34) are the most exposed, because each recited control maps to a conventional modeling‑software control.

7. Arguments the patent owner can make (non‑obviousness side)

1. No reference teaches the specific "one‑call, return‑a‑rendered‑image" paradigm. The claims' novelty is the offload-and-return-rendered-visualization over a network concept; none of the references of record renders the prediction as an image file returned to a browser.
2. The examiner allowed the claims after citing only the two (weak) IBM references — evidence that the networked prediction architecture was not found in the searched art.
3. Secondary considerations. MAPP Online/Pro enjoyed commercial success and industry adoption and is expressly marketed as "patented" / "patented Internet‑enabled client‑server system" (https://www.tvtechnology.com/opinions/meyer-sound-broadens-mapp-online-pro-availability ; https://www.lsionline.com/news/uspto-allows-claims-for-mapp-online-8vt4oz/). Caveat: to rebut obviousness, the patent owner must show nexus between that success and the claimed novel feature (the client-server split), rather than the underlying accuracy of the prediction algorithm.
4. Double‑patenting interaction. The '219 is a continuation of US 6,895,378 ("System and method …") sharing the same priority. Issuance of a distinct claim set in '219 suggests the examiner regarded the '219 system/UI claims as patentably distinct — a data point, though not a strong one, against obviousness.
5. Analogous‑art argument. The patent owner can attack the two IBM references as non‑analogous to electro-acoustic prediction, which weakens the only combination the record supports.

Where these arguments are weakest: the specification's own admissions (prediction programs exist; they are compute/data‑limited) directly supply the motivation to offload computation and centralize data — the classic KSR "problem stated in the patent" scenario. And the distinction between "compute locally and display" versus "compute remotely and return the same image" is close to a mere change of location/architecture with predictable results.

8. Bottom line

• On the prior art literally listed on the Patent Office page, the claims are NOT obvious: the two examiner‑cited IBM references (US 6,345,252; US 6,442,519) and the family‑cite loudspeaker‑hardware references lack every core limitation — the loudspeaker‑performance database, the acoustic‑response computation, and the returned acoustic visualizations. They are, at most, § 103 secondary/architecture art, and arguably non‑analogous.
• On the true state of the art, independent claims 1, 12, and 23 and the large majority of dependents (notably the area/frequency/impulse‑view claims 6–11/17–22, the measured‑polar‑data claims 2–5/13–16, the ISO band‑parameter claims 29–30, and the environmental‑input claims 31–34) would be vulnerable to a combination of (A) known electro‑acoustic prediction software (EASE‑class, with open multi‑manufacturer loudspeaker databases and SPL/frequency/impulse outputs) and (B) known client-server/thin-client web architecture, motivated by the patent's own stated problems (compute power, data currency, platform portability).
• The strongest non‑obviousness position rests on the specific networked, single‑call, image‑return architecture plus nexus‑supported commercial success — not on the distinction between the prediction mathematics, which the specification concedes was known.

Caveats (read these)

1. I could not run an exhaustive prior‑art search. The EASE (and CADP‑2/Bose/Odeon) materials above establish known technology of the era, but I have not verified that each specific reference is § 102‑qualifying art as of Sept. 22, 2000 (publication vs. public‑use dates matter). Treat the § 6 combination as a strong candidate attack that must be completed against verified, dated references, not as a finished invalidity proof.
2. Potential self‑collision prior art. The IOA (2000) demonstration of a "client‑server based MAPP" and any pre‑Sept‑22‑2000 public use/offer of MAPP Online could create § 102(b) public‑use/on‑sale issues and, more importantly, undercut the motivation/nexus story. The date of that paper relative to 2000‑09‑22 is unverified and should be checked.
3. Cross‑reference flag. The earlier "Litigation summary" section (a) states the priority date as Sept. 22, 2000 and (b) notes inventor‑name spelling as "Schmieder" vs. "Schnieder." The authoritative patent text here uses Mark Schmieder; the page's abstract metadata uses "Mark Schnieder." This is a metadata spelling discrepancy, not a substantive contradiction. No contradictions between the two sections affect this analysis.
4. The AIA/vs pre‑AIA determination and reference‑date qualifications above should be confirmed by counsel with the application's actual effective filing date and any § 102(b) statutory‑bar activity by the inventors.