US 7097201

I'll search for authoritative information on US patent 7097201, including any 2026 CAFC activity.

Let me check specifically for any 2026 Federal Circuit or litigation activity tied to this patent or its owner.

Let me retrieve the full claim set to characterize each independent claim accurately.

US Patent 7,097,201 — Verification Summary

Search scope note: I was able to retrieve authoritative bibliographic and text data (Google Patents full text, Justia claims, and a KIPO-hosted claim sheet). I could not directly query the live USPTO Patent Center/Public PAIR or the CAFC docket system in this session, so my statements about litigation status rest on the secondary aggregator records cited below. I found no CAFC 2026 docket activity touching US 7,097,201. One important reason for that: the patent's recorded legal status is Expired – Fee Related, adjusted expiration 2013‑11‑02 — so it was already off-term long before 2026.

Bibliographic Data (as recorded)

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7097201/en ; https://patents.justia.com/patent/7097201

Continuity chain (from the specification's CROSS REFERENCE section, verbatim): this application is a continuation of 10/963,390 (filed 2004‑10‑12), which is a continuation of 10/768,791 (2004‑01‑30), which is a continuation of 09/435,045 (1999‑11‑08, now US 6,685,218), which is a continuation‑in‑part of 09/114,962 (1998‑07‑14, now US 6,419,265), which is a continuation‑in‑part of 08/101,017 (1993‑09‑16, now US 5,842,716). Sibling grants in the same family include US 7,052,038; US 7,025,379; US 7,070,202; and US 7,334,657.

Note on priority-date discrepancy: Google Patents lists the priority date as 1993‑09‑16 while, for sibling family members (e.g., US 6,685,218 / US 7,052,038), it lists 1991‑07‑09. I report these literally as recorded and do not resolve the difference.

Abstract (verbatim, as published)

Vehicle including an occupant protection apparatus for protecting an occupant during an impact into a side of the vehicle, and a side impact, electronic crash sensor assembly for detecting impact into the side of the vehicle and controlling the occupant protection apparatus responsive to the detected impact. The sensor assembly includes a sensor housing arranged in a door or between inner and outer side panels along a side of the vehicle, a movable sensing mass arranged within and movable in the lateral direction relative to the sensor housing in response to lateral accelerations thereof, a micro-processor containing an algorithm which generates a time-varying signal representative of lateral movement of the mass, analyzes the signal and generates a deployment signal based thereon, and a control unit for receiving the deployment signal from the micro-processor and controlling deployment of the occupant protection apparatus based thereon.

Claim Structure

The patent is a vehicle/system claim set (not a method set). Independent claims appear at 1, 8, 18, and 29, with intervening dependent claims. I could not retrieve a verbatim full claim listing from an authoritative source for every claim; the descriptions of claims 8 and 29 below are based on partial text and are flagged accordingly. Uncertainty: I do not have high-confidence confirmation of the total claim count.

Claim 1 (independent) — Vehicle with electronic lateral-motion side sensor

Verbatim preamble: "In a vehicle having doors, front and rear wheels and a longitudinal axis between a front and rear of the vehicle such that a lateral direction is defined perpendicular to the longitudinal axis, the vehicle also having left and right sides, comprising:"

Plain language: A vehicle carrying (a) an occupant protection apparatus (e.g., a side airbag) for side impacts, and (b) an electronic side-impact crash sensor assembly that includes:

• a sensor housing located in a door or between inner and outer side panels along the left or right side;
• a movable sensing mass that moves laterally relative to the housing in response to lateral accelerations;
• a microprocessor with an algorithm that produces a time-varying signal of the mass's lateral movement, analyzes that signal, and generates a deployment signal; and
• control means that receives the deployment signal and controls deployment of the occupant protection apparatus.
  The housing is positioned and oriented so a side impact producing lateral acceleration moves the mass.

Claim 8 (independent) — Vehicle claim in the same family

From the retrieved dependent-claim text (e.g., "The vehicle of claim 8, wherein said sensor housing is mounted in contact with a side door assembly or a side panel assembly of the vehicle between the centers of the front and rear wheels," and the piezo-electric accelerometer dependent claim), claim 8 is an independent vehicle claim directed to the side-impact airbag system with a mass-based crash sensor, with dependents covering mounting location and sensor implementation.
Uncertainty: I do not have the verbatim preamble/body of claim 8; the above is inferred from its dependent claims.

Claim 18 (independent) — Self-contained modular airbag system

Verbatim body: "a self-contained modular airbag system for the vehicle, comprising: an airbag and inflator assembly including an airbag housing, at least one inflatable airbag arranged in said housing and which inflates into a passenger compartment of the vehicle along a side of the vehicle and an inflator for inflating said at least one airbag; a sensor assembly for detecting an impact into a side of the vehicle and initiating said inflator to inflate said at least one airbag, said sensor assembly including a power supply for supplying power to said inflator and a diagnostic system arranged to diagnose the capability of said sensor assembly to initiate said inflator to inflate said at least one airbag and generate a signal when said sensor assembly is unable to initiate said inflator to inflate said at least one airbag, said airbag and inflator assembly and said sensor assembly being arranged in a self-contained module; and said self-contained module being mounted onto a side door of the vehicle or onto a side of the vehicle between inner and outer panels of the vehicle."

Plain language: A vehicle with a self-contained side-airbag module — airbag + inflator + sensor assembly in one package — where the sensor assembly carries its own power supply (dependent claim 28 specifies a capacitor) and a diagnostic system that checks whether the module can actually fire the inflator and signals when it cannot. The module mounts in a side door or between the inner and outer side panels.

Claim 29 (independent) — Self-contained module with movable-mass sensor

Same "self-contained modular airbag system" framework as claim 18, but the sensor assembly is recited as including a power supply and a diagnostic module for diagnosing the inflator's ability to inflate the airbag, plus a sensor having a sensor housing in the side door or between inner and outer side panels, a movable sensing mass movable laterally in response to lateral accelerations, and at least one electronic component (subsequent text truncated in my retrieval).
Uncertainty: The closing "at least one electronic…" limitation was cut off in the source snippet; I do not have its full verbatim wording.

Representative dependent claims (verbatim excerpts retrieved)

• "The vehicle of claim 18, wherein said self-contained module is mounted in contact with a side door assembly or a side panel assembly of the vehicle between centers of the front and rear wheels."
• "The vehicle of claim 18, wherein said sensor assembly is arranged adjacent said airbag and inflator assembly within said self-contained module."
• "The vehicle of claim 21, wherein said at least one electronic component is a micro-processor containing an algorithm arranged to generate a time-varying signal representative of movement of said mass in the lateral direction, analyze the signal… and generate a deployment signal based thereon."
• "The vehicle of claim 18, wherein said power supply is a capacitor." (claim 28)
• "The vehicle of claim 17[/8], wherein said mass constitutes part of an accelerometer which includes a piezo-electric element for generating a signal representative of the movement of said mass."

Litigation / Docket Status (2026)

• No CAFC 2026 docket entry for US 7,097,201 was found. My searches for the number in 2026 Federal Circuit materials returned only unrelated cases (e.g., Spero v. Mercedes‑Benz/Volkswagen, Nos. 2025‑1470 / 2025‑1064; Constellation Designs v. LG, Nos. 2024‑1822).
• The activity Google Patents associates with this patent family is a 2006 district-court case in the Eastern District of Michigan — recorded as Automotive Technologies International v. Calsonic Kansei et al., case 2:06‑cv‑15756 — see https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Michigan%20Eastern%20District%20Court/case/2%3A06-cv-15756. (A KIPO-hosted patent sheet renders the same case number as "206‑CV‑157560"; I report both forms literally and do not harmonize them.)
• Broadly, the assignee American Vehicular Sciences LLC (an Acacia Research affiliate) was an active litigant in the 2012–2019 period in the E.D. Tex. and E.D. Mich., but that activity involved other Breed/ATI patents (e.g., US 7,413,048; US 9,043,093; US 6,772,057), not this patent.
• Given the 2013‑11‑02 expiration, it is consistent that no live 2026 appellate or PTAB proceeding touches the '201 patent.

Plain-Language Overview

US 7,097,201 claims a vehicle equipped with a side-impact occupant protection system in which a small inertial mass, housed inside a door or between the side body panels, moves laterally when the vehicle's side is struck. Electronics (a microprocessor running an algorithm, in claim 1) convert that mass motion into a time-varying signal, evaluate it against a threshold, and issue a deployment signal that fires the side airbag. The narrower independent claims (18, 29) are directed at packaging the airbag, inflator, sensor, backup power supply (capacitor), and self-diagnostic circuitry together as a self-contained side-impact airbag module that mounts in the door or between the inner and outer side panels. The specification's stated motivations are the unsuitability of the prior-art all-mechanical Thuen design (cross-axis sensitivity, O-ring sealing in a door environment) and reliance on conventional separately-mounted sensors with door routing of wiring.

Confidence Statement

• High confidence: title, patent/application numbers, filing and issue dates, inventors, assignees (original and current), abstract, claim 1 and claim 18 verbatim text, the continuity chain, and the expired-fee legal status.
• Moderate confidence: identity of independent claims 8 and 29 and the dependent-claim summaries; total claim count; the exact 2006 case caption/number formatting.
• Explicit uncertainty: I did not query live USPTO PAIR/Patent Center or the CAFC electronic docket directly; the absence of 2026 CAFC activity is a negative search result, not a certified docket confirmation.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 7097201.

The initial searches returned mostly unrelated patents (Celgene 6,315,720; Smartflash 7,334,720; Raytheon '720). Let me target the specific patent and its assignees.

I found the primary case. Let me check for any later suits (the patent was reassigned to American Vehicular Sciences LLC in 2012) and verify the outcome.

Litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 7,097,201 ("Side impact sensor systems")

Preliminary note on ID discipline: My searches surfaced a large volume of hits for other patents whose numbers contain the digit string "720" — e.g., U.S. 6,315,720 (Celgene), U.S. 7,334,720 (Smartflash), and a reissued Raytheon "720" patent (PTAB IPR petitions). None of those are U.S. 7,097,201 and I have excluded them. Everything below is tied to the literal identifier 7,097,201.

I found one U.S. patent-infringement action in which the '201 patent was formally asserted, plus a related Federal Circuit appeal.

1. Automotive Technologies International, Inc. v. Siemens VDO Automotive Corporation, et al.

How the '201 patent was resolved: The court issued its claim-construction order on November 11, 2008. Following that order, the parties agreed to dismissal of ATI's claims as to the '201 patent, and the court entered a stipulated order to that effect on February 3, 2009. In other words, the '201 patent was not carried to judgment — it was voluntarily dismissed out of the case at the claim-construction stage.

The rest of the case went badly for ATI: the court granted summary judgment of invalidity as to the '379, '038, '202 and '824 patents, and later found the case exceptional under 35 U.S.C. § 285 in part and awarded attorney fees. A magistrate's Report & Recommendation noted that ATI's voluntary dismissal of the '201 claims and its abandonment of the '824 claims supported a finding that ATI had not acted in bad faith with respect to those patents.

Sources: Google Patents litigation link for US7097201; RPX Insight complaint document; Justia docket (Dkt. 79, Dkt. 161); vLex opinions ("Automotive Technologies v. Siemens VDO Automotive"); Stanford NPE Litigation Database party pages.

2. Related appellate proceeding (same case)

This is the appeal arising out of the same district-court case, not a separate infringement suit. Because the '201 claims had already been dismissed by stipulation in February 2009, the appeal did not reach the '201 patent.

3. Related but NOT the '201 patent (flagged to avoid confusion)

• Automotive Technologies Int'l, Inc. v. BMW of North America, Inc., No. 2:01-cv-71700 (E.D. Mich.) / Fed. Cir. appeal Nos. 06-1013, 2007 — this litigation concerned U.S. Patent 5,231,253 (the '253 patent, held invalid for lack of enablement, 501 F.3d 1274 (Fed. Cir. 2007)). That suit was filed in May 2001, before the '201 patent issued (Aug. 29, 2006), so the '201 patent could not have been in it. I mention it only because it is the same patent family and the same court.
• American Vehicular Sciences LLC ("AVS") cases (e.g., AVS v. Toyota, AVS v. Honda, AVS v. BMW, AVS v. TK Holdings, filed 2012–2015 in E.D. Tex./E.D. Mich./C.D. Cal.): AVS acquired the '201 patent by assignment from ATI on April 10, 2012, but my searches did not surface any AVS complaint specifically asserting 7,097,201. Those AVS suits appear to have asserted other ATI-family patents.

Bottom line / confidence level

• Known litigation asserting U.S. 7,097,201: one case — ATI v. Siemens VDO Automotive Corp., et al., No. 2:06-cv-15756 (E.D. Mich., filed Dec. 27, 2006) — in which the '201 claims were dismissed by stipulation on Feb. 3, 2009, following the Nov. 11, 2008 claim-construction order, plus the voluntarily-dismissed Federal Circuit appeal (458 F. App'x 893) from that case.
• The '201 patent never reached a merits judgment on infringement or validity in any proceeding I could identify.
• Caveats: I could not run a full PACER or Docket Navigator/Darts-IP query, and the patent expired for fee-related reasons on 2013-11-02 per the Google Patents record. I therefore cannot rule out additional short-lived or sealed suits, and I found nothing suggesting post-2012 AVS-filed litigation on this specific patent. If you need certified completeness, a PACER "patent number" search on the '201 patent and a Darts-IP family query (family 32995747) would confirm.

I'll verify the canonical "no proceedings" baseline before writing anything up.

The structured block says the ODP ingest shows nothing — but the '201 patent was heavily litigated, so let me test whether anything is hiding in older PTAB dockets.

No hits yet on the '201 specifically. Let me probe the PTAB/patent-database and litigation angles directly.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 7,097,201: 0. The USPTO ODP structured record returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for this patent, and independent web searching surfaced no petition, institution decision, or Final Written Decision naming the '201 — so there is nothing to break out by active / invalidated / sustained / settled / denied, and the defensive posture is not "hardened by surviving IPRs" but rather "expired and never PTAB-tested": the patent's Google Patents legal status is Expired - Fee Related, with an adjusted expiration of 2013-11-02, roughly 14 months after IPR first became available on 2012-09-16.

No proceedings to report

I looked for a proceeding to profile and did not find one. What I actually verified:

• Structured source (canonical): the "PTAB proceedings on file" block states the ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings as of the most recent ingest. I adopt that as the operating answer.
• Independent search: queries on the patent number in combination with IPR/PGR/PTAB identifiers, and on American Vehicular Sciences / Automotive Technologies International plus the patent number, returned proceedings against sibling patents only — never against 7,097,201. Do not cite any of the sibling dockets below as proceedings on this patent.
• Disambiguation warning: search results are polluted with unrelated "the '720 patent" shorthand. US 7,727,720 (Dhallan, IPR2021-01026), US 6,315,720 (Celgene, IPR2015-01092/01096/01102/01103), and US 9,270,720 (DIVX, IPR2020-00647) are different patents, not this one. Any claim that 7,097,201 was invalidated in a "720" IPR is a confusion artifact.
• Residual uncertainty: I could not query PTAB E2E or a litigation/PTAB aggregator directly in this session. I therefore cannot exclude a very short, low-visibility proceeding with absolute certainty — but no public source names one, and the expiration date makes one economically implausible.

What did happen to this patent — the district court record

Because there is no PTAB history, the only adversarial test of the '201 claims was in court:

• Automotive Technologies International, Inc. v. Siemens VDO Automotive Corp., No. 2:06-cv-15756 (E.D. Mich.). The docket link recorded in the Google Patents family record is https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Michigan%20Eastern%20District%20Court/case/2%3A06-cv-15756.
• The court construed the disputed claims on 2008-11-11. Per the Federal Circuit/CourtListener opinion in the related appeal, "following that order the parties agreed to dismissal of Plaintiff's claims as to the '201 patent, and the court entered a stipulated order to this effect on 2009-02-03." Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[2409173](/patent/2409173)/automotive-technologies-international-inc-v-siemens-vdo-automotive-corp/ (see also the E.D. Mich. document at https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/michigan/miedce/2:2006cv15756/[217237](/patent/217237)/79/).
• Read carefully: that is a stipulated dismissal of the '201 claims after the Markman order, not a validity holding. Nothing was canceled, nothing was held patentable. It is stylized as "Construing the terms of the patent" on the Justia docket. Treat it as evidence the patent owner walked away from the '201 after claim construction, not as a judgment of invalidity.

Strategic summary

Claim status: UNTESTED at the PTAB — all of it. No claim of 7,097,201 has been canceled, confirmed, or even challenged in an AIA trial. Every claim stands or falls on the original 2006 grant and its prosecution history. That cuts both ways: a defendant gets no free "claim 1 is dead" argument, but the patent also has no PTAB confirmation to hide behind. The far more important fact is the status of the asset itself: Google Patents records the '201 as Expired - Fee Related with an adjusted expiration of 2013-11-02, consistent with a 20-year term running from the earliest benefit date in its continuation chain (U.S. App. Ser. No. 08/101,017, filed 1993-09-16) plus patent term adjustment. Verify that date independently in USPTO Patent Center before relying on it — the Google Patents "expiration" field is expressly an assumption — but if it holds, the patent has been expired for roughly 12 years and 10 months as of 2026-09-23.

Estoppel landscape: nothing has attached, and there is nothing to attach. Because no IPR reached a Final Written Decision on the '201, 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) creates no estoppel against anyone as to these claims. A defendant today faces no estoppel constraints in district court and, in principle, no § 315(b) one-year bar. The full universe of prior art — including every reference the district court considered in 2008, every reference cited against AVS's sibling patents, and anything a defendant has developed on its own — remains theoretically available. But see the next paragraph, because the practical value of that freedom is close to zero.

Pattern signals: AVS's PTAB wars were fought on other patents. American Vehicular Sciences (successor to Automotive Technologies International; current assignee per the face of the patent) is a high-volume automotive NPE, and its portfolio was attacked at the PTAB repeatedly — but on other members of the family and portfolio. Toyota filed a coordinated July 2013 wave (IPR2013-00412, -00413, -00414 against US 6,738,697; IPR2013-00415 against US 7,650,210; IPR2013-00416 against US 8,019,501; IPR2013-00417 and -00419 against US 6,772,057); American Honda filed IPR2014-00633 against the '210; Mercedes-Benz filed IPR2014-00646 against the '057, prompting a Toyota joinder motion that the Board denied on 2014-12-05 (panel: Jameson Lee, Trevor M. Jefferson, Lynne E. Pettigrew). A defensive aggregator does appear in the chain — Unified Patents filed IPR2016-00364 against AVS's US 9,043,093 ("Single Side Curtain Airbag For Vehicles"), instituted 2016-06-27, joined by a Toyoda Gosei/Autoliv/Takata/Hyundai Mobis coalition in IPR2016-01872. The inference — and I flag this explicitly as inference, not record evidence — is that the '201 was simply not worth an IPR: it was within weeks of expiry when AVS's first big PTAB wave hit in July 2013, and killing an expired patent buys a defendant nothing.

Recommended next steps

1. If you are holding a demand letter citing US 7,097,201, check the expiration date first — it is your whole defense. The Google Patents record states: Expired - Fee Related, expires 2013-11-02 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US7097201/en). Confirm in USPTO Patent Center / PAIR. No act you committed after that date can infringe, and the § 286 six-year damages lookback from any complaint filed in 2026 reaches back only to 2020 — entirely post-expiration. Damages exposure should be zero, and a demand built on this patent is, at best, a bluff.
2. Treat the '201 as a decoy for a sibling assertion. This patent sits in an enormous continuation family (the same specification chain produced US 5,842,716, US 6,419,265, US 6,685,218, US 7,024,379, US 7,052,038, and US 7,334,657, among many others). AVS's live monetization has long since moved to later continuations — the '210, '697, '057, and '093 patents above are real, PTAB-tested, and in some cases still being litigated. If a demand letter names the '201, ask for the full asserted-patent list and check the issue dates on every one.
3. If you need a validity ruling on the '201 for some reason (e.g., a licensee seeking a declaratory judgment of non-infringement or invalidity, or a pre-2013 back-damages claim surfaces), an IPR against an expired patent is legally possible — the Board has instituted on expired patents — but no estoppel or prior PTAB record constrains you, so ex parte reexamination or a district court invalidity case is the cleaner vehicle. Do not expect the PTAB to be your cheapest path when there is no live exclusionary right to cancel.
4. Do not over-read the absence of IPRs as strength. Here the absence is fully explained by expiration, not by the claims being bulletproof. Well-asserted live patents in this portfolio did attract IPRs — the '201 did not, and the reason is the calendar.

Bottom line for a defendant: the patent has not survived two IPRs — it has survived zero, because nobody bothered to file, most likely because it expired on 2013-11-02. If a demand letter today cites claims of US 7,097,201, you are almost certainly looking at an expired patent being used as leverage; the demand is a false positive, not a hardened claim.

I'll research the assignment chain and litigation history for US 7097201 to ground the analysis beyond the patent text provided.

Let me verify the Acacia/American Vehicular Sciences ownership link and attempt to retrieve reel/frame data.

Assignment & Ownership Reconstruction — US 7,097,201 B2

Patent: US 7,097,201 B2 — "Side impact sensor systems"
App. No.: 11/174,837 · Filed: 2005-07-05 · Issued: 2006-08-29 · Priority: 1993-09-16
Current assignee (per Google Patents legal events): American Vehicular Sciences LLC

Data-availability caveat (read first). I reconstructed the chain from the Google Patents legal-events record for this patent (provided in-source), cross-checked against the E.D. Mich. complaint in ATI v. Siemens VDO (2:06-cv-15756), the RPX Insight news record, and Acacia/AVS litigation filings. I was not able to retrieve the 6-digit reel/frame numbers from the USPTO Assignment Center through the tools available to me, and I will not guess them. Where I cite dates below, they come from the legal-events record or from the litigation/assignment documents named. Verify reel/frame at the Assignment Center (link at the end).

Inventors

Unusual patterns worth flagging:

• Mixed-employment inventorship. One of three inventors (Castelli) is a Xerox researcher on an automotive-safety patent owned by ATI. This is a classic recipe for a later confirmatory assignment to clean up title — which is exactly what appears in the record (see the 2007-05-23 entry below).
• Long-delayed confirmatory assignment. The record shows all three inventors executing an assignment to ATI only on 2007-05-23 — roughly 14 years after the 1993 priority filing and 2 years after this application was filed. This is a title-curative step, not a contemporaneous employment assignment.
• I found no evidence that all inventors departed ATI within 12 months of filing (the pre-fire-sale tell). The real exit event is the portfolio sale in 2012, not individual inventor departures.

Original assignee

Automotive Technologies International, Inc. (ATI) — a Delaware corporation, founded/led by inventor David S. Breed.

• Primary line of business: automotive safety R&D and technology development/licensing (crash sensors, occupant sensing, side-impact airbag systems). ATI is named as the applicant on this patent and its entire 6-application family.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Not established. ATI reads as a development/licensing house rather than a volume manufacturer. Tellingly, ATI's own infringement suit accused third-party suppliers (Siemens VDO, TRW, TK Electronics, Calsonic Kansei) of making the side-impact sensor/airbag hardware — i.e., ATI asserted the patents rather than making the accused products itself.
• Current status: Unclear / not resolved from available records. No bankruptcy filing surfaced. After the April 2012 portfolio transfer to AVS, ATI ceases to appear as a plaintiff in the enforcement campaigns; AVS (Acacia) took over assertion.
• (Note a discrepancy: an RPX Insight piece cites ATI's website saying the company was "formed by Breed… in 1998," which sits awkwardly against the 1993 priority date. I flag this rather than resolve it.)

Assignment timeline

Only two post-inventor assignments are reflected in the legal-events record for this patent. Reel/frame columns are marked [not retrievable] rather than fabricated.

• 2007-05-23 (executed) / recorded 2007-05-23 — Reel [not retrievable]/[not retrievable]

  • Conveyance: Assignment (confirmatory — inventors to company)
  • Assignor: David S. Breed; Vittorio Castelli; Anthony S. Pruszenski, Jr. (all three inventors)
  • Assignee: Automotive Technologies International, Inc.
  • Correspondent: [not retrieved] — the Assignment Center correspondent of record was not accessible via my tools. Contextual note: the prosecuting attorney of record on related ATI/Breed patents (e.g., US 7,650,210) is Brian Roffe, so his firm is the likely family-level patent counsel — but I have not verified he was the recording correspondent, so I do not treat this as a finding.
  • Context: Title curative / internal — confirms inventor→company title; executed long after filing (see anomaly above).

• 2012-04-10 (executed) / recorded 2012-04-10 — Reel [not retrievable]/[not retrievable]

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: Automotive Technologies International, Inc.
  • Assignee: American Vehicular Sciences LLC (a Texas LLC formed 2012-01-19; later at 6136 Frisco Square Blvd., Suite 400, Frisco, TX; registered agent Registered Agent Solutions, Inc.)
  • Correspondent: [not retrieved] — same limitation as above.
  • Context: Transfer-to-asserter. This is the transfer of the patent from the operating/développement company to an Acacia-affiliated assertion vehicle. Timing is decisive: AVS acquired the ATI portfolio in April 2012 and launched its first infringement suits in June 2012 (RPX Insight, 2012-10-16, confirms the patents "were assigned to American Vehicular Sciences in April 2012").

Later chain context (family-level, NOT verified as touching this patent): a post-2018 restructuring record lists a large block of Acacia entities — including "AMERICAN VEHICULAR SCIENCES LLC" and "ACACIA RESEARCH GROUP LLC" — as assignors to Starboard Value Intermediate Fund LP. Because US 7,097,201 had already lapsed in 2013 (see below), this patent was probably not part of that transfer; I do not assert it here.

No assignment record at all? No — the patent does have recorded assignments (two, above). It is not a "no-record" patent.

Patent lapse: Legal events show expired – fee related, expires 2013-11-02 — the patent lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees ~18 months after AVS acquired it.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7097201
    1993 : Priority application filed
    2005 : Continuation application filed
    2006 : Patent issued to ATI
         : ATI sues Siemens VDO et al
    2007 : Inventors assign rights to ATI
    2009 : 201 patent claims dismissed by stipulation
    2012 : ATI assigns patent to AVS LLC
         : AVS sues automakers
    2013 : Patent lapses for unpaid fee

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT.
Patent moved from ATI (the operating/development assignee founded by the inventor) to American Vehicular Sciences LLC, a Texas LLC formed 2012-01-19 — i.e., created roughly three months before the 2012-04-10 assignment — with no commercial products and a registered-agent service (Registered Agent Solutions, Inc.) as its agent of record. AVS exists to hold and assert patents. This is a concrete, documented transfer, not a "name suggests shell" inference.

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT.
The current assignee, American Vehicular Sciences LLC, is a subsidiary of Acacia Research Group LLC, whose parent is the public company Acacia Research Corporation (AVS's Rule 7.1 corporate disclosure, reported in the KIPO NPE 2013 report and by RPX Insight). Acacia Research Corp is on the recognized NPE list. AVS filed 30+ infringement suits in 2012–2014 (KIPO/NPE reporting: 16 suits in 2012, 17 in 2013), and its Breed-family patents were the subject of multiple Unified Patents- and Toyota-filed IPRs (e.g., IPR2013-00380 through -00424). Strong, corroborated.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR.
I could not retrieve the Assignment Center correspondent of record for either recording, so I cannot establish recurrence. The only counsel name I could ground is Brian Roffe (prosecution attorney of record on related ATI/Breed patents such as US 7,650,210) — a single, prosecution-side data point is not a finding under the stated rule. Marked unclear, not present.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT.
There is exactly one post-inventor transfer in the record (ATI → AVS, 2012-04-10), plus one curative inventor→ATI assignment. No chain of LLC-to-LLC hops within 24 months.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT (for this patent's own suit).
The first suit naming the '201 patent was ATI v. Siemens VDO et al., filed 2006-12-27 (NPE/Stanford NPE database and the E.D. Mich. complaint, which lists the '201 patent at ¶16–17). The 2012-04-10 transfer occurred ~5 years after that suit — so the transfer was not arranged to enable the '201-specific assertion. However, the same 2012-04-10 transfer preceded AVS's general June-2012 assertion wave by ~2 months, which is the classic "arrange the chain, then sue" setup at the portfolio level.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT.
No ATI Chapter 7/11 filing surfaced. ATI lost its enforcement cases (see below) but no bankruptcy-driven patent sale was found.

7. Privateering — UNCLEAR.
The shape (operating developer → Acacia NPE → suits against automakers) resembles privateering, but privateering requires evidence the operating company retained a beneficial interest or share of recoveries, and/or that the NPE asserts on the operating company's behalf. What the record actually shows is an outright April-2012 sale of the ATI portfolio to AVS. I therefore mark this unclear and do not claim privateering.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT.
The chain terminates at American Vehicular Sciences LLC / Acacia — an asserting entity — not at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. Inverse signal absent; the patent was litigated, not neutralized by aggregation.

Additional litigation-loss context (relevant to value, not to NPE status):

• ATI v. Siemens VDO, 2:06-cv-15756 (E.D. Mich.) ended in plaintiff's loss / non-infringement (KIPO litigation table: "원고패소, 미침해"), and the '201 patent claims were dismissed by stipulated order on 2009-02-03 following the Nov. 11, 2008 Markman order.
• ATI's foundational '253 patent was held invalid for lack of enablement (ATI v. BMW, 501 F.3d 1274 (Fed. Cir. 2007)), and ATI's '516/'080/'029/'945 patents were held invalid/anticipated in ATI v. Delphi (776 F. Supp. 2d 469, E.D. Mich. 2011).
• Consistent with a low expected value, this patent lapsed for unpaid maintenance fees on 2013-11-02 even while under AVS ownership — AVS let individual family members drop rather than maintain the whole portfolio.

Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

Two strong signals are independently documented: (i) a shell/licensing-entity transfer on 2012-04-10, moving the patent from operating assignee ATI to American Vehicular Sciences LLC, a Texas LLC formed 2012-01-19 with a registered-agent service address and no products; and (ii) a known asserter in the chain — AVS is a subsidiary of Acacia Research Group LLC / Acacia Research Corporation, and it filed 30+ automotive infringement suits in 2012–2014 while its Breed-family patents drew Unified Patents- and Toyota-filed IPRs. The absence of cascaded LLC transfers and of any pre-'201-suit transfer does not weaken the verdict, because the asserter-facing facts (Acacia parentage + assertion campaign) are the dispositive ones. The patent's subsequent fee lapse (2013-11-02) further indicates a portfolio-enforcement posture in which weaker members were abandoned.

Verify: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 7,097,201) · Google Patents legal events — https://patents.google.com/patent/US7097201/en

I'll research the prior-art references cited for US 7,097,201, focusing strictly on that patent number.

Let me retrieve the actual "References Cited" (patent citations) list for US 7,097,201 specifically.

Let me get the exact cited-references list for 7,097,201 itself (not its siblings).

Prior Art for U.S. Patent No. 7,097,201 ("Side impact sensor systems")

Methodology and a necessary source caveat

I ran targeted searches for the literal identifier 7,097,201 and for its face-of-patent citations. Two things you should know before using anything below:

1. What I could retrieve: the Google Patents full text of US 7,097,201 (including the specification's own in-text citations), the Justia "References Cited" listing for the same-specification sibling US 7,334,657 (a continuation of the same application family — US 11/467,239 filed 2006-08-25), and the Google Patents family/US20050242555 page for the 11/174,837 family.
2. What I could NOT retrieve in this session: a direct render of the "Patent Citations" (form PTO-892 / "References Cited" 56-list) table on the Google Patents page for 7,097,201 itself, and I could not query USPTO Patent Center / PAIR directly. Because 7,097,201 and 7,334,657 share substantially the same specification and drawings and were filed about 13 months apart by the same assignee, their examiner-cited reference lists are expected to be nearly identical — but I am presenting the list below as the family reference list, and I flag where a specific entry is only confirmed for the sibling. Where the specification body of 7,097,201 itself names a reference, that is confirmed for '201.

Also confirmed from the previously generated section: the '201 is a continuation chain landing on earliest priority 1993-09-16 (via 08/101,017 → US 5,842,716). Several siblings list 1991-07-09 as priority. This matters for §102 dates; I note it where relevant and report both literally rather than harmonize.

A. U.S. patent references cited (the "References Cited" / box-56 list)

The following is the U.S.-patent reference list associated with the '201 specification/continuation family (retrieved via the Justia reference listing for US 7,334,657 and cross-checked against the '201 Google Patents text). Dates are the listed grant/publication dates.

Foreign/non-patent counterparts: The Justia/Google listings also reflect the family's foreign search-report citations, but I could not confirm any foreign patent document was cited on the face of 7,097,201 itself; I therefore do not list foreign patent documents as face-of-'201 citations rather than risk fabricating them.

B. Non-patent literature cited (same family reference listing)

• "A Critique of Single Point Sensing," D. Breed et al., SAE Paper No. 920124, Feb. 1992. — Expressly cited in the '201 specification body (the "crush zone sensing" rationale). §102(b) printed-publication art for the sensing-philosophy limitations of claim 1.
• "Sensing Side Impacts," D.S. Breed et al., SAE Paper No. 940561 (listed Feb 28, 1994 – Mar 3, 2004). — §102(a)/(b) art depending on the critical date; bears on side-impact sensing with an accelerometer + algorithm (claim 1).
• "Trends in Sensing Side Impacts," V. Castelli, SAE Paper No. 890603, Feb 27 – Mar 3, 1989. — §102(b) art for side-impact sensing concepts.
• "New Sensor Developments Leading to Sensor System Simplification," R.W. Diller, SAE Paper No. 841218, Oct 1–4, 1984. — §102(b) art for sensor/accelerometer design.
• "Side Impact Airbag System Technology," D.S. Breed, International Body Engineering Conference, Sep 26–29, 1994.
• "Airbag System for Side Impact Protection," J.A. Olsson et al., 12th International Technical Conference on Experimental Safety Vehicles, Proc. Vol. 2, May 29 – Jun 1, 1989, pp. 976–983.
• "Inflatable Structures for Enhanced Side Impact Crash Protection," Collision Safety Engineering Inc.
• "Crash Protection in Near Side Impact, Advantages of a Supplemental Restraint," C.Y. Warner et al. (SAE International Congress and Exposition, Feb 27 – Mar 3, 1989).
• SBIR Proposal 87-NH2, May 1, 1987, pp. 5–23.
• "A Perspective on Side Impact Occupant Crash Protection," C.Y. Warner et al., SAE Technical Paper Series 900373, Mar 7, 1990 (appears in related ATI/AVS PTAB records).

C. References named inside the '201 specification body (confirmed for '201)

These are cited in the "BACKGROUND"/"OBJECTS" and Detailed Description text of 7,097,201 itself, and are the ones an examiner or litigant would treat as the operative art:

D. Anticipation analysis by claim

Important caveat on the §102 analysis: none of the cited third-party references appears to disclose, in a single document, the combination required by independent claim 1 — namely (i) an electronic side-impact crash sensor, (ii) a sensor housing in a door/between inner and outer side panels, (iii) a laterally movable sensing mass, (iv) a microprocessor with an algorithm generating/analyzing a time-varying signal and outputting a deployment signal, and (v) a control unit. So my characterization is:

• Claim 1 — No cited reference provides a clean single-reference §102 anticipation of the full combination, primarily because the electronic algorithm/microprocessor element is absent from the mechanical-era art. The reference most worth assessing is US 4,966,388 (Warner), which supplies the door-mounted airbag + door-mounted impact sensor arrangement but not the electronic sensing/algorithm. Everything else (Thuen, Breed '141, '350, '549) supplies sensor/mass features but not the side-door electronic package. Expect these to be §103 combination art rather than standalone §102 art.
• Claim 8 (vehicle claim, side-impact airbag with a movable-mass crash sensor) — US 4,966,388 (Warner, 1990) is the most plausible §102 reference for the side-impact, in-door airbag-plus-sensor arrangement; US 4,580,810 (Thuen) and US 5,233,141 (Breed) supply the movable-mass sensor limitations. Because the dependent claims of 8 recite mounting location ("in contact with a side door assembly or a side panel assembly … between the centers of the front and rear wheels") and a piezo-electric accelerometer, those dependents are where Warner/Breed-type art bites hardest.
• Claim 18 (self-contained modular airbag system with its own power supply and a diagnostic system) — Warner (in-door airbag+sensor) does not disclose the self-contained module/backup-power/diagnostic elements; the cited sensor art does not either. §103 art at best. Note the '201's own background identifies the separate-diagnostic/backup-power arrangement as the prior-art norm, which helps explain why claim 18's self-contained power+diagnostic limitation was the differentiator.
• Claim 29 (self-contained module + movable-mass sensor + power supply + diagnostic) — same analysis as claim 18, with the movable-mass limitation supplied by Thuen / Breed '141 / Mausner '732 and the module/power/diagnostic limitations absent from the cited art.

Same-inventor issue to flag: several of the strongest-looking references (US 3,974,350; 4,329,549; 4,666,182; 4,711,466; 4,900,880; 4,995,639; 5,231,253; 5,233,141) are David S. Breed's own patents. Under pre-AIA §102(a), a reference must be "by others" to be anticipatory, and under §102(b) an inventor's own publication within the one-year grace period is not a statutory bar. So these are more properly §102(e) or §103 art (or simply background), not clean §102(a)/(b) anticipations against claims 1/8/18/29. I flag this rather than treat them as straightforward anticipatory art.

Date discipline for §102: with the '201's earliest effective priority of 1993-09-16 (as recorded for '201), the §102(b) one-year critical date is approximately 1992-09-16, so the 1975–1991 references fall under §102(b) and the 1992–1993 references (SAE 920124, SAE 940561; US 5,231,253; US 5,233,141) fall under §102(a) or, for the Breed patents, the same-inventor exceptions. If the operative priority is instead 1991-07-09 (as listed for the siblings), the §102(b) date shifts to ~1990-07-09, which would move several 1990–1991 references (e.g., US 4,966,388 Warner, US 4,980,573, US 4,985,835, US 4,987,316, US 4,995,639) to §102(a) rather than §102(b). I report both priority dates literally and do not resolve the discrepancy.

E. Confidence statement

• High confidence: the identity of the material art cited within the '201 specification — US 4,580,810 (Thuen), US 4,711,466 (Breed), US 5,231,253 (Breed et al.), US 5,233,141 (Breed) — the parent documents US 5,842,716 and US 6,419,265, and the NPL item SAE 920124. These are directly evidenced in the '201 full text.
• Moderate confidence: the broader box-56 U.S.-patent list above. I retrieved it from the same-specification sibling US 7,334,657, not from a direct render of the '201 face page. Given the shared specification and same assignee/examiner family, the lists are expected to be near-identical, but I have not verified each entry against the '201's own printed front page.
• Lower confidence / not independently verified: the one-line descriptions of several older references (Matsui, Fox, Pulling, Abbondante, etc.) for which I could not pull the abstract text in this session — I have marked those "Background" rather than invent a description.
• Explicit uncertainty: I did not query USPTO Patent Center/PAIR or the examiner's PTO-892 for 7,097,201 directly. For a certified "every reference cited on the face of 7,097,201," the authoritative sources are the '201 front-page "(56) References Cited" block and the PTO-892 in the 11/174,837 file wrapper. I recommend those be pulled to confirm the exact box-56 list before this analysis is used for anything load-bearing.

Contradiction flagged: the previously generated "Patent summary" section noted the 1993-09-16 vs. 1991-07-09 priority-date discrepancy for this family; that discrepancy is material to the §102 critical dates above and is carried forward here unresolved, as instructed.