US 7610394

I'll search for this specific patent number and any 2026 CAFC docket activity.

Let me check for claims text and any 2026 appellate docket activity.

Let me retrieve the full issued claim set to accurately summarize the independent claims.

US 7,610,394 B2 — Analyst Summary

Basis: Full patent text supplied in the prompt (Google Patents, fetched 2026-09-28), cross-checked against RPX/insight.rpxcorp.com, FreePatentsOnline, and USPTO/Plainsite assignment records. Note a discrepancy I flag up front: the Google Patents document as fetched contains the abstract and description but not the numbered claim set, so the claim text below comes from a secondary source and I mark it as such.

Bibliographic data

Familial link (important): This is a continuation of 09/187,256 (filed 1998-11-06, now US 6,452,609), and it is itself the parent of US 8,549,097 and US 8,805,830 (per the FPO cross-reference and Google Patents "Priority to" entries for 11/514,018 and 12/485,236).

Chain of title (from the assignment records in the fetched document): Supertuner.com → Copper Data River LLC (2005) → Media & Transactions, Inc. / Supertuner.com (2013, change-of-name plus inventor assignment) → Zarbaña Digital Fund LLC (2015, merger) → Intellectual Ventures Assets 125 LLC (2018, nunc pro tunc) → Avinnov LLC (2019-02-06) → Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. (2019-10-17).

Abstract (verbatim)

"A web page has a player for playing media objects, a sequencer which displays a play list that defines an order in which media objects are played by the player, and a media access area for containing a plurality of graphical icons. Each graphical icon representing a media object, and the graphical icons can be manipulated by a user to modify the play list. For example, the media icons may be dragged to the sequencer to add them to the sequencer."

Plain-language overview of the claims

Claim 1 — method (the only independent claim I could identify; 17 claims total). Text as retrieved from RPX Insight (https://insight.rpxcorp.com/patent/[US7610394B2](/patent/US7610394B2)):

"1. A method comprising: establishing a bidirectional database connection to a user database associated with a media server; retrieving from said user database a play list that defines an order in which one or more media objects are played, wherein said play list is in a state corresponding to a most recent user session; generating a command to a media player in response to user selection of a media object from said play list, causing said media player to signal a media server to request the media object, to buffer a media stream received from said media server, and to play the media object; and retrieving from an interface database associated with said media server an expandable and collapsible outline of subjects with media icons arranged in lists, and displaying said outline, wherein said retrieving comprises sending a pre-defined initial query to said interface database, and loading said outline into a media icon access panel Data Source Object (DSO)."

In plain language, claim 1 covers a client/server method with four moving parts:

1. Persistent-state connection — the browser opens a two-way (read/write) connection to a user database held on a media server.
2. Session restore — it pulls back the user's play list exactly as the user left it at the end of the last session (stateful playlists, not a fresh page load).
3. Player control chain — when the user picks an item from that play list, the page issues a command to an embedded media player, which then signals the media server, fetches and buffers the stream, and plays it. (This is the "pageless" concept — the page never navigates away.)
4. Outline/DSO population — a separate interface database is queried with a pre-defined initial query, and the returned expandable/collapsible subject outline with media icons is loaded into a client-side Data Source Object (the browser's data-binding mechanism used to drive the DHTML display).

Claims 2–17 — dependent. A source lists these as all depending (directly or indirectly) from claim 1, which implies a single independent claim. Based on the specification and the SUMMARY section of the fetched document, the dependent claims appear to cover the described implementation features: media-type indicators and descriptive text on the icons; drag-and-drop of icons from the access area to the sequencer to add to the play list; tabbed switching among multiple play lists; per-entry checkbox (skip/include) and per-entry pop-up menu (via the "menu description notation" / MDN string); scripted-DHTML implementation of the sequencer and access area; the expandable/collapsible outline with per-subject tabs; the player's draggable image-display window with handle, size lock, window-shade, position-swap and hide controls; and the site-driven area with a banner synchronized to the playing media object, including dragging a banner to the player to interrupt-and-play and to the sequencer to append, plus a banner pop-up menu.

Three additional aspects appear in the SUMMARY but I could not confirm they are separate independent claims in this patent (they read like the parent/child claim sets): a web-page claim (player + sequencer play list + media access area of manipulable graphical icons); a method claim (display multiple streaming-content sources, receive user input ordering them, store the order, then deliver in that order); and an Internet-site claim (first database of media objects, second database of presentation information, third database of users, plus an application server communicating with a client running the web page). Do not treat these as verified claim language for '394.

Litigation and 2026 docket check

• No Federal Circuit 2026 docket activity for 7,610,394 was found. Targeted searches for "7610394" together with Federal Circuit / Cedar Lane 2026 returned zero results. I cannot rule out an unfound appeal, but there is no evidence of one, and this is consistent with the patent being expired (adjusted expiration 2019-01-12).
• 2026 Cedar Lane filings appear to be on different patents, not '394. Examples: Cedar Lane Techs. v. David Lerner Assocs., 1:26-cv-00183 (E.D.N.Y., filed 2026-01-13, dismissed on settlement 2026-03-31); Cedar Lane Techs. v. Speechify, 1:26-cv-00031 (D. Del., asserting 8,438,485); Cedar Lane Techs. v. LaSalle St. Secs., 1:26-cv-00721 (N.D. Ill., asserting 8,577,782). None of these dockets as retrieved identify '394 as an asserted patent.
• District-court cases naming '394 (as listed on the Google Patents page, 2020–2021): D. Colo. 1:20-cv-03037; N.D. Tex. 3:20-cv-01103; S.D.N.Y. 1:20-cv-03635 and 1:20-cv-03159; D. Del. 1:20-cv-01370 and 1:21-cv-00676.

Uncertainty / caveats

1. Claim text provenance. The claim set was not present in the authoritative fetched document. Claim 1 above is from RPX Insight and contains at least one apparent transcription artifact ("user selection" vs. "user selection of a media object" flow); the exact issued wording should be confirmed against the USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Public Search full-text or the granted-PDF at patentimages before being relied on.
2. Independent-claim count. "One independent claim" is my inference from a source that lists claims 2–17 as dependents of claim 1. I did not directly read claims 2–17.
3. Assignee. "Current Assignee" on Google Patents is expressly disclaimed by Google as an assumption; Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. is what the record shows, but confirm via USPTO Assignment Search.
4. Priority date. 1998-11-06 is the claimed/continuation priority date and Google flags it as an assumption, not a legal conclusion.
5. Expiry math. Google shows both "Expired - Fee Related, expires 2019-01-12" and a "2019-01-12 Adjusted expiration" event. Given the 1998 priority date, a 2019 expiration implies an expiry computed from an earlier-filed reference (consistent with the 09/187,256 parent), but I have not independently verified the terminal-disclaimer/PTA arithmetic.

I'll research litigation involving US 7610394 across patent litigation sources.

Let me search for the specific case numbers listed on the patent page.

I'll start by searching for any PTAB proceedings involving this patent, then cross-check.

Let me dig deeper for Cedar Lane IPR activity and check the PTAB petition document that referenced this patent.

No hits yet on the '394 patent itself. Let me check whether any Cedar Lane IPRs cover this patent, and check the PTAB patent-specific record.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 7,610,394: 0. Per the structured ODP block supplied with this prompt (the canonical source), the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings — no IPR, no PGR, no CBM — for this patent as of the most recent ingest. My independent web search (PTAB-related queries, IP Watchdog filings roundups, Unified Patents insights, RPX litigation records) surfaced no petition number, institution decision, or FWD naming US 7,610,394 as the challenged patent. I could not access PTAB E2E directly in this session, so treat this as "no PTAB activity on file" with a small residual-indexing caveat, not as a positive affirmative verification of zero.

Bottom line defensive posture: neither "hardened" nor "dead." The claims of US 7,610,394 are untested at the PTAB — which means no claim has been canceled and no IPR estoppel (§ 315(e)(2)) attaches to anyone. That cuts both ways: a defendant cannot point to a prior FWD to kill a demand letter built on this patent, but the same defendant has a completely clean slate to file its own IPR without facing General Plastic "follow-on petition" reasoning, and no earlier petitioner has already burned the best art. The most important practical fact is not PTAB-related at all: the patent expired on 2019-01-12 (status: Expired – Fee Related), which caps exposure to pre-expiration damages under § 286 and eliminates injunctive relief.

No proceedings to itemize

There is no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, ground, FWD, or appeal to report. I will not invent one. The items below are adjacent, clearly-labeled context — they are not proceedings on US 7,610,394 and must not be cited as such.

Cross-portfolio context (different patent — do not conflate)

IPR2020-00006 — Unified Patents, LLC v. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. (U.S. Patent 7,173,177 B1)

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2019-10-03
• Status: Institution 2020-03-18; FWD 2021-02-12; Petitioner's Request for Rehearing denied 2021-12-08 (per Patexia docket, IPR2020-00006)
• Outcome: The PTAB held the asserted independent claim of the '177 patent unpatentable (Unified Patents, https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2021/2/12/cedar-lane-patent-held-unpatentable)
• Why it matters here: The '177 patent is a different patent (a Cedar Lane/AVInnov asset previously held by Intellectual Ventures), not US 7,610,394 and not in the '394 continuation family. Its only relevance is as a pattern signal: a defensive aggregator (Unified) went after the Cedar Lane portfolio in 2019-2020, won on one asset, and for whatever reason did not petition against '394 — even though Cedar Lane was asserting '394 in district court at the same time. See RPX Insight, https://litigation.rpxcorp.com/ptab/10878.

District-court assertion footprint of '394 (relevant to your demand-letter analysis, not PTAB)

• Cedar Lane Technologies asserted US 7,610,394 in its 2020-2021 campaigns, e.g., Cedar Lane Techs. v. Aspiro, Inc., No. 1:20-cv-03159 (S.D.N.Y.), and Cedar Lane Techs. v. Spotify USA Inc., No. 1:21-cv-00676 (D. Del.), where '394 was pleaded alongside US 6,502,194, 6,526,411, 6,721,489, 6,806,889, 6,452,609, 7,173,177, 8,549,097, and 8,805,830 (IP Watchdog filings roundups, https://ipwatchdog.com/2020/04/29/patent-filings-roundup-something-water-sharp-spike-district-court-filings/ and https://ipwatchdog.com/2021/05/21/patent-filings-roundup-new-[npe](/resources/what-is-a-patent-troll)-solid-state-drive-suit-micron-western-digital-redfin-indemnitee-files-ipr-on-virtual-reality-tour-patents/).
• Cedar Lane's overall docket shows roughly 336–367 suits (2020-2022) with ~310 settled (KIPO NPE report; Tokyo Kosha America report 2024). The pattern — mass assertion, near-universal early settlement, vanishingly little PTAB pushback — is the opposite of the profile that produces IPRs. That is the most plausible explanation for the empty PTAB docket on this patent.

One incidental hit worth noting (not a proceeding on '394): a PTO-892 "Notice of References Cited" appearing in a PTAB petition exhibit list (Paper No. 20200316) cites US-7610394-B2 as prior art against a third party's patent (e.g., US-7631098, Boutboul). In other words, '394's disclosure has been used offensively as prior art by other petitioners — but that is not a challenge to '394 itself. I cannot verify the full provenance of that exhibit from the search snippet alone.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Every claim of US 7,610,394 is UNTESTED. No claim has been canceled, and no claim has been sustained by the Board, because no AIA trial was ever instituted. I have no FWD to quote and therefore will not state which claims are independent, which dependents exist, or what any panel held — the authoritative text in this prompt does not enumerate the claims, and no PTAB record supplies them. Any representation that "claims X-Y were canceled" would be fabricated. The real narrowing event for this family is not an IPR but the expiration date: 2009-10-27 grant, filing 2002-07-31 as a continuation of Ser. No. 09/187,256 (filed 1998-11-06, now US 6,452,609), with adjusted expiration 2019-01-12 (Google Patents legal-status block). Related family members US 8,549,097 and US 8,805,830 issued from later continuations (priority links dated 2006-08-30 and 2009-06-16) and have their own, separate PTAB exposure I did not exhaustively check in this session.

Estoppel landscape. Because no IPR was ever instituted on '394, § 315(e)(2) estoppel is zero for everyone. No petitioner, real party in interest, or privy is barred from raising any ground. A defendant today can file a first IPR using whatever § 102/§ 103 art it wants — including art the examiner considered (no § 325(d) hardship beyond the ordinary Advanced Bionics/Becton Dickinson framework) and including known systems/printed publications that cannot be used in an IPR at all (see § 311(b)) but remain available in district court. Practically: all prior-art doors are open. Note the counterweight — no institution also means the patent owner has never had to defend its claims on the merits, so the claim-construction record is a blank slate for both sides.

Pattern signals. (1) No repeat petitioner — there is no petitioner at all. (2) The one defensive aggregator in the chain, Unified Patents, attacked Cedar Lane's '177 asset (IPR2020-00006) and won, but did not file against '394; Unified's public postings and RPX's PTAB tracker show no '394 counterpart. (3) Patent owner appeals: Cedar Lane's responses to the '177 loss were a Request for Rehearing (denied 2021-12-08) rather than a Federal Circuit appeal on the merits that I could confirm — again, that is the '177, not the '394. (4) Ownership chain: Copper Data River LLC → Zarbaña Digital Fund LLC (2015-12-11 merger) → Intellectual Ventures Assets 125 LLC (2018-12-18) → AVInnov LLC (2019-02-06) → Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. (2019-10-17). A defendant facing a demand should verify current ownership and standing before responding, since a 2018 nunc pro tunc assignment by a bankruptcy-adjacent entity (Copper Data River) is a common chain-of-title soft spot.

Recommended next steps

1. Lead with expiration, not invalidity. US 7,610,394 is expired (adjusted expiration 2019-01-12). Any demand letter asserting it can only seek damages for pre-expiration infringement, and 35 U.S.C. § 286 limits recovery to six years before the complaint was filed. Injunctive relief is unavailable. Ask the asserting party to produce a damages model that survives § 286 and the expiration date — most Cedar Lane-style campaigns were built on early nuisance-value settlement, not on provable damages.

2. Verify the "no PTAB activity" finding yourself before you rely on it. Query PTAB E2E by patent number: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/parties-or-patents (search "7610394") and cross-check the AIA trial docket by owner: https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab. CourtListener is also useful for any CAFC activity touching the family: https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%227610394%22. My web-search sweep found nothing, but absence of evidence in a snippet-based search is not proof of absence.

3. If you intend to file an IPR, you are a first petitioner — use that. No General Plastic / Fintiv-sibling petition problem exists because no prior petition exists on this patent. Note the two practical frictions: (a) the patent is expired, so the Board may weigh discretionary denial arguments about efficient use of Office resources more heavily than in a live-patent case (see the recent informative decisions on settled expectations, e.g., Amgen v. Bristol-Myers Squibb, IPR2025-00601/-00602/-00603, Paper 9 (2025-07-24)); and (b) an expired patent cannot be amended, so the record is static and fully citable.

4. Do the family-level check. '394 shares a specification with US 6,452,609, US 8,549,097, and US 8,805,830. If you are being asserted on more than one of these, map the priority chain (continuation of 09/187,256, filed 1998-11-06) before budgeting — a single prior-art theory may dispose of the whole family, and a win against the parent can be leveraged across the continuations.

5. Do not cite IPR2020-00006 (the '177 IPR) as a win against '394. It is a different patent with a different specification. It is useful only as evidence that this portfolio is IPR-vulnerable and that Cedar Lane responds to adverse PTAB rulings with rehearing requests rather than appeals.

Confidence statement: High confidence that no IPR/PGR/CBM naming US 7,610,394 appears in the ODP structured data or in my web-search results. I could not independently confirm via PTAB E2E, and I have no claim-level PTAB record whatsoever for this patent — so I have deliberately made no claim-number, panel, ground, or FWD assertion about it.

I'll research the assignment chain for US 7610394 using the assignment records, litigation data, and NPE directories.

Good progress — I have two reel/frames already. Let me pull the remaining links in the chain.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 7,610,394 B2

Preliminary note on sources. Two links in this chain were retrieved with full reel/frame and correspondent data (Reels 15766/0685 and 25590/0467). The remaining links are documented in Google Patents' legal-events record for this patent (dates, conveyance types, assignors/assignees) but the reel/frame and correspondent fields were not retrievable in this session — those must be pulled directly from the USPTO Assignment Center record for verification. I have not invented reel/frame numbers for those links.

Inventors

Unusual patterns — present:

• The inventors' assignment to their employer was not recorded until 2013-12-04, roughly 15 years after the 1998 filing and roughly 11 years after the parent patent issued. Google Patents shows a 2013-12-04 "Assignment of Assignors Interest" record running from Burress/Furtado/Katinsky to Media & Transactions, Inc. That is a chain-of-title clean-up, not a contemporaneous filing.
• The clean-up was recorded eight years after Copper Data River LLC had already taken title (2005-02-23, Reel 15766/0685). Recording the inventor documents after the downstream sale is the classic signature of a diligence failure discovered during a later monetization effort.
• I found no evidence that any inventor departed the original assignee within 12 months of filing. That signal is not present on the retrieved record — but the record is thin on 1998–2002 activity, so treat as unresolved rather than affirmatively negative.

Original assignee

Entity named on the issued patent: Copper Data River LLC, Suite #271, Los Altos, CA 94022 (assignee of record when US 7,610,394 issued on 2009-10-27).

• Product embodying the claims: none identified. Copper Data River LLC is not evidenced in any retrieved source as shipping a product. Its recorded address ("Suite #271") is a private-mailbox format typical of holding entities, not an operating campus.
• Primary line of business: appears to be IP holding/licensing, not media delivery. The operating business that actually built the technology was SuperTuner.com, which the claim set describes (embedded web media player + drag-and-drop playlist sequencer).
• Current status: no longer a separate legal entity. Per the 2015-12-11 Merger record, Copper Data River LLC merged into Zarbaña Digital Fund LLC.
• ⚠️ Discrepancy flag: Google Patents labels Copper Data River LLC as "Original Assignee," but the invention was developed at Media & Transactions, Inc. / SuperTuner.com, and the parent patent US 6,452,609 (issued 2002-09-17) named Supertuner.Com as assignee. "Original assignee" here means assignee at issuance of the '394 patent, not the 1998 development entity. Do not conflate the two in any pleading or diligence memo.

Assignment timeline

1. 2004-09-23 (executed) / recorded 2005-02-23 — Reel 15766/0685

   • Conveyance: Assignment ("Assignment of Assignors Interest")
   • Assignor: Supertuner.com
   • Assignee: Copper Data River LLC (Suite #271, Los Altos, CA 94022)
   • Correspondent: Elissa Y. Wang, Fish & Richardson, PC, 500 Arguello St, Ste 500, Redwood City, CA 94063-1526
   • Coverage: both 09/187,256 (US 6,452,609) and 10/210,203 (this patent, US 7,610,394)
   • Context: fire-sale / transfer-to-holding-entity. The operating startup divests the entire family to a Los Altos mailbox LLC nearly six years before the '394 patent even issued.
   • Recurrence note: Fish & Richardson is a large general-practice IP firm that does both operating-company and assertion-side work. A single appearance is not a finding — but this is the only correspondent confirmed in the chain so far, so it should be checked against the 2013–2019 recordings before any conclusion is drawn.

2. 2004-09-23 (same instrument) / recorded 2005-09-12 — reel/frame not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Assignment — Assignor: Supertuner.com → Assignee: Copper Data River LLC
   • Correspondent: not retrieved
   • Context: re-recording of the same instrument to capture an additional family member. Verify at Assignment Center.

3. 2004-09-23 (same instrument) / recorded 2011-01-05 — Reel 25590/0467

   • Conveyance: Assignment — Assignor: Supertuner.com → Assignee: Copper Data River LLC
   • Correspondent: not retrieved (plainsite record does not show one for this entry)
   • Coverage: 12/485,236 (US 8,805,830)
   • Context: third recording of the same 2004 instrument, this time to sweep in a continuation filed in 2009 — evidence the family was being actively re-papered to keep the chain intact across newly filed continuations.

4. Recorded 2013-12-04 — reel/frame not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Assignment — Assignor: Michael Burress; Jefferson Furtado; Steve Katinsky → Assignee: Media & Transactions, Inc.
   • Correspondent: not retrieved
   • Context: belated chain-of-title perfection — inventor documents recorded 15 years after filing.

5. Recorded 2013-12-04 — reel/frame not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Change of Name — Assignor: Media & Transactions, Inc. → Assignee: SuperTuner.com
   • Correspondent: not retrieved
   • Context: change of name only — establishes that Media & Transactions, Inc. and Supertuner.com are the same legal person, retroactively validating the 2004/2005/2011 Supertuner.com conveyances in entries 1–3.

6. Recorded 2015-12-11 — reel/frame not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Merger — Assignor: Copper Data River LLC → Assignee: Zarbaña Digital Fund LLC
   • Correspondent: not retrieved
   • Context: internal restructuring into a fund vehicle. No cash sale price would be expected on a merger record, which conveniently obscures valuation.

7. Recorded 2018-12-18 — reel/frame not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Nunc pro tunc Assignment — Assignor: Zarbana Digital Fund LLC → Assignee: Intellectual Ventures Assets 125 LLC
   • Correspondent: not retrieved
   • Context: transfer into the Intellectual Ventures aggregation machine. "Nunc pro tunc" (back-dated effect) confirms the drafting was retrofitted — typical of IV's bulk portfolio acquisitions.

8. Recorded 2019-02-06 — reel/frame not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Assignment — Assignor: Intellectual Ventures Assets 120 / 125 LLC → Assignee: AVInnov LLC (Delaware)
   • Correspondent: not retrieved
   • Context: transfer-to-asserter. RPX confirms this pattern: AVInnov acquired a portfolio of 36+ patents from IV in December 2018 and sued Charter Communications in February 2019 — weeks after taking title.

9. Recorded 2019-10-17 — reel/frame not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Assignment — Assignor: AVInnov LLC → Assignee: Cedar Lane Technologies Inc.
   • Correspondent: not retrieved (Cedar Lane's own counsel/director of record per RPX is Greg Benoit, address corresponding to Pigott & Co., an IP licensing firm — this is counsel/control, not confirmed as the assignment correspondent)
   • Context: transfer-to-asserter. RPX: "AVInnov assigned its entire portfolio to Cedar Lane Technologies Inc., a Canadian NPE already managing two litigation campaigns from its growing body of former IV patents."

Current assignee of record: Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. (per Google Patents legal-events record).

Litigation filed under Cedar Lane (from the patent's own Google Patents record): D. Colo. 1:20-cv-03037; N.D. Tex. 3:20-cv-01103; S.D.N.Y. 1:20-cv-03159; S.D.N.Y. 1:20-cv-03635; D. Del. 1:20-cv-01370; D. Del. 1:21-cv-00676 — all filed after the 2019-10-17 acquisition.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7610394
    1998 : Invention filed by Media and Transactions
    2002 : Parent patent 6452609 issues to Supertuner.com
    2004 : Supertuner.com sells family to Copper Data River
    2005 : Sale recorded Reel 15766 frame 0685
    2009 : US 7610394 issues to Copper Data River
    2011 : Same 2004 instrument re-recorded Reel 25590 frame 0467
    2013 : Inventor assignments recorded late
         : Media and Transactions renamed Supertuner.com
    2015 : Copper Data River merges into Zarbana Digital Fund
    2018 : Zarbana assigns to IV Assets 125
    2019 : IV Assets 125 assigns to AVInnov
         : AVInnov assigns to Cedar Lane Technologies
    2020 : Cedar Lane infringement suits filed

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT.
Supertuner.com (an operating web-media startup that actually built the player/sequencer described in the claims) conveyed the whole family to Copper Data River LLC at "Suite #271, Los Altos, CA 94022" — a private-mailbox address format — via Reel 15766/0685 (exec. 2004-09-23). The chain then passes through Zarbaña Digital Fund LLC (2015-12-11, merger), Intellectual Ventures Assets 125 LLC (2018-12-18, nunc pro tunc), AVInnov LLC (2019-02-06) and Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. (2019-10-17). Cedar Lane was formed in British Columbia on 2019-04-29, has "no parent company," and its corporate address corresponds to Pigott & Co., an IP licensing firm (RPX Empower, 2019-11-09). No assignee after 2004 is evidenced as shipping a product.

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT.
Two named NPEs appear: Intellectual Ventures (via IV Assets 125 LLC, 2018-12-18) and Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. (2019-10-17). Cedar Lane is explicitly designated an NPE by Unified Patents and appears in the Stanford NPE Litigation Database under the "1 Acquired patents" asserter category. RPX describes AVInnov as an NPE. Cedar Lane's portfolio is reported at 203 patent groups with 457 cumulative suits, 96.63% resolved by settlement (Guangdong WTO/TBT Report, 2026 Q1) — i.e., nuisance-litigation economics, no trial outcomes.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — NOT PRESENT (insufficient data).
Only one correspondent was captured: Elissa Y. Wang, Fish & Richardson, PC, Redwood City on Reel 15766/0685. Per your own standard, a single appearance is not a finding, and Fish & Richardson is a mainstream IP firm that does substantial operating-company work. This signal cannot be scored until the 2013, 2015, 2018 and 2019 recordings' correspondent fields are pulled from the Assignment Center. The relevant question is whether the same recording attorney appears on Reels covering the Zarbaña → IV → AVInnov → Cedar Lane leg. Flagged as verify-first.

4. Cascading transfers — PRESENT (strong).
Three recorded transfers in under 11 months: 2018-12-18 (Zarbaña → IV Assets 125) → 2019-02-06 (IV → AVInnov) → 2019-10-17 (AVInnov → Cedar Lane). RPX further notes AVInnov voluntarily dismissed its Charter case in early August 2019 and assigned the entire portfolio to Cedar Lane two months later, with Cedar Lane re-filing against the same defendant in the E.D. Tex. within about a month. Reel/frame for these three links must still be confirmed.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — PRESENT.
The final assignment (AVInnov → Cedar Lane) is recorded 2019-10-17; the first suits naming this patent in the Google Patents record are 2020 filings (1:20-cv-03037, 1:20-cv-01103, 1:20-cv-01370, 1:20-cv-03159, 1:20-cv-03635) plus 1:21-cv-00676. For early-2020 filings this falls inside the 6-month window from the transfer. Independently, the AVInnov → Charter suit (Feb 2019) followed the 2019-02-06 acquisition within weeks. Exact '394 complaint filing dates were not retrieved — verify to fix the precise interval.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT.
No Chapter 7/11 proceeding was found for SuperTuner.com, Media & Transactions, Inc., or Copper Data River LLC. The 2015 Copper Data River exit is recorded as a Merger, not a bankruptcy sale. Note: absence of evidence here is weakly probative because 1998–2005 startup records are thin.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT in the classic form (flagged as unclear).
The operating company (SuperTuner.com) exited the family in 2004–2005, roughly 15 years before the '394 suits, so there is no operating-company principal directing assertion against its own competitors. What is present is IV-mediated aggregation followed by sale to a pure asserter — enforcement-enablement, but not privateering by an operating sponsor. No SEC filing evidence retrieved (the original assignee does not appear to be a public reporting company).

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT.
The chain terminates at Cedar Lane Technologies Inc., an active plaintiff, not at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. The patent is asserted, not neutralized.

⚠️ Additional flagged observation (not one of the eight signals).
Google Patents lists the legal status as "Expired – Fee Related" with an adjusted expiration of 2019-01-12 — i.e., the '394 patent appears to have lapsed roughly nine months before Cedar Lane took title on 2019-10-17, and roughly a year before the 2020 filings. If accurate, the 2020–21 Cedar Lane complaints would necessarily rest on the §286 six-year past-damages lookback or on sibling family members (e.g., US 8,545,097 / US 8,805,830), not on a live '394 term. This is consistent with the pattern flagged in the 2026-Q1 Guangdong trade-barrier report warning about NPEs asserting expired patents still inside the damages lookback. This must be verified against USPTO Patent Center maintenance-fee records before being relied upon — an adjusted-expiration field can also reflect a projected term rather than an actual lapse.

Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

The chain shows a clean operating-entity-to-holding-entity divestiture (Supertuner.com → Copper Data River LLC, exec. 2004-09-23, recorded 2005-02-23 at Reel 15766/0685, with the same instrument re-recorded at Reel 25590/0467), followed by a decade of fund/aggregator warehousing (Zarbaña Digital Fund LLC merger 2015-12-11; Intellectual Ventures Assets 125 LLC nunc pro tunc 2018-12-18), and a compressed three-hop cascade into assertion vehicles within eleven months (AVInnov 2019-02-06 → Cedar Lane 2019-10-17) with suits filed the following year. Two public NPE directories independently classify the terminal assignees as non-practicing entities, and RPX documents the identical IV → AVInnov → Cedar Lane hand-off. The only unresolved element is the repeat-correspondent test, which requires the 2013–2019 recordings' correspondent fields; I scored it "not present" rather than "present" precisely because the evidence needed to support it was not retrieved.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 7610394) — also mirrored at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html. Retrieve, for each of the six 2013–2019 entries: reel/frame, execution date, and correspondent of record.

Cross-references used:

• Google Patents legal events + reassignment records: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7610394/en
• Reel 15766/0685 record: https://www.plainsite.org/patents/assignment.html?id=[2997298](/patent/2997298)
• Reel 25590/0467 record: https://www.plainsite.org/patents/assignment.html?id=[5043999](/patent/5043999)
• RPX Empower, "In a Matter of Months, Former IV Portfolio Bounces Off One NPE to Land in New Cedar Lane Complaints" (2019-11-09): https://litigation.rpxcorp.com/news/59211
• Unified Patents, "Cedar Lane patent held unpatentable" (2021-02-12): https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2021/2/12/cedar-lane-patent-held-unpatentable
• Stanford NPE Litigation Database, Cedar Lane Technologies Inc.: https://npe.law.stanford.edu/party/cedar-lane-technologies-inc

I'll research the prior art citations for US 7610394. Let me start with targeted searches.

Let me try to retrieve the citation list directly and related family members.

I found a promising lead — a prior-art list associated with this patent family. Let me verify it and get the actual citation table.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 7,610,394 B2

1. Scope, sources, and an important provenance caveat

What I was asked to do: pull US 7,610,394 from the USPTO/patent databases and walk through its own patent citations, giving citation, date, description, and § 102 claim mapping.

What I could and could not obtain — read this before using the tables below.

1. The authoritative full text supplied for this analysis does not contain the "(56) References Cited" section. The version of the Google Patents page reproduced in my task input begins at the bibliographic block and then jumps straight from Classifications → Definitions → Description → Abstract → Description. There is no front-page reference table and no claim set. I flag this explicitly rather than inventing it, per my operating rules.
2. I therefore reconstructed the cited-art list from a secondary source: the Unified Patents portal record for the published application in this family, US 2003/0137531 A1 (the pre-grant publication of the application that issued as US 7,610,394), which displays a "Patent Art (24)" list. URL: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-20030137531-A1
3. I could not retrieve: (a) the official PTO-892 / IDS transmittals from the file wrapper of 10/210,203; (b) the list of Non-Patent Citations; (c) the exact claim numbering and wording of US 7,610,394. The claim mapping below therefore uses the claim categories recited in the patent's own SUMMARY section (which I do have verbatim), and I label each mapping as inferred.
4. The dates in the Unified Patents list are shown without a column header in the retrieved text. In Google-style citation tables that column is normally priority date (not publication date). I have used the dates as listed and refuse to silently reinterpret them; where the distinction changes the § 102 subsection, I say so.

Numbers I searched literally, and did not "correct": 7,610,394 / US 10/210,203 / US 2003/0137531 A1 / parent US 09/187,256 → US 6,452,609 / continuations US 11/514,018 → US 8,549,097 and US 12/485,236 → US 8,805,830. One interesting literal hit: US 7,610,394 B2 itself appears on a PTO-892 Notice of References Cited in a later, unrelated matter (USPTO PTACTS petition 1557942) — i.e., the '394 is now being cited as prior art, which is a status fact worth noting.

2. Confirmed bibliographic ground truth for the '394

§ 102 timing consequence (critical to everything below). Because '394 is a straight continuation of 09/187,256, its claims are entitled to 1998-11-06, so:

• Art dated on or before 1997-11-06 → potential § 102(b) statutory bar (one-year grace measured from the earliest effective U.S. filing date).
• Art dated 1997-11-06 to 1998-11-06 → potential § 102(a) (known/used/patented by others before applicant's invention) and/or § 102(e) for U.S. patents/publications.
• Note the alternative: if one instead measured the grace period from the 2002-07-31 filing date of this application, essentially every reference below would be § 102(b) art. Either way the substance is the same, but the subsection label changes.

3. The 24 cited references (as listed for US 2003/0137531 A1)

"Date" = date as listed in the source (priority date column, per note above). Descriptions are title-derived; I have not independently read each specification.

* For #9 and #17 no date was shown in the retrieved list; their § 102 subsection is therefore unverified. Based on their issue dates (Dec-1999 and Jul-2001) they are almost certainly pre-1997-11-06 filings, hence 102(b), but I am flagging this rather than asserting it.

4. § 102 mapping against the '394's claim groups

Because I do not have the claim set, I group the claims the way the patent's own SUMMARY and the "Definitions/Landscapes" extraction structure them:

• A — Independent apparatus claim: "a web page [having] a player for playing media objects, a sequencer which displays a play list that defines an order in which media objects are played by the player, and a media access area for containing a plurality of graphical icons… manipulable by a user to modify the play list."
• B — Method claim: displaying multiple sources of streaming content; receiving user input selecting a playing order; storing the order; receiving input to start delivery; presenting content in the stored order.
• C — Internet-site claim: first database (media objects), second database (presentation/how media objects appear on the page), third database (users), plus an application server communicating with the client.
• D — Dependents (media-type icon + descriptive text; drag-and-drop to sequencer; multi-playlist tabs; per-item checkbox + pop-up menu; scripted DHTML sequestration; expandable/collapsible outline with subject tabs; draggable image-display window with home/handle/shade/lock/swap; site-driven banner synchronized to the playing media object; banner drag-to-sequencer and drag-to-player; banner pop-up menu; preference-profile preloading; history; e-mail exchange of playlists).

Reference-by-reference § 102 potential (all "inferred"):

• US 5,864,868 (#5) — the single best § 102 candidate for claim A. A "computer control system and user interface for media playing devices" plausibly discloses a playable-media list that the user reorders, i.e., a sequencer + player. Anticipation hole: no "web page," and no browser-delivered network page; expect a § 103 outcome, not § 102.
• US 6,005,563 (#9) — best § 102 candidate for the "web page + embedded player" half of claim A. Anticipation hole: no sequencer/play list and no graphical media-icon access area; cannot anticipate A alone.
• US 6,349,951 (#18) and US 5,796,945 (#4) — best § 102 candidates for the method claim B. #18 discloses user selection of recordings into an ordered playback queue; #4 discloses presentation of multimedia "according to user defined indicia." Anticipation hole for B: neither clearly discloses "sources of streaming content" over a network, nor "storing" a user-selected playing order as claim B recites. If "streaming content" is read broadly, #18 is a genuine § 102 (or at minimum § 103) attack on B.
• US 5,864,868 (#5), US 5,905,983 (#6), US 6,262,723 (#17) — § 102 candidates for the "media access area with graphical icons / selection-only-available-resources" dependents (D). #17 in particular ("displaying only available media resources to facilitate selection" in a multimedia editor) maps closely to a media-icon access panel; a § 102 attack on a dependent claim reciting a resource-selection panel is arguable.
• US 6,018,768 (#7) and US 6,173,317 (#13) — best § 102 candidates for the synchronized-banner dependents. #7 (retrieved integrated Internet information segments delivered in coordination with a video program) and #13 (video stream with synchronized annotations over a network) both disclose presentational content synchronized to a playing stream — the core of the "site-driven area / synchronized banner" dependents. #13 in particular is a strong § 102(a)/(b) candidate for a dependent claim reciting delivery of synchronized content with the played object, though not for the "drag the banner to the sequencer" dependents.
• US 6,141,010 (#11) — best § 102 candidate for the targeted-advertising/banner + user-profile server dependents and for the Internet-site claim C (computer interface with targeted advertising implies a user-profile store and a serving component).
• US 6,587,127 (#22) — best § 102 candidate for claim C and for the preference-preloading dependent ("content player method and server with user profile" maps directly onto the third database + application server + profile-preload features).
• US 6,385,596 (#19, secure online music distribution) and US 6,226,618 (#15, content-delivery family) — § 102 candidates for claim C's content-database/server architecture.
• US 6,169,997 (#12) — § 102 candidate for the outline/interface-database dependent (subject/context map presented as Internet data ≈ the interface DB constructing the outline).
• US 5,353,401 (#1) — § 102 candidate for the DHTML/interface-generation dependent (automatic interface layout generation from database metadata closely parallels the master outline reference table + Adjcode/Writecode fields).
• US 6,133,913 (#10) — § 102 candidate for the image-size / "expand to normal image dimensions" dependents.
• US 6,025,841 (#8) — § 102 candidate for the "draggable image display window / multiple simultaneous windows" dependents.
• US 2002/0188746 A1 (#24) — § 102 candidate for the user-history/tracking dependents (audience measurement ≈ tracking media objects added to the sequencer and the order played).
• US 6,622,171 (#23), US 6,230,200 (#16), US 5,793,366 (#3), US 5,724,595 (#2) — peripheral; server resource allocation, bus-animated-display, and hyperlink-creation art. Unlikely to reach any '394 claim alone.
• US 5,905,983 (#6), US 6,441,832 (#20) — hierarchical data handling, relevant only to the outline dependents.
• US 6,202,155 (#14) and US 6,519,584 (#21) — no titles surfaced in my source; I cannot characterize these and will not guess.

5. Bottom line on § 102

No single cited reference appears to be a clean § 102 anticipation of any of the three independent claims (A, B, C). Every candidate supplies at most two of the three structural pillars of claim A — (i) a browser/web-page-embedded player, (ii) a user-reorderable play list (sequencer), and (iii) a graphical media-icon access area whose icons are manipulable to modify that play list. That combination, plus the synchronized-banner and drag-a-banner-to-add-or-play features of the dependents, is what distinguishes the '394, and it is why the application issued over this art in the first place (which is itself consistent with no § 102 rejection having been made — though I could not verify the prosecution history to confirm that).

Where § 102 is genuinely arguable, it is at the dependent-claim level, on narrow features:

• synchronized presentational content tied to a playing stream → #7, #13;
• "only available media resources" selection panel → #17;
• user-defined indicia / queued playback order → #4, #18;
• server + user profile content delivery → #22.

Everything else in this list is, on its face, § 103 material — i.e., the obviousness pool against which a combination attack would be built (e.g., #9 for the browser player + #5 or #18 for the sequencer + #12/#1 for the DB-driven interface).

6. Adjacent art used against the Cedar Lane sibling patent (context, not the '394's citation list)

A separate Unified Patents IPR, IPR2020-00006, Unified Patents, LLC v. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc., was filed 2019-10-03 against US 7,173,177 B1 — a sibling playlist patent in the same Cedar Lane/AVInnov assertion campaign as the '394. Its exhibited art was: US 6,226,672 (DeMartin), US 5,969,283 (Looney), US 5,616,876 (Cluts), US 6,385,596 (Wiser), US 6,032,162 (Burke), and EP 0 427 264 A2 (Morioka). Sources: https://litigation.rpxcorp.com/[ptab](/ptab)/10878 and https://services.patexia.com/lawsuits/Unified-Patents-LLC-v-Cedar-Lane-Technologies-Inc-id-[128967](/patent/128967)/documents/sort_by/doc_number/sort_dir/desc

Note the overlap: US 6,385,596 (Wiser) appears both on the '394's cited list (#19) and as the '177 IPR's Exhibit 1007. That is a useful cross-check — if a Wiser-based ground was run against the sibling playlist patent and the Board instituted (institution 2020-03-18; final written decision 2021-02-12 holding the independent claim unpatentable), Wiser is worth re-running against the '394's server/database claims. The Cluts, Looney and DeMartin references were not in the '394's citation list per my source, so they are additional, uncited-against-'394 art worth evaluating.

7. Cross-reference flags and known gaps

• Contradiction/omission flag: the previously generated Litigation summary section is a stub — it contains only a promise to research ("I'll research litigation…") and no substantive findings. I cannot cross-reference it, and the reader should not treat it as containing the case list. For completeness, the case numbers on the '394 page are: D. Colo. 1:20-cv-03037; N.D. Tex. 3:20-cv-01103; S.D.N.Y. 1:20-cv-03635 and 1:20-cv-03159; D. Del. 1:20-cv-01370 and 1:21-cv-00676, plus the Cedar Lane v. Aspiro, Inc. suit (1:20-cv-03159) listed by IPWatchdog as asserting 6452609, 7610394, 8549097, 8805830 alongside 6502194, 6526411, 7173177, 6721489 and 6806889 (https://ipwatchdog.com/2020/04/29/patent-filings-roundup-something-water-sharp-spike-district-court-filings/#3).
• The authoritative patent text I was given lacks both the (56) references and the claims. The 24-item list above is sourced from a third-party portal and may not equal the printed front page exactly (the list is likely annotated with current assignees — e.g. it shows US 5,796,945 as "Zarbana Digital Fund LLC," a later NPE assignee, which a 1998-2009 front page would not).
• Unknown, and I will not fabricate: the Non-Patent Citations; the actual PTO-892 rejections; the exact wording/numbering of US 7,610,394's claims; titles/dates for US 6,202,155 and US 6,519,584; and whether the examiner ever made a § 102 rejection.
• One quirk worth recording: the "prior art keywords" on the Google Patents page include "circumflex over" — that is an OCR artifact of the "menu description notation" (MDN) strings in the specification (e.g. the FIG. 17 pop-up menu string using ^ delimiters), not a substantive art keyword.

I'll research the actual prior-art references cited on this patent's page and any invalidity contentions, rather than rely on memory.

Now let me get the actual "References Cited" list for '394 itself and any invalidity/IPR contentions.

Let me pull the specific cited-reference tables for '394 and its siblings.

Obviousness Analysis — US 7,610,394 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Scope note on "the Prior Art section of this page" — please read first

I need to flag a sourcing problem before the analysis, because it materially affects how much weight to give the grounds below.

1. The authoritative fetched document (Google Patents, 2026-09-28) does not contain a prior-art table. The page as supplied includes the abstract, the specification, the classification list, and the "Definitions" panel, plus a "Prior art keywords" line — but no "Patent Citations (38)" / "References Cited" table and no "Cited By" table. Those tables exist on the live page (one search result confirms the sibling discloses "Patent Citations (38)"), but they were not in what I was given.
2. The "Prior art keywords" line is itself partly an artifact. It reads: media, circumflex over, user, play list, play. The token circumflex over is not a technical term — it is an OCR/extraction artifact produced by the caret character ^ used as the field delimiter in the patent's menu description notation (MDN) string (see the spec: "Each field may be delimited by a character, such as the 'caret' character '^'", and the worked example renders as Preview{circumflex over ( )}{circumflex over ( )}...). Per the operating rule to interpret identifiers literally, I am treating circumflex over as a non-substantive artifact and not as a prior-art concept.
3. Where the reference list below actually came from. The reference set I use is (a) the BACKGROUND of '394 itself, which names SMIL, Macromedia Lingo, Apple HyperCard, ECMAScript/JavaScript, QuickTime™, RealMedia™ and Microsoft Media Player™, and (b) the examiner-cited reference list retrieved from the FreePatentsOnline page for US 8,549,097 — a same-family member of '394 (sharing the 1998-11-06 priority). I have marked this provenance explicitly. These are candidates; I have not verified which of them appear on the face of '394 versus only on its siblings.

Contradiction flag: the previously-generated summary states the claim set was not in the fetched document and that claim 1 was taken from RPX Insight and is unverified. My element-by-element mapping therefore inherits that uncertainty. If claim 1's issued wording differs from the RPX text, the mappings below must be re-run.

1. Effective filing date and PHOSITA — the threshold issue

• '394 issued from 10/210,203, filed 2002-07-31, as a continuation of 09/187,256 (filed 1998-11-06, now US 6,452,609).
• If every limitation of claim 1 finds written-description support in the 1998 parent, the § 103 critical date is 1998-11-06, and the prior-art universe shrinks to art publicly available (or with a § 102(e) US filing date) before that date. Critically, claim 1's "interface database" + "media icon access panel Data Source Object (DSO)" language is the vulnerable link: if that DSO-specific limitation is not supported in the 1998 parent, the effective date for claim 1 shifts toward 2002-07-31, which would flood the field with 1999–2002 art (RealJukebox, Launch.com, Yahoo! Music, Sonic Foundry, MP3.com) that I have not catalogued.
• PHOSITA: a software engineer with ~2 years of experience building DHTML/JavaScript web front-ends against server-side databases, familiar with browser plug-in media players and with Microsoft IE 4.0's data-binding architecture. No undue experimentation is implied by any limitation.

Most of the references in the retrieved family list are post-1998 publications (Hoyle 2000-10-31; Chaddha 2001-01-09; Papierniak 2001-01-02; Matsuzawa 2001-07-17; Fenner 2001-06-05; Wiser 2002-05-07; Tao 2002-08-27; Mastronardi 2002-02-12). These are prior art only under pre-AIA § 102(e), i.e. only if their underlying US filing dates precede the critical date. I have not verified the individual filing dates and I am not asserting that they all qualify. Two that I can place pre-Nov-1998 with reasonable confidence on the retrieved data are Hoyle (filed 1998-07-17) and Bickford (filed 1997-10-14, issued 1998-11-16). Everything else below should be treated as conditional art pending filing-date confirmation.

2. Element-by-element mapping of claim 1

3. Proposed § 103 grounds

Ground 1 — Primary: Hoyle + Bickford + White, optionally + Papierniak.

• Hoyle (US 6,141,010), "Computer interface method and apparatus with targeted advertising," teaches a networked client interface in which an advertising/interstitial region is served and driven by the server in response to the user, and in which user profiles/history drive what is served.
• Bickford (US 5,986,979) teaches the play-list-as-ordering-data structure, including modification of the list without interrupting playback.
• White (US 6,005,563) teaches embedding player controls in a web browser.
• Papierniak (US 6,169,997) teaches a hierarchical "context/subject map" used to present Internet data — i.e., the outline.
• Motivation (KSR, articulated-rationale): all four address a common problem — presenting addressable media to a networked user in an interface the server can drive. Combining Hoyle's server-driven interface with Bickford's play list and White's browser-embedded player is the predictable use of prior-art elements for their known purpose (KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, "predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions"). No element of claim 1 requires a structural change to any of them.

Ground 2 — Primary: US 5,892,915 + Bickford + White.

• US 5,892,915 (retrieved title: "System having client sending edit commands to server during transmission of continuous media from one clip in a play list for editing the play list") is the closest single reference I encountered: it expressly discloses a client sending commands to a server while continuous media is being transmitted from a play list, to edit that play list. That is claim 1's (B) + (C) chain in one reference.
• The only residual gap is the outline/DSO limitation (D) and the bidirectional user-database limitation (A), which White + Papierniak + the IE 4.0 DSO mechanism supply.
• Motivation: the reference already frames the problem as client-side control of a remote, server-hosted play list; adding a browser page as the client is a design choice dictated by the fact that browsers were the client platform for such services.

Ground 3 — "Admissions" ground: SMIL + embedded plug-in + DSO, on the face of '394 itself.
This is the highest-confidence ground and requires no exotic art. '394's own BACKGROUND admits that:

• a player program can be embedded in the page ("the link can point to a player program embedded in the page … without leaving the page");
• SMIL exists and is designed to express synchronized/sequenced multimedia presentation (the W3C's SMIL <seq> construct defines an ordering of media objects);
• JavaScript/ECMAScript and proprietary authoring languages (Lingo, HyperCard) were available; and
• the preferred implementation uses Microsoft IE 4.0 with data source objects bound to DHTML, over SQL queries to server databases.

Stack SMIL's <seq> (the play order) + an embedded streaming plug-in (the player) + a DSO-bound DHTML region (the outline/access panel) + a server-side per-user record (the session state), and every element of claim 1 is present. Applicant's own specification supplies the motivation — the whole stated purpose of the invention is to fix the admitted deficiency that "the size of the image displayed and the controls available to the user are chosen by the web page designer" and that multimedia lacked "a coherent presentation format." A PHOSITA seeking to remedy an admitted, well-known deficiency by combining known tools is the paradigm of obviousness (KSR; Rolling Rock rationale not needed — this is an express improvement-of-the-same-art rationale).

Ground 4 — Dependent-claim cluster (claims 2–17, all depending from claim 1).
Per the earlier section, the dependents appear to cover: media-type icons + text; drag-and-drop to the sequencer; tabbed multi-play-list switching; per-entry checkbox and MDN-string pop-up menus; scripted-DHTML implementation; outline with per-subject tabs; the draggable player window with handle/size-lock/window-shade/position-swap/hide; and the site-driven synchronized banner with drag-to-play and drag-to-append.

• Drag-and-drop of a list item between screen regions was a standard GUI idiom (and standard DHTML practice) well before 1998 — obvious per se.
• Tabbed switching between stored lists is routine windowing UI.
• Checkbox = include/exclude without deletion is the classic "select subset" pattern.
• Server-side banner synchronized to content is directly met by Hoyle (6,141,010) and by Ullman (US 6,018,768) ("Enhanced video programming system … for incorporating and displaying retrieved integrated internet information segments"), which teaches driving retrieved Internet content in coordination with a playing video program. Chaddha (US 6,173,317), "Streaming and displaying a video stream with synchronized annotations," is a second, independent hit on the same idea.
• Commerce/purchase menu options on the banner are met by Bernard (US 5,918,213) (automated remote previewing and purchasing of music/video) and Downs (US 6,226,618) (electronic content delivery).
• Pop-up menu built from an encoded delimited string is a routine data-transport design choice (why send a menu as markup when a delimited string suffices); the MDN parsing rules in the spec (caret delimiter, tildes for parameters, >/< for super/sub-menu) are ordinary serialization.

4. Where this analysis is weak, and what I could not verify

1. I did not read claims 2–17. Their mapping is inferred from the SUMMARY and the earlier section. Do not treat the per-dependent mapping as verified.
2. § 102(e) eligibility is unverified for most cited references. I cannot state that Wiser, Tao, Mastronardi, Matsuzawa, Fenner, Tushie, Forecast, Liu, Looney, White (6,133,913), Finkelstein, or Bernard qualify as pre-1998-11-06 art. Each needs its US filing date confirmed.
3. The DSO/"media icon access panel Data Source Object" limitation is the strongest non-obviousness argument available to the patent owner. It is the one limitation tied to a specific named implementation mechanism of the patent's own era. A patentee could argue DSOs were a non-obvious delivery choice. The counter is that '394's own Figure 10 description presents DSOs as an off-the-shelf browser capability it is using, not inventing.
4. RealPlayer/RealSystem playlists (.ram metafiles) and RealPlayer G2 (1998) are, in my view, the most dangerous realistic art for a 1998 priority date — but I did not retrieve a citable document for them in this session, and I will not assert specific dates or contents. Treat as a lead to verify, not a finding.
5. Secondary considerations. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. is the current assignee and has asserted this family in litigation (the six 2020–2021 district-court cases listed on the Google Patents page: D. Colo. 1:20-cv-03037; N.D. Tex. 3:20-cv-01103; S.D.N.Y. 1:20-cv-03635 and 1:20-cv-03159; D. Del. 1:20-cv-01370 and 1:21-cv-00676). Licensing/assertion activity is not a nexus-bearing secondary consideration under KSR/In re GPAC absent product coextensiveness. I found no evidence of commercial success, long-felt need, failure of others, or unexpected results tied to claim 1. Given the patent's adjusted expiration of 2019-01-12 (Expired – Fee Related), the practical stakes are the retrospective damages window, not prospective injunctive value.
6. No IPR/PGR petition on '394 was found in this session. If one exists, the Board's institution decision would be far more probative than this desk analysis.

Net assessment: claim 1 is, in my view, strongly vulnerable to § 103 on the strength of Ground 3 alone (the patent's own admitted background art plus the ordinary DSO data-binding of its own chosen platform), with Grounds 1 and 2 as independent, structurally different attacks. The dependents are more likely than not obvious as routine GUI and serialization choices, but confirm the issued claim text before relying on any of this.