US 7257426

I'll search for authoritative records on this patent number across USPTO and Federal Circuit sources.

Let me dig into the claims text and any litigation/appeal history.

Search Report — US Patent 7,257,426

Important scope note up front: I ran targeted web searches for the exact string "7257426" in combination with patent, claim, litigation, and Federal Circuit 2026 terms. I did not have direct programmatic access to USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Public Search or to the CAFC PACER docket system in this session, so treat the "no 2026 CAFC activity found" statement as a search-result observation, not a certified docket clearance. I also did not auto-correct any identifier; everything below is as returned by the sources.

1. Bibliographic data (high confidence — corroborated by the authoritative patent text and multiple sources)

Two discrepancies worth flagging (I am not resolving them as fact):

• The USPTO assignment record lists Robert F. Buege as an assignor alongside the four named inventors, but Buege does not appear on the printed inventor list on the patent face.
• Third-party PCT search-report extracts render the inventor name as "MITKOWSKI TODO R" and the applicant as "JOHNSON CONTROLS INTERIORS TEC" — these are OCR corruptions of "Witkowski, Todd R." and "Johnson Controls Technology," not separate parties. I flag this because the instructions require literal reading of identifiers; the literal strings are erroneous OCR, not distinct entities.

Family notes (useful for claim-scope context): related publications/patents sharing this specification include US 2002/0197955 A1, US 2003/0228879 A1, US 2008/0045274 A1, and US 7,346,374; US 7,349,722; US 7,970,446; US 8,494,449; US 9,094,802; US 9,318,017 — all Witkowski et al. (Google Patents / Justia "cited by" tables).

2. Abstract (verbatim from the authoritative text)

"A wireless communications system and method adapted for use in automotive applications for enabling automatic, high-speed, wireless voice and/or data communications link to be established between a wide variety of external devices and various electronic subsystems of a vehicle. The apparatus includes first and second RF transceivers which are operated in accordance with a communications specification to enable a seamless, automatic communications link to be created when the two RF transceivers come within a pre-determined proximity of one another, for example, within up to 100 meters of one another. Information from one device is then automatically transmitted over the wireless communications link to the other device. In various implementations the apparatus is used to obtain information from a home PC, a work PC, a notebook PC and various other electronic devices, as well as information from the Internet, which is displayed and/or played back for the user by various subsystems of the vehicle while traveling in the vehicle. Other applications involving retail and manufacturing applications are disclosed by which the apparatus is used to facilitate and/or expedite manufacturing processes or retail transactions via one or more high-speed, secure, wireless communications links which are created automatically and seamlessly between the RF transceivers of the apparatus of the invention."

3. Independent claims — plain-language overview

Coverage caveat: My searches retrieved verbatim claim text only for claims 15–26. I could not retrieve verbatim text for claims 1–14, so the descriptions of the earliest independent claims below are inferences from claim dependencies (flagged as such) and should be verified against the official claim set before being relied on.

Independent claims I can identify with confidence:

• Claim 18 — Vehicle wireless communication system (hands-free phone). A microphone in the vehicle interior picks up the occupant's voice; a Bluetooth-compatible transceiver in the vehicle converts those voice messages into wireless data per the Bluetooth standard and sends them wirelessly and directly to a hand-held wireless phone that is external to the transceiver but located within the vehicle; a speaker is coupled to the transceiver; the transceiver also receives voice back from the phone and plays it through the speaker, and can place a call via the phone based on numbers spoken into the microphone. Plainly: a car-side Bluetooth puck that turns a phone in the car into a hands-free speakerphone with voice dialing.
• Claim 22 — Automobile wireless communications system. A microphone and a speaker in the automobile interior, plus a first Bluetooth transceiver in the automobile interior that communicates wirelessly and directly with a second Bluetooth transceiver in a hand-held cellular phone (phone external to the first transceiver, inside the automobile), and a system coupled to mic/speaker/transceiver that enables hands-free use of the phone, places calls from spoken numbers relayed over the transceivers, receives voice messages from the phone, and delivers them to the occupant through the speaker.

Dependent claims confirming the feature set (verbatim, high confidence): claim 19 adds a recording/playback system for recording microphone audio; claim 20 recites link establishment when the phone comes into proximity; claim 21 adds a display for data received from the phone; claim 23 adds display of incoming call information; claim 24 adds a "low battery" warning for the phone; claim 25 adds a speech recording/playback function; claim 26 recites wired connections between the system and the mic/speaker/transceiver.

Independent method claims (text not retrieved — inferred from dependents, LOW confidence):

• Claim 10 appears to be an independent method claim involving a radio frequency transmitter, a microphone, and vehicle power; dependent claim 16 adds "receiving vehicle power from the vehicle battery," and dependent claim 17 adds that "the radio frequency transmitter is configured to communicate over a limited range under about 100 meters."
• Claim 13 appears to be an independent method claim involving recording audio signals; dependent claim 15 adds "playing back the recorded audio signals via a speaker of the vehicle-installed audio system."
• Claim 1 is presumed independent (an apparatus/system claim), but I have no retrieved text for it.

Claim count: the highest claim number surfaced is claim 26, with no claim 27 preceding the "Patent History" section on the Justia page — so the patent likely has 26 claims with roughly five independents (1, 10, 13, 18, 22). Treat the independent-claim set as probable, not confirmed.

Practical characterization: notwithstanding the very broad abstract (retail transactions, assembly-line diagnostics, gas-pump kiosks, home PCs, internet "push"), the issued claims are narrow and centered on the Bluetooth hands-free cellular-telephone-in-a-vehicle implementation of the FIG. 8 "Travelnote®" embodiment (specifically incorporated U.S. Pat. No. 5,810,420).

4. Litigation / Federal Circuit status

• No Federal Circuit 2026 docket naming this patent was found. My 2026 CAFC searches surfaced only an unrelated appeal: Contour IP Holding LLC v. GoPro, Inc., Fed. Cir. No. 2026-2012 (appeal from N.D. Cal. Nos. 3:17-cv-04738-WHO and 3:21-cv-02143-WHO), which does not involve 7257426.
• Searches for "7,257,426" plus Visteon/district-court terms returned no court documents tied to this patent number in the result set I obtained. I therefore cannot confirm or deny that this patent has been asserted in litigation or challenged at the PTAB; my retrieved sources simply did not produce such a record, and I have no high-confidence recollection of a specific 2026 appeal involving it.
• The patent's legal status per the authoritative record is Expired – Fee Related (anticipated expiration 2020-05-26), which limits the practical likelihood of new 2026 appellate activity, though it does not foreclose it.

5. Sources

• Authoritative patent text supplied for this analysis (Google Patents, https://patents.google.com/patent/US7257426/en), fetched 2026-09-28.
• Justia Patents, US 7,257,426 — claim text for claims 15–26, inventor/assignee/examiner/attorney data: https://patents.justia.com/patent/7257426
• Espacenet citation record confirming inventor set, original assignee (Johnson Controls Tech Co), US7257426 (B1), 2007-08-14, priority 1999-05-26.
• WO 00/72463 A family/ISR extracts confirming US 7257426 B1 as a family member (publication 14-08-2007).

Uncertainty summary: bibliographic data and claims 15–26 are well-corroborated; the identity/text of independent claims 1, 10, and 13 is a reasoned inference from dependencies and needs confirmation against the official claim set; the total claim count of 26 and the "no CAFC 2026 involvement" conclusion are search-limited findings, not certified negatives.

I'll search for litigation records involving US 7,257,426.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me check litigation-specific sources directly.

Bottom line

I found no litigation asserting U.S. Patent No. 7,257,426. Based on my searches, there is no known district court action, ITC investigation, or PTAB proceeding in which US 7,257,426 is identified as a patent-in-suit. I cannot give you plaintiff/defendant/jurisdiction/case number/outcome entries because I found none — not because the entries are being withheld.

I want to be explicit about the evidentiary limits here: my only tool in this session was general web search, and I was cut off after several queries. I could not directly query the Unified Patents litigation portal, Docket Navigator, RPX Insight, PACER, or the PTAB API by patent number. So treat this as "no litigation identified," not "no litigation exists" — a targeted docket search remains warranted before you rely on it.

What the record does show for US 7,257,426

From the authoritative full text (Google Patents, https://patents.google.com/patent/US7257426/en):

Two points worth flagging for you as counsel:

1. The docket/transaction history on the patent's own landing page shows only prosecution and assignment events — no litigation events. Google Patents surfaces a "Litigation" panel when it has court data tied to a patent; none appears for this number.
2. The patent lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees and its term ran out in 2020, which is a strong practical reason no assertion activity is visible: even if an action existed, the damages window closed in 2020 and there is no live injunctive leverage.

Related cases that are NOT this patent — do not conflate

My searches repeatedly surfaced cases involving the same owner (Visteon) and the same technology space (vehicle/Bluetooth/wireless). None of them asserted 7,257,426, and I list them only to help you rule them out:

• Visteon Global Technologies, Inc. v. [Garmin International, Inc.](/litigations/by-defendant/Garmin%20International%2C%20Inc.), No. 2:10-cv-10578 (E.D. Mich., filed Feb. 2010). The asserted patents were U.S. 5,544,060; 5,654,892; 5,832,408; 5,987,375; and 6,097,316 — all navigation-related Visteon patents. US 7,257,426 is not among them.
• Daedalus Prime LLC v. Arrow Electronics, Inc. et al., No. 1:22-cv-01107 (D. Del.). Visteon appears as a defendant, but the patents-in-suit belong to plaintiff Daedalus Prime, not Visteon — so 7,257,426 is not at issue on the plaintiff side.
• Various Omega Patents, LLC vehicle-telematics cases (M.D. Fla. and elsewhere) involve unrelated patent numbers.

Two false-positive traps I encountered

Searching the bare string "426" produces hits for entirely different patents that are abbreviated the same way as "the '426 patent":

• A cell-culture patent family ('426/'427/'443/'192) litigated by Wilson Wolf / Corning.
• A Medidea LLC knee-prosthesis '426 patent asserted against DePuy.

Neither is US 7,257,426. Any future search should anchor on the full seven-digit number or on "Witkowski" / "Johnson Controls" / "Visteon" as co-filters.

Recommended next steps before you rely on this

1. Query Unified Patents' litigation caselist (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) and RPX Insight filtered on patent number 7257426.
2. Run a CourtListener RECAP docket search on "7,257,426" and on "7257426".
3. Check PTAB for any IPR/PGR/CBM naming 7,257,426 as the challenged patent (none surfaced in my searches, but I could not query the PTAB API directly).
4. If you need to be certain about pre-2015 assertions, note that Johnson Controls Technology Company held the patent until the 2015 assignment to Visteon, so suits (if any) could have been filed under either name.

I'd rather tell you plainly that I could not confirm any case than hand you a case number I haven't verified. If you can grant more search steps or point me at a specific docket database, I'll run the patent-number queries directly and report the result either way.

I'll start by searching for any PTAB proceedings involving this patent, since the structured ODP block reports none.

Search results so far are false-positive matches to other patents numbered "...426" (e.g., 5,414,426 and 8,327,426). Let me search more precisely.

A USPTO PTAB petition filing (ptacts.uspto.gov ID 1463918) surfaced with the 7,257,426 front page. Let me dig into that and the referenced IPR number.

Let me run two more targeted searches to determine whether any real proceeding exists on this patent.

I'll start by verifying the assignment records and the corporate context behind the two recorded transfers.

Let me verify whether US7257426 left Visteon's hands (the IP Bridge result is worth checking) and whether it has ever been litigated.

The IP Bridge transfer needs verification — I need to know whether US7257426 was in that Visteon portfolio.

Ownership & Assignment Reconstruction — US 7,257,426 B1

"Wireless communications systems and method" · App. 09/979,199 · Priority 1999-05-26 · Filed 2000-05-26 · Issued 2007-08-14 · Status: Expired – Fee Related

Evidence note up front. I was able to retrieve the Google Patents legal-events record and corroborating third-party assignee records (Unified Patents portal), but I was not able to pull the USPTO Assignment Center / assignment.uspto.gov rows for this patent in this session. Google Patents' legal-events table does not publish reel/frame numbers, and I will not invent them. Every reel/frame field below is therefore marked as unretrieved rather than populated. Nothing in this report is sourced to a reel/frame I did not actually see.

Inventors

Notes and anomalies:

• The 2002-04-29 recorded assignment lists five assignors: Beuge, Robert F.; Dykema, Kurt A.; Geerlings, Steven L.; Witkowski, Todd R.; Zeinstra, Mark L. Robert F. Beuge is not a named inventor on the face of US 7,257,426. That is a routine pattern where a non-inventor employee (typically a JCI patent-ops or engineering manager) executes the confirmatory assignment on the company's behalf — but it is worth flagging because it means the recorded assignor set ≠ the inventorship set.
• Employer inference is well grounded: the specification itself identifies the Travelnote® speech recording/playback system and the Homelink® trainable transceiver as "proprietary to the assignee of the present application." Those were Johnson Controls (Prince Corporation) products, which places the inventive group squarely inside JCI's automotive electronics organization.
• Departure/fire-sale test: not determinable. I found no employment-tenure or departure data for any of the four inventors, and no evidence any of them left JCI within 12 months of filing. I am explicitly not asserting the "inventors depart → portfolio fire-sale" pattern here; the data is simply absent.

Original assignee

Johnson Controls Technology Company (a subsidiary of Johnson Controls, Inc., NYSE: JCI at the time) — named on the issued patent; listed by Google Patents as "Original Assignee."

• Primary line of business: Johnson Controls Technology Company was the IP-holding vehicle for JCI's automotive businesses (interiors, seating, and — relevant here — the automotive electronics group that produced Homelink®, Travelnote®, and in-car Bluetooth hands-free/telematics modules).
• Product embodiment: yes, at least arguably. The specification describes commercial JCI products (Homelink®, Travelnote®) and the claims are directed to automatic proximity-triggered short-range RF linking between a portable device and vehicle subsystems — i.e., a Bluetooth hands-free / car-kit architecture that JCI was actively building in 1999–2002. This is not a paper-only filing.
• Current status: Johnson Controls Technology Company's automotive electronics business was divested to Visteon Corporation (the transaction widely reported at ~$265M and closing in 2014; the corresponding patent-recordation batch appears on the 2015-02-25 legal event). I was not able to open the JCI 10-K/8-K filings in this session to independently confirm terms and closing date — treat the deal economics as reported, not verified here. The residual JCT entity's present corporate status (operating IP subsidiary vs. wound down after the 2016 JCI/Tyco merger) is unclear from the sources I could reach; I will not guess.

Assignment timeline

Only two post-filing assignment events are recorded for this patent on Google Patents. Reel/frame and correspondent-of-record are not available in the sources retrieved; they must be read directly from Assignment Center.

• 2002-04-29 (executed date not shown) / recorded 2002-04-29 — Reel/Frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest (confirmatory/employment assignment)
  • Assignor: Beuge, Robert F.; Dykema, Kurt A.; Geerlings, Steven L.; Witkowski, Todd R.; Zeinstra, Mark L. (individually)
  • Assignee: Johnson Controls Technology Company
  • Correspondent: not retrieved (Google Patents does not publish it)
  • Context: Routine inventor→employer confirmatory assignment, recorded ~2 years after the 2000-05-26 PCT filing — consistent with recordation at PCT national-stage entry rather than a distressed or strategic transfer.

• 2015-02-25 / recorded 2015-02-25 — Reel/Frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest
  • Assignor: Johnson Controls Technology Company
  • Assignee: VISTEON GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Corporate divestiture — bulk transfer of JCI's automotive electronics patent estate to Visteon Corporation following Visteon's acquisition of that JCI business unit. An operating-company-to-operating-company asset transfer, not a monetization vehicle.

• 2020-05-26 — Anticipated expiration (not an assignment). Google Patents status: Expired – Fee Related.

Open item requiring a live Assignment Center pull (I could not confirm this, and it materially changes the verdict if true): A PTAB submission in petition 1554395 reproduces a Visteon "Reassignment (US)" table showing Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 as assignee of Visteon Global Technologies Inc., executed 2015-02-13, recorded 2015-04-16, reel 035421/0739, with a recorded correspondent of Timothy Devlin, 1306 N. Broom Street, 1st Floor, Wilmington, DE 19806. Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 is the INCJ-backed Japanese patent fund that litigated Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 v. TCL Communication Technology Holdings, D. Del. 1:15-cv-00634. However, both Google Patents and the Unified Patents portal page for US‑7257426 list the current assignee as Visteon Global Technologies Inc., and no 2015-04-16 event appears in this patent's legal-events chain — so on the available evidence US 7,257,426 is not among the patents in reel 035421/0739. Verify by pulling reel 035421/0739 in Assignment Center.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7257426
    1999 : Priority application filed
    2000 : PCT application filed
    2002 : Inventors assign to Johnson Controls
    2007 : Patent issued 2007-08-14
    2015 : Johnson Controls sells auto electronics to Visteon
         : Assignment recorded 2015-02-25
    2020 : Patent term expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Additional non-signal finding: the patent reached its 2020-05-26 expiration and is recorded Expired – Fee Related. Whatever the ownership outcome, the asset is now unassertable — assertion risk from this patent is zero regardless of the reel 035421/0739 question.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion (closest available fit — caveated).

Justification: the entire recorded chain consists of operating entities — inventors → Johnson Controls Technology Company (recorded 2002-04-29) → Visteon Global Technologies, Inc. (recorded 2015-02-25) — with no shell LLC, no known NPE, no cascading transfers, no defensive aggregator, and no correspondent recurrence. Caveat, stated plainly: the taxonomy's "operating-company assertion" bucket requires the owner to be suing actual competitors, and I found no infringement suit naming US 7,257,426; strictly, this is operating-company ownership with no observed assertion, and the taxonomy has no bucket for that. The single item that could overturn the call is an unverified lead — if US 7,257,426 turns out to sit inside reel 035421/0739 (Visteon → Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1, exec. 2015-02-13, rec. 2015-04-16), the verdict would flip to NPE — moderate confidence on the strength of a known-asserter assignee, though the 2020-05-26 expiration would neutralize it. Verify that reel before relying on this verdict.

Verify at:

• USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 7257426; also https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html)
• Google Patents legal events — https://patents.google.com/patent/US7257426/en
• Unified Patents portal — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-7257426-B1
• IP Bridge lead source (PTAB petition 1554395 exhibit) — https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/1554395/download-documents
• Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 v. TCL docket — https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/Delaware_District_Court/1--15-cv-00634/Godo_Kaisha_IP_Bridge_1_v._TCL_Communication_Technology_Holdings_Limited_et_al/

I'll research US patent 7257426 and its cited prior art.

Let me get the specific citation list for this patent.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent 7,257,426

1. Identification (verified)

I located and confirmed the patent, and the record matches the authoritative full text supplied in my working materials.

Source: the patent's authoritative full text (Google Patents full-text mirror of the USPTO document), https://patents.google.com/patent/US7257426/en

Honest caveat on sourcing: I do not have a direct USPTO API/PatentCenter query tool in this session. My searches reached (a) the patent's own full text, (b) Google Patents' US full-text record (which is derived from the USPTO document), and (c) Espacenet. Everything below is labelled with its actual provenance so you can see exactly what is verified versus what is not. I deliberately did not substitute results for other numbers.

2. Critical dates — the § 102 framework that actually governs

This matters more than the citation list, because it tells you which references can be § 102 art at all:

• § 102(b) statutory-bar date: May 26, 1998 (one year before the May 26, 2000 filing date; the provisional was filed May 26, 1999, so it cannot push this date back).
• § 102(a) / (e) / (g) reference date: May 26, 1999 (the provisional's filing date, carried into the non-provisional).
• Any reference dated on or after May 26, 1999 can only be § 102(e) art (U.S. patent/applications with earlier effective filing dates) or § 102(a) art if actually published before May 26, 1999 — not § 102(b) art.

Consequently, the 1998–1999 Bluetooth-era materials (Bluetooth specification, Haartsen's Ericsson Review paper, etc.) sit on or around the § 102(a)/102(b) boundary and must be individually date-checked. Note the patent itself evidences the Bluetooth standard as of 1999, which means the standard and its 1998 publications are the most dangerous art class for this family.

3. What I could NOT verify — stated plainly

I was unable to retrieve US 7,257,426's own "Patent Citations" (backward citation) list in this session. Because the rules require that I not fabricate, I am not going to produce a numbered list of citations and attribute them to this patent.

Why this matters for your request: you asked for "each patent citation for 7257426" with an anticipation mapping. I can give you the framework and the candidate set, but a fabricated citation table would be worse than no table.

What I did retrieve — and each of these is a different document's citation set, not US 7,257,426's:

1. US 2006/0168627 A1 – System and method for configuring a wireless communication system in a vehicle (Johnson Controls), lists 26 patent citations, and itself cites US 7,257,426 B1 among them. That table includes: US 32,048; US 48,622; US 90,279; US 110,472; US 197,955; US 203,379; US 228,879; US 5,717,387; US 5,278,759; US 5,535,274; US 5,557,656; US 5,555,498; US 6,532,374; US 6,542,758; US 2003/0060211 A1; US 7,257,426 B1; US 7,349,722 B2; US 6,954,657 B2; US 6,990,338 B2; US 7,003,316 B1; US 7,027,781 B2 …
   Provenance: Google Patents page for US 2006/0168627 A1 — this is that publication's citation list.
2. US 6,134,456 – Integrated mobile-phone handsfree kit combining with vehicular stereo loudspeakers — its citation/cited-by set includes US 5,722,069 (Donner, Inc., 1998-02-24), US 5,754,962 (Ericsson, 1998-05-19), US 5,867,794 (Ericsson, 1999-02-02), US 5,991,640 (Ericsson, 1999-11-23), US 6,301,491 B1 (Samsung, 2001-10-09), US 6,304,764 B1 (Priority Tech, 2001-10-16).
   Provenance: Google Patents page for US 6,134,456 — not US 7,257,426's list.
3. A non-patent-literature set (Haartsen, "Bluetooth – The Universal Radio Interface for AD HOC, Wireless Connectivity", Ericsson Review No. 9, 1998, pp. 110–117, XP000783249; Jaap C. Haartsen, "The Bluetooth Radio System", IEEE Personal Communications, Feb. 2000, pp. 28–36; The Jini Architecture Specification, Sun Microsystems v1.0, Jan. 1999; Hafner, "Want a Soda? Phone it in…", Sun Sentinel, Mar. 12, 2000; Kujubu, "Phones used for cashless buys", InfoWorld, Jul. 19, 1999; Ringle, "The Sell Phone Dial 'M' for Munchies", Washington Post, Jun. 19, 1999; Reid, "Net Profits at the Pump?", National Petroleum News, Jan. 2000; English abstracts of JP H04-253695 and JP H08-249530; ISRs for PCT/IB2001/001841 and PCT/IB2001/001853; Notice of Allowance in U.S. Appl. No. 10/363,060).
   Provenance problem: the same snippet includes "Notice of Allowance in U.S. Appl. No. 10/363,060" and ISRs from 2001 PCT applications. On its face this NPL set belongs to the later Johnson Controls case (U.S. 10/363,060 → US 2004/0110472 A1), not to US 7,257,426's 1999–2000 IDS. I therefore will not represent these as US 7,257,426 citations. Several of them (Hafner 2000; Reid 2000; Haartsen IEEE Feb. 2000) also post-date the § 102(b) bar date, so they could not be § 102(b) art against this patent anyway.

4. Verified reference actually cited inside US 7,257,426

One citation is verifiable directly from the authoritative text, and it is the specification's only incorporated-by-reference U.S. patent:

• U.S. Pat. No. 5,810,420 — cited in the FIG. 8 embodiment: "The Travelnote® recording/playback system 80 is described in detail in U.S. Pat. No. 5,810,420, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference."
  • Relevance: this is the assignee's own in-vehicle voice record/playback system. It is cited as § 112 enablement support, not as prior art. It is nevertheless useful to you because it defines the "second transceiver subsystem inside the vehicle" side of the FIG. 8 hands-free claim set. As an incorporated reference it cannot anticipate the claims it is used to enable.

The patent also cites the non-patent source www.bluetooth.com and describes the Bluetooth specification's parameters in detail: 2.4 GHz ISM band, 1600 hops/second frequency hopping, encryption and authentication built in, automatic output-power adaptation, −70 dBm receiver sensitivity, 0 dBm nominal / 20 dBm maximum output, ~10 m range at 0 dBm / ~100 m with an external PA, <1 Mbit/s max data rate, 64 kbit/s voice channel, 2–8 device piconets with parked devices and scatternets, and SWAP-CA as an alternative (2.4 GHz, 2 Mbit/s).

Consequence: the specification's own admissions make the Bluetooth specification (v1.0, published 1999) and the Haartsen Ericsson Review article the single most probative art class for any claim reciting "automatic," "ad hoc," proximity-triggered establishment on the 2.4 GHz ISM band with frequency hopping and encryption. Any such claim element is effectively admitted prior art by the patentee.

5. Claim-mapping limitation (important)

The authoritative text I was given does not include the claims section — the fetched document is truncated in the description at FIG. 11 and goes straight to Classifications/Abstract/Description. The Abstract is present, but the numbered claims are not.

Therefore I cannot responsibly assign "which claim(s) it potentially anticipates under 35 U.S.C. § 102" to individual references, because I do not have the claim language in front of me. Anything I wrote there would be invented. Two honest options:

• If you supply the claim text (or grant me a fetch of the Claims tab of the record), I will do the element-by-element § 102 mapping.
• Or, use the Abstract-derived scope statement as a provisional test: the claims almost certainly require (i) first RF transceiver in a portable electronic device, (ii) second RF transceiver in a vehicle, (iii) automatic link establishment without user command upon coming within a predetermined proximity, and (iv) transfer of voice and/or data to a vehicle subsystem (audio/display). Element (iii) — "without any command being input" — is the likely point of novelty and the likely battleground for § 102.

6. Candidate prior art worth running down (with provenance and my confidence)

Based on the vintage-appropriate references actually encountered in the same field and family neighbourhood. Treat these as leads to verify against the real citation list, not as confirmed citations of US 7,257,426.

Explicitly not § 102 art: the co-pending same-priority Johnson Controls/Visteon continuations and divisionals — US 7,349,722; US 7,970,446; US 8,380,251; US 8,494,449; US 8,634,888; US 8,897,708; US 9,318,017; US 9,370,041; US 8,200,214; and US 2004/0110472 A1. Every one of these shares the May 26, 1999 priority date, so none can be prior art to US 7,257,426; they are relevant only for obviousness-type double patenting and for family/lineage purposes. Likewise EP 1,246,414 A2 and EP 1,852,836 A3 (EP 07013479) are foreign counterparts, not art.

7. Recommended next steps to close the gap

1. Pull the U.S. Patent Citation and Non-Patent Citation lists from the granted patent's front page (the "References Cited" block) — USPTO PatentCenter → US 09/979,199 → "References Cited", or the Google Patents "Patent Citations" tab, or Espacenet's cited documents view (worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/citedDocuments?CC=US&NR=7257426B1).
2. Also pull the IDS/file-wrapper contents for US 09/979,199, since a 1999 BT-era case will contain examiner-cited art that never made the printed face of the patent.
3. Retrieve the claims — mapping cannot proceed without them.
4. Cross-check the provisional 60/135,979 filing date against any candidate reference dated 1998-05-26 to 1999-05-26 to decide § 102(a) vs § 102(b) vs § 102(e).

Bottom line: US 7,257,426 is confirmed as U.S. 7,257,426 B1, Johnson Controls Technology/Visteon, priority May 26, 1999 (provisional 60/135,979). The one reference I can positively confirm as cited in the patent is U.S. Pat. No. 5,810,420 (incorporated by reference, § 112 support, not art). The candidate § 102 references I encountered — US 5,535,274, US 5,717,387, US 5,555,498, US 5,278,759, US 5,557,656, and the Ericsson US 6,532,374 / 6,542,758 pair — are the strongest leads in the correct date window, but I could not verify that they appear on US 7,257,426's own citation list, and I decline to present unverified citations as fact.

I'll gather the prior art and claim context before analyzing. Let me run several searches in parallel.

Let me pull the full claim set and the cited-references list.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 7,257,426 ("Wireless Communications Systems and Method")

Analyst note on scope and evidence. I am working from (a) the full patent text supplied for this analysis, (b) the previously generated PTAB section, and (c) live-search results obtained for the claim set and the front-page reference list. Two important caveats before the analysis, because they materially affect the conclusions:

1. Claim retrieval is incomplete. The Google Patents text supplied to me runs from the Abstract through the Description and omits the claims. The only verbatim claim text I could verify comes from the Justia record — claims 15–26, plus fragmentary text of claims 10–14. Claims 1–9 were not retrieved and I will not reconstruct them. The analysis below is therefore grounded on claims 10–26 (the "vehicle hands-free" claims), which is also where the commercially asserted subject matter (BlueConnect) resides.
2. "Prior Art section" scope. The prior-art material I could verify is a partial front-page reference list (US 4,731,811 Dubus; 4,875,229 Palett; 4,905,270 Ono; 5,584,052 Gulau; 5,625,673 Grewe; 5,651,056 Eting; 5,661,651 Geschke; 5,732,074 Spaur; 5,758,300; 5,810,420) plus references surfaced in search. Several front-page titles were not recovered, so where I rely on a reference's content I say so and hedge; where I only know the number, I say that too. I do not invent reference contents.

Contradiction flag (carried forward): The earlier PTAB section concluded no genuine PTAB proceeding exists on the '426, treating the ptacts.uspto.gov hit bearing the 7,257,426 banner image as a false positive. Nothing in my later searches disturbs that conclusion. However, the search results do show PTAB/litigation activity against family continuations (e.g., Simonds/Ekstrom/Ohmura/MOST-based IPRs on Johnson Controls/Witkowski hands-free continuations). Those are not proceedings on the '426 and must not be cited as such.

1. Governing law and critical date

The application is pre-AIA (filed 26 May 2000, priority to Provisional 60/135,979 filed 26 May 1999). The effective critical date is therefore 26 May 1999.

This date does real work:

Consequence: any obviousness case that leans on "the Bluetooth Specification v1.0" is date-fatal for claims entitled to the May 26, 1999 provisional. A challenger must establish the Bluetooth radio interface through the 1998 Haartsen article, the June 1998 "Comprehensive Description," the Bluetooth SIG website as archived pre-May 1999, or an analogous short-range ad-hoc RF publication. This is the single most important drafting vulnerability for the patent owner and the single most important proof burden for the challenger.

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

A POSITA as of May 1999 would be an engineer with a B.S. in EE/CS (or equivalent) and ~2–4 years' experience in one or more of: (i) short-range RF data links and radio modem design; (ii) automotive electronics/telematics and vehicle bus integration; (iii) portable telephony and hands-free car-kit design. The field is highly interdisciplinary and, critically, highly combinatorial — the '426 specification itself says the transceivers may be "any other suitable wireless communications specification," which is an admission that the RF layer was treated as a design choice.

3. Element breakdown of the verified claims

4. Grounds of rejection

Ground 1 — Vehicle hands-free car kit in view of the Bluetooth short-range RF interface (§103)

References: (i) an automotive hands-free system with vehicle microphone, vehicle speaker, and an interface for a portable cellular telephone — e.g., US 5,243,640 ("Integrated cellular telephone and vehicular audio system," Ford), US 5,864,794 ("Audio-output for a portable radio telephone utilizing a vehicle's AM/FM radio," Ericsson), US 5,754,962 ("Method and apparatus for indicating an operable or non-operable connection between a portable radio and a vehicle kit," Ericsson), US 5,991,640 ("Docking and electrical interface for personal use communication devices," Ericsson), US 6,134,456 ("Integrated mobile-phone handsfree kit combining with vehicular stereo loudspeakers"), and the hands-free telephone references on the '426 face (US 4,731,811; US 4,905,270); in view of (ii) Haartsen (1998) / the 1998 "Comprehensive Description of the Bluetooth System" / the Bluetooth SIG publications predating May 26, 1999.

Mapping:

• Vehicle mic + speaker + portable-phone interface → claims 10, 13, 15, 16, 18 (first three elements), 22 (first three elements), 26.
• Short-range RF, frequency-hopping, ad-hoc automatic link between a vehicle-side transceiver and a portable device → claim 20 (proximity-established link), claim 17 (~10 m at 0 dBm; ~100 m with a 20 dBm amplifier — the '426 specification states this is the Bluetooth class-1/class-2 trade-off).
• Transceiver "coupled to the vehicle" → claim 16 ("vehicle power from the vehicle battery") is a description of any hard-wired car-kit installation.
• "Wirelessly and directly … external to the Bluetooth-compatible transceiver and within the vehicle" → a Bluetooth point-to-point piconet link, which Haartsen describes as a direct, connectionless/cable-replacement link between two devices.

Motivation to combine (KSR/MPEP 2143–2144):

• Substitution of a known element for a known element to obtain a predictable result (MPEP 2144.01): replacing the hard-wired or cradle-coupled phone interface of a car kit with a short-range RF one, both being known means of coupling a portable phone to a vehicle audio system. The result — audio and microphone signals flowing between phone and car kit without a wire — is exactly what both references predict.
• Known technique used to improve a similar device in the same way (MPEP 2144.02 / KSR): wireless headsets and wireless LAN links were already known in 1998–99; Haartsen expressly frames Bluetooth as the cable-replacement interface for mobile telephones, notebooks, and PDAs.
• Design incentives / market forces: driver-distraction and hands-free concerns and the proliferation of incompatible proprietary cradles created an express market pull for a standardized, cableless car-to-phone link. The '426 specification's own Background admits the very problem the combination solves ("application specific" cabling; the lack of "an 'automatic' or 'unconscious' connection").
• Reasonable expectation of success: Bluetooth's 64 kbit/s voice channel and 2.4 GHz FH link were designed for exactly this telephony use case; the specification gives receiver sensitivity (−70 dBm) and range/power figures as matters of routine engineering.

Result: claims 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 20, 26 are the most exposed. Claim 17 in particular ("limited range under about 100 meters") is a range recitation that reads on a documented Bluetooth power class.

Ground 2 — Ground 1 in further view of the voice recording/playback system (claims 19 and 25)

Reference: US 5,810,420 (the Travelnote® recording/playback system), which the '426 expressly incorporates by reference and describes as existing commercial prior art.

Because the '426 incorporates '420 into its own disclosure, the patent owner cannot argue that '420 is outside the field. Claims 19 ("recording/playback system coupled to the microphone, the Bluetooth-compatible transceiver, and the speaker … configured to record voice messages") and 25 ("the system is configured to provide a speech recording/playback function") are met by combining the vehicle hands-free architecture of Ground 1 with the recording/playback function of '420 — a pure aggregation of two functions known to be independently useful with the same microphone and speaker. The motivation is at least the obvious design choice of sharing the microphone and speaker hardware already present for hands-free telephony.

Ground 3 — Ground 1 in further view of vehicle display / portable-phone status art (claims 21, 23, 24)

Claims 21 (display data received from the phone), 23 (display incoming-call information) and 24 (display a "low battery" warning) claim the display of phone status in the vehicle. The '426 specification itself treats this as an implementation detail ("Useful information received by the cellular phone 78 could even be displayed on a small portion of a rearview mirror … auxiliary phone annunciators, a 'low battery' warning"). A challenger would pair Ground 1 with any contemporaneous vehicle information display/telematics reference showing portable-phone status presentation in the vehicle. I could not retrieve a specific pre-1999 reference establishing this in the searches run, so I flag this ground as the least evidentially supported of the three.

Ground 4 — The voice-dial limitation (claims 18 and 22, and any corresponding independent claim)

Claims 18 and 22 require the vehicle-side system to "place a call via the hand-held wireless phone based on numbers spoken into the microphone." This is the only limitation in the verified claim set that is not squarely supplied by a car-kit + Bluetooth combination. To invalidate claims 18/22 (and claim 10/13 if they recite it — I could not verify their preambles), a challenger needs a pre-May-1999 reference teaching speech-recognized dialing through a portable telephone or a vehicle hands-free interface.

Candid assessment: I did not identify a specific pre-1999 voice-dialing reference in the material retrieved for this analysis. I can state only that (a) the '426 specification presents speech-based dialing as a capability of the claimed system, not as an ordered inventive step, and (b) voice recognition was an established 1990s-era telephony feature. Absent a documentary reference, this element should be logged as a genuine gap rather than assumed away. It is the strongest non-obviousness argument available to the patent owner on claims 18 and 22.

Ground 5 — "Direct" vs. relayed communication

Claims 18 and 22 use "wirelessly and directly" and "external to the Bluetooth-compatible transceiver and within the vehicle." If the patent owner is later permitted an amendment-style construction treating "directly" as excluding any intermediate network element (e.g., a vehicle gateway, a piconet master that forwards through a second node), the mapping tightens. Under its plain meaning, a single Bluetooth piconet link between the phone and the vehicle transceiver satisfies it; the limitation is likely to be treated as descriptive rather than distinguishing.

5. Patent owner's counterarguments (and their weight)

1. "Bluetooth did not exist as an available standard before the critical date." Partly true, and this is the owner's best procedural argument: Bluetooth Specification v1.0 (July 26, 1999) is not §102(b) art. But the 1998 Haartsen article and the June 1998 "Comprehensive Description" document undercut it, and the '426 specification itself tells the reader to consult www.bluetooth.com — an admission that the interface was a publicly documented selection.
2. Teaching away. The prior art car kits are deliberately wired/cradle-coupled (a docking interface is the point of US 5,991,640). A challenger should not over-read this as teaching away: a docking interface is not a statement that wireless coupling is inoperative; it is one of two known coupling techniques. KSR forecloses the "field of endeavor" and "teaching away" arguments where both techniques are known and the substitution is predictable.
3. Secondary considerations. The patent owner can point to commercial success (the Jan. 15, 2008 Johnson Controls/BlueConnect announcement of the '426 and its 2003 production launch). But the nexus is weak: the success is plausibly attributable to (i) mandated hands-free driving requirements, (ii) Bluetooth's status as a non-proprietary industry standard that OEMs were required to support, and (iii) the BlueConnect value-add (voice recognition, noise cancellation) rather than to the claimed combination. Market demand for a standardized link is a motivation to combine, not evidence of non-obviousness.
4. "Unexpected results." None apparent: the specification claims only the expected benefits of a cableless link (no line-of-sight, automatic connection, negligible power).

6. Bottom line

The '426's issued scope is narrower than its disclosure: the specification is a broad "wireless communications system" manifesto, but the claims that issued (18–26) read on the FIG. 8 cellular-phone + Travelnote® hands-free embodiment. That is a classic pattern of narrowing onto a specific commercial implementation because the broad concept was old. The strongest §103 case is therefore a two-reference combination (wired vehicle hands-free kit + the 1998 Bluetooth disclosures), extended by the incorporated-by-reference '420 for recording/playback — with the caveat that claims 18 and 22 are only clearly invalidated once a pre-May-1999 spoken-dialing reference is produced.

7. What I could not verify (do not treat as established)

• Claims 1–9 — not retrieved. Any analysis of an independent system claim other than 18/22 is unsupported.
• Preambles of claims 10 and 13 — only dependent claims 14–17 were retrieved verbatim.
• Titles/contents of several front-page references (US 4,875,229 Palett; 4,905,270 Ono; 5,584,052 Gulau; 5,625,673 Grewe; 5,651,056 Eting; 5,661,651 Geschke; 5,758,300; 5,732,074 Spaur) — numbers verified as cited, but I did not confirm their disclosures here and did not rely on them as element-by-element mappings.
• A specific pre-1999 voice-recognition-dialing reference — not identified (Ground 4 gap).
• Any real PTAB proceeding on the '426 — none found; the ptacts.uspto.gov record bearing the '426 banner is, consistent with the earlier section, a false positive.
• The '426 is expired for failure to pay maintenance fees (anticipated expiration 2020-05-26), so this analysis is of historical/portfolio significance rather than current-enforcement significance.