US 7729985

I'll search for authoritative information on US 7729985, including any CAFC 2026 activity.

Let me do targeted searches on litigation and any court docket activity for this specific patent.

US Patent 7,729,985 — Analyst Summary

Sourcing note: No live result contradicted the authoritative patent text supplied (fetched from Google Patents). Where third-party databases disagree on dates, I flag it. I found no evidence of any CAFC 2026 (or other) appellate activity involving US 7,729,985; my targeted searches of Federal Circuit reporting and docket sources returned only unrelated patents. I cannot prove a negative from public search alone, so treat "no litigation found" as "none surfaced," not "confirmed none exists."

Bibliographic Data

Discrepancies to note (literal, not auto-corrected):

• Unified Patents' portal lists priority date 2006-07-12, grant date 2010-05-31, and expiration 2027-01-08 — one day earlier than Google Patents on each. I am reporting both rather than reconciling them.
• The patent is one of a family of three same-day Rolf filings cited as non-patent references during prosecution: U.S. App. Nos. 11/485,700 and 11/485,719, both filed 2006-07-13. Those are separate applications with their own outcomes.

Abstract (verbatim, from the patent)

A system and method for depositing salary payments directly into an account that is associated with at least one of a communications service and an Internet feature, such as auction, search, communication, hosting, social community, content aggregation, media downloading or streaming, whereafter the deposited money is available to be used in electronic commerce or to be otherwise withdrawn. The account may be maintained either by a communication service provider associated with the account or by a financial service provider (e.g., a bank) in partnership with a provider of communications and/or Internet services or with the ability to support such communications/Internet offerings.

Independent Claims — Plain-Language Overview

The patent has 16 claims, of which exactly one is independent (claim 1). Claims 2–16 all depend, directly or indirectly, from claim 1. (Note: the issued claim set is narrower than the specification, which discusses general communications/cellular, auction, search, and media accounts — the granted independent claim is specifically recited around an "online social community" service.)

Claim 1 — a computer-implemented method with four steps, all performed by at least one "electronic processor" associated with the provider:

1. Provide a common account. Give an accountholder an account that serves as one shared account for both (a) deposit services and (b) online social community Internet services offered by the provider. The processor performing this is associated with the provider of the online social community Internet services.

2. Receive a third-party deposit. A payment is deposited into the account by a payor who is not the accountholder — i.e., someone other than the account owner funds it (the specification's paradigm case is an employer's direct-deposit of salary).

3. Enable commerce. Let the accountholder make a purchase from an entity that is neither the deposit provider nor the online social community provider, with the purchase price withdrawn from the account.

4. Enable withdrawal. Let the accountholder withdraw money from the account, expressly including withdrawal at a retail location.

Key limitations to note for claim-scope purposes: the single-account "common account" requirement; the non-accountholder payor; the "not the provider" limitation on the merchant; and the retail-location withdrawal limitation (added to claim 1 and, on its face, more specific than a generic ATM/card withdrawal).

Representative dependent claims (context):

• Claim 2 — payor is the accountholder's employer.
• Claim 3 — incentive given to the payor for making the direct deposit.
• Claims 4–7 — account type: commercial, savings, checking, debit.
• Claim 8 — the payment is a salary payment.
• Claim 9 — purchase initiated via a portable physical payment device personal to the accountholder; claims 10–12 narrow that to a mobile communications device, a check, or a payment card.
• Claim 13 — further enables the account to purchase media or media subscriptions; claims 14–16 again narrow the payment device to mobile communications device, check, or payment card.

Prosecution / Prior-Art Context (from the record)

• 40–41 cited references, including US 6,347,305 (E-Duction, payroll deduction at e-commerce checkout), US 6,829,588 (First Data, electronic payroll), US 7,376,583 (GoFigure, L.L.C., "Device for making a transaction via a communications link"), US 7,089,208 (PayPal), and US 2006/0085259 (Nicholas, cooperative purchasing over social networks).
• Non-patent citations include a 1974 United States Banker piece titled "Toward The Single Account" and the 1997 Davern article on social networks and economic sociology.
• Only 5 forward citations, notably GoFigure's own later mobile-payment applications (US 2010/0274678; US 9,235,831), SmartyPig/Social Money (US 2013/0297471), and Bank of America token patents.

Confidence and Uncertainty

• High confidence: patent number, title, inventor, application number, assignee chain, claim text and structure, current lapsed status — all corroborated by the authoritative full text and multiple independent databases.
• Moderate confidence / open questions: exact issue date (2010-06-01 vs. 2010-05-31 across sources) and priority date (2006-07-13 vs. 2006-07-12). The one-day gaps are likely database date-convention differences, but I am not asserting which is correct.
• No finding: I did not locate any Federal Circuit 2026 docket, IPR, or district-court case naming 7,729,985. Given the patent expired for non-payment in 2022, active assertion in 2026 is unlikely, but I cannot state its litigation history is empty with certainty from these searches.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 7729985, focusing on litigation databases.

Let me run more targeted searches on this patent's assignees and litigation databases.

Let me search litigation databases more specifically.

Bottom Line

I found no litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 7,729,985. No plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome can be reported because none was located. To be explicit: this is a "no known litigation" answer, not a "litigation exists but I couldn't retrieve details" answer.

What I Searched and What Came Back

Because I could not complete every intended query (I ran out of search steps), I want to flag that limitation rather than let it imply a negative result I didn't earn. My searches were bounded to open web results; I did not get direct access to PACER or to subscription litigation dockets (Docket Navigator, Lex Machina, RPX/UnifiedPatents case portals beyond the free summary page), which are the authoritative places a suit against this patent would appear.

Why This Is Consistent With the Record

Two features of the file support the "no known litigation" conclusion:

• The patent lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees. The legal events show "LAPS – Lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees" and "PATENT EXPIRED DUE TO NONPAYMENT OF MAINTENANCE FEES UNDER 37 CFR 1.362," dated 2022‑07‑04 (effective date 2022‑06‑01), attributed to a large-entity patent owner. (Note the discrepancy with the page header, which shows "Expired – Fee Related" and an adjusted expiration of 2027‑01‑09; the legal-events record is the more specific event history.) A patent that has expired cannot support a live infringement action for post‑expiration conduct, which reduces the likelihood of pending litigation.
• The patent's own "Cited By" list shows only subsequent patent publications, not litigation. If the '985 had been asserted, downstream related filings and portfolios would typically reflect an enforcement footprint; here the family is small and self-referential (e.g., GoFigure's own US20100274678A1 and US9235831B2).

Important Caveats (per the strict-ID rule)

• I interpreted the identifier literally as US 7,729,985 B1, application 11/485,699, filed 2006‑07‑13, granted 2010‑06‑01. I did not substitute or auto-correct any number. Documents referencing "7729985" in an unrelated context (e.g., a French thermostat part number) were correctly excluded.
• This patent is a sibling of two co-pending applications filed the same day by the same inventor that appear in the file's Non‑Patent Citations: U.S. Appl. No. 11/485,700 and U.S. Appl. No. 11/485,719 (both "filed Jul. 13, 2006; Inventor: Rolf, Devon"). If you are tracing enforcement activity by this family, those applications (and the granted patents that issued from them, such as US 7,717,334; US 7,720,762; US 7,783,541; US 7,788,174) may be where any litigation footprint lives — but I found no litigation on those either, and I am not asserting that any exists.
• I do not have high-confidence knowledge from training data of any suit asserting the '985. Rather than supply a plausible-looking case caption, number, or date — which would be fabrication — I am reporting the absence of found litigation.

If You Need a Definitive Negative

To convert this into a citable clearance statement, the following should be checked directly (I could not reach them):

1. PACER — search all district courts for "7729985" and for the assignees "GoFigure Payments," "GoFigure Social," and "GoFigure, L.L.C."
2. Unified Patents litigation portal / caselist — confirm the '985's "Litigation" tab is empty.
3. Federal Circuit (CAFC) docket — check for any appeal naming the patent or the assignee.
4. PTAB — check for IPR/PGR/CBM challenges (a real possibility for a G06Q40/02 business-method patent, and a record that would exist even absent district-court litigation).

No such records surfaced in my searches, so my answer remains: no litigation involving US 7,729,985 is known.

I'll verify the canonical "no proceedings" finding against live sources before writing the report.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks before concluding.

AIA Trial Proceedings — US 7,729,985 B1

"Method for enabling an online social community account for banking services" | App. 11/485,699 | Filed 2006-07-13 | Granted 2010-06-01 | Inventor Devon A. Rolf | Assignee of record GoFigure Social LLC

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 7,729,985: zero (0). There are no inter partes reviews, no post-grant reviews, and no covered business method reviews — none instituted, none denied, none settled, none terminated, and therefore no claims invalidated and no claims sustained through any AIA trial, because no trial was ever requested. The canonical source for this finding is the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block in this prompt, which reports that the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest. My independent live searches corroborate that negative.

The bottom-line defensive posture is unusual and worth stating precisely, because it is not the usual "hardened by surviving IPR" story:

• The patent was never subjected to an AIA trial. It is therefore not "hardened" — no panel has construed claim 1, no institution decision has tested any ground, and no estoppel has attached to any petitioner. Nothing about PTAB precedent narrows or immunizes these claims.
• The reason no AIA trial exists appears to be commercial, not legal: the patent was never asserted, and it died before anyone had reason to challenge it. Per the file's legal-events record, maintenance fees lapsed (LAPS, 2022-07-04), and the patent expired for nonpayment of maintenance fees under 37 CFR 1.362, effective 2022-06-01.
• A defendant's practical exposure today is close to nil — but for expiration reasons, not PTAB reasons. An expired patent cannot ground an injunction or a damages claim for post-expiration conduct, and it cannot be the subject of a new IPR/PGR (which require an unexpired patent). The prior sections' findings of no district-court or Federal Circuit litigation naming this patent are consistent with this.

So the correct one-line answer for a defendant is: "Zero AIA proceedings exist; the patent was never tested at the Board and expired in 2022 for unpaid fees — check the expiration first, because that, not PTAB, is your defense."

Per-proceeding detail

There are no proceedings to report. Rather than fabricate a docket, here is the reconciliation of the near-miss identifier most likely to be mistaken for a proceeding on this patent, plus a record of what was searched and excluded.

IPR2024-01321 — Google LLC v. DH International Ltd. — NOT a proceeding on US 7,729,985

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2024-09-11
• Status: Institution Denied (terminated 2025-03-24)
• Judge panel: APJs Andreas Baltatzis, Brian Murphy, Karl Easthom
• Patent actually at issue: US 7,628,333 B2 ("Portable Electronic Device and Method for Data Exchange"); challenged claims 1–13
• Why this matters here — and why it does not: Exhibit 1008 in this petition is US 7,376,583 B1 (Rolf, "Device for making a transaction via a communications link"), i.e. the GoFigure/Rolf family patent. It is relied on as prior art — Ground 3 argues claim 10 is obvious over Ong, Hoff, and Rolf. That makes the Rolf family's earlier patent an asserted prior-art reference against a third party, not the challenged patent. US 7,729,985 is not named anywhere in IPR2024-01321, and the '583 is a genuinely different patent (App. 09/635,935, filed 2000-08-10, granted 2008-05-20).
• Defensive value: none, as to the '985. It is included only to preempt the inference that "a PTAB case citing Rolf = a PTAB case on this patent." It is not. If you are litigating against the GoFigure/Rolf family generally, this is the single data point I found where that family's art has been deployed at the Board — and it was deployed as sword, not as target.
• Link: PTAB E2E case view — https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/case/IPR2024-01321 (petition exhibit available via Docket Alarm at https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2024-01321/)

Everything else — searched and excluded

Method limitation, stated plainly: my searches were bounded to open web results. I did not obtain direct API or docket access to USPTO PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/), Docket Navigator, Lex Machina, or Unified Patents' litigation caselist. The ODP structured block in this prompt is the authoritative source I was given, and it is consistent with everything my independent searches surfaced. I am reporting "no proceedings on file," which is what the canonical data supports — not a claim to have exhaustively hand-audited the Board's docket.

Strategic summary

Claim status across the whole patent, from the PTAB perspective. Because no AIA trial was ever filed, the claim-status ledger has no PTAB entries at all: claim 1 is NOT canceled; claims 2–16 are NOT canceled; and no claim is "sustained" in the PTAB sense, because "sustained" requires a Final Written Decision holding a challenged claim unpatentable-or-not, and none exists. All 16 claims stand in their as-granted form in the public record — but see the expiration point below, which is what actually governs. Anyone who tells you claims of the '985 were canceled in an IPR is confusing this patent with another; there is no FWD, no certificate, and no cancellation to cite. Conversely, anyone relying on "the patent survived IPR, so it's strong" is equally wrong — it survived nothing, because it was never attacked.

Estoppel landscape — § 315(e)(2). There is no petitioner and therefore no estoppel, from anyone. Specifically: no party is estopped under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) from raising any ground before a district court or the ITC, because estoppel attaches only to a petitioner that obtained a Final Written Decision — and no such decision exists. That cuts both ways for a defendant. Favorably, it means every prior-art ground remains fully available to you; nothing was "raised or reasonably could have been raised." Unfavorably, it means you get no free validity win from the Board and no § 315(e) leverage over the patent owner. For completeness, the ground set available to you is exactly the art analyzed in the prior-art and obviousness sections of this file — most sharply, the combination of "Toward The Single Account" (1974) + US 6,829,588 (First Data) + US 6,347,305 (E-Duction) + US 2006/0085259 (Nicholas), with US 2004/0111370 (Digital World Access) and US 7,089,208 (PayPal) as redundant anchors. Note that US 7,376,583 — the same Rolf family patent Google used as Exhibit 1008 in IPR2024-01321 — is itself a reference of record against the '985, though its pre-AIA § 102(e)(2) "by another" status and § 103(c) common-ownership were flagged as open questions in the prior section.

Pattern signals. Three signals, all negative for the "asserted patent" hypothesis:

1. Repeat petitioners? None — there is no petitioner at all.
2. Aggressive patent-owner appeals? None — no FWD means no appealable decision, and I found no CAFC appeal naming the patent (consistent with the litigation section's earlier finding). GoFigure never had a Board loss to appeal.
3. Defensive aggregator in the chain? None. The chain terminates at GoFigure Social, LLC (reel 054566/0808, 2020-12-07), not RPX, Unified, AST, LOT, or OIN. That is notable in a different sense: Unified Patents' portal indexes this patent (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-7729985-B1) but shows no litigation and no challenge — Unified did not file a preemptive IPR against it, which is consistent with a patent no one considered worth attacking.

The unifying explanation is the one the earlier sections reached independently: a small founder-owned portfolio (Rolf, sole inventor, also the registered practitioner) that was never monetized, never asserted, and was allowed to lapse for nonpayment at the 11.5-year fee in 2022. Well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs; this one never did, because it was never used.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant facing a demand letter citing US 7,729,985:

1. Lead with the expiration, not with PTAB. The patent expired 2022-07-04 (effective 2022-06-01) for failure to pay maintenance fees under 37 CFR 1.362, per the legal-events record. Confirm this at USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/) and Global Dossier (https://globaldossier.uspto.gov/) before doing anything else. If the patent is expired, demand damages for post-expiration conduct are unavailable, and there is no injunctive exposure. There is no FWD to link to and nothing to quote, because no AIA trial ever issued a disposition on these claims — do not cite a nonexistent decision; if opposing counsel cites one, ask them for the proceeding number.
2. Distinguish the near-miss proactively. If opposing counsel or a portfolio chart references IPR2024-01321 as though it involved this patent, it does not — that proceeding challenged US 7,628,333 and used US 7,376,583 (Rolf) only as prior art.
3. Preserve your § 103 grounds untouched. Because there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel from any petitioner, the full obviousness combination remains available to you in a district court or ITC validity challenge. See the obviousness section of this file for the mapped combination; the contested limitation is the choice of a social-community account as the deposit vehicle, which the applicant's own specification lists as interchangeable with the alternatives.
4. If you nonetheless want a third-party invalidity challenge (e.g., to defeat a claim for pre-expiration damages, or for portfolio-clearing purposes), note the constraint: an expired patent cannot be the subject of a new IPR or PGR. Ex parte reexamination on the granted claims remains theoretically available, but its practical value against an expired patent is very limited.
5. To convert this into a citable clearance statement, pull the PTAB docket directly rather than relying on my bounded searches: search USPTO PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/) and the USPTO Open Data Portal for patent 7,729,985 and for the assignees "GoFigure Social, LLC," "GoFigure Payments, LLC," and "GoFigure, L.L.C.," and check CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/) for any Federal Circuit appeal naming the patent. I could not reach E2E or the subscription dockets directly, so those remain the authoritative verification steps.

Constraints honored / caveats: I have not invented any proceeding number. There is no FWD to quote, no panel to name, and no claim-level disposition to report — because no AIA trial exists, and I will not manufacture one. The single proceeding named above (IPR2024-01321) is identified only to be excluded, with its actual challenged patent stated correctly as US 7,628,333 B2. I do not know, with high confidence from training data, of any AIA trial naming US 7,729,985; my finding of "zero proceedings" rests on the canonical ODP block plus corroborating open-web searches, and I flag that I did not obtain direct PTAB E2E or subscription-docket access. The date discrepancy flagged in prior sections (operating brief 2026-09-27 vs. an earlier task header of 2026-04-26) is carried forward unreconciled and is immaterial here. All dates are in YYYY-MM-DD format.

I'll research the assignment records for US 7729985 across USPTO Assignment Search and related sources.

Let me dig into the assignee entities and correspondent details.

Let me try to locate the actual recorded assignment documents and their correspondents.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 7,729,985 B1

Patent: US 7,729,985 B1 · App. 11/485,699 · filed 2006‑07‑13 · issued 2010‑06‑01 · "Method for enabling an online social community account for banking services"
Verification links: USPTO Assignment Center · Assignment Search · Google Patents legal events

Sourcing note / limitation (read first). The three recorded conveyances, their reel/frame numbers, execution dates and recording dates below are taken verbatim from the authoritative legal‑events record reproduced in the patent text supplied. I was cut off by my search‑step limit before I could pull the Assignment Center detail pages, so I could not retrieve the two fields the task specifically asks me to capture: the recorded correspondent (attorney/agent) for each conveyance, and confirmation that no additional post‑2020 records exist. I flag every place that gap affects a conclusion rather than filling it in. One methodological note for follow‑up: pre‑2017 recordings are also available as PDFs at legacy-assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/assignment-pat-RRRRRR-FFFF.pdf, where the filename encodes the reel/frame (e.g., assignment-pat-027150-0138.pdf). I surfaced one such PDF (reel 027150/0138, correspondent Hovey Williams LLP, Overland Park, KS) but it is not tied to GoFigure and I am not attributing it to this chain.

Contradiction flag (carried forward): the earlier task header stated a current date of April 26, 2026; my operating brief says 2026‑09‑27. Unreconciled and immaterial here.

Inventors

Unusual patterns — and one that is genuinely notable:

• There is only one inventor, and he is also the assignee's principal AND a USPTO‑registered patent practitioner. In a public USPTO comment filed in 2020 (PTO‑C‑2020‑0055‑0226, dated 2020‑11‑13) Rolf states: "I am an inventor on thirty four (34) issued U.S. patents and I am registered to practice before the USPTO," listing his organization as GoFigure, LLC. A sole inventor who is also (a) the founder of the assignee, (b) a repeat filer across mobile‑payments, telephony‑billing and digital‑media patents, and (c) his own patent attorney is a serial‑inventor/monetization profile — it also means the "correspondent of record" on GoFigure's recordings may well be Rolf himself rather than a law firm. That is an inference, not a finding.
• No "inventors departed within 12 months of filing" pattern is possible or present — there is only one inventor, and he did not depart. He remained the controlling principal of the assignee chain through the final 2020 conveyance (he is the registered agent on the Kansas LLC filings).
• No multi‑inventor team, no employment‑agreement-driven assignment. The 2006 conveyance is a founder‑to‑his‑own‑company assignment (assignor ROLF, DEVON A. → GOFIGURE, L.L.C.), which is the classic signature of a self‑funded individual inventor rather than a corporate R&D group.

Original assignee

Entity named on the issued patent: GoFigure Payments, LLC (Paola, KS) — per the Google Patents "Original Assignee" field and the 2007‑12‑06 recorded conveyance. Note the two‑step nuance: at the filing date (2006‑07‑13) the assignee was GoFigure, L.L.C.; the entity that held the patent at issuance (2010‑06‑01) was GoFigure Payments, LLC, following the 2007 assignment.

Primary line of business. GoFigure's patent families cluster in three adjacent areas — (i) mobile/wireless payments and telephony billing (this patent; US 7,376,583; US 8,756,153; US 10,339,746; US 7,065,342), (ii) fee allocation for electronic transactions (US 7,783,541 — a same‑day sibling filing), and (iii) digital media distribution (US 8,843,947, US 8,385,912, held by the affiliated GoFigure Media, LLC, Paola, KS). A corporate email domain (devon@gofigure.com) and the "GoFigure, LLC" organization name on the 2020 filing indicate a live small operating/portfolio business rather than a letterhead.

Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Not verified — and I could not verify it. There is no evidence in the record I retrieved that GoFigure ever commercialized an account that simultaneously serves as a deposit account and an online social community account — which is claim 1's point of novelty. The mobile‑payment and media platforms are the plausible commercial embodiments of the sibling patents, not of the '985's specific claims. I am expressly declining to assert either "yes" or "no."

Current status. Kansas registry data (third‑party aggregator kansasregistry.com, mirroring state records; page last updated 2026‑03‑30) lists GOFIGURE PAYMENTS, LLC, registration no. 4170536, classified "FOREIGN LTD LIABILITY COMPANY" (reported literally), status ACTIVE AND IN GOOD STANDING, registered agent Devon A. Rolf, 26950 Old Kansas City Road, Paola, KS 66071. No bankruptcy, receivership, or dissolution record was found for any GoFigure entity. Notable tension worth flagging: the operating entity is alive and in good standing while the patent it once owned is dead — the '985 lapsed for non‑payment of maintenance fees on 2022‑07‑04 (effective 2022‑06‑01).

Assignment timeline

Three recorded conveyances, all "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST." Recordingdate = USPTO recordation; execution/effective date = the document's own effective date.

2006‑07‑13 (executed) / recorded 2006‑07‑13 — Reel 018104/0466

• Conveyance: Assignment (Assignment of Assignors Interest — see document for details)
• Assignor: ROLF, DEVON A. (sole inventor)
• Assignee: GOFIGURE, L.L.C. (Kansas)
• Correspondent: Not retrieved. My search budget ended before the Assignment Center detail page could be pulled. Flagging the likely (unverified) candidate: because the assignor is himself a registered practitioner, the correspondent may be Rolf personally — but I have no record to cite and am not asserting it.
• Context: Founder‑to‑company assignment executed the same day as the filing — the standard "assign at filing" capture of a self‑funded inventor's rights.

2007‑11‑20 (executed/effective) / recorded 2007‑12‑06 — Reel 020240/0185

• Conveyance: Assignment
• Assignor: GOFIGURE, L.L.C.
• Assignee: GOFIGURE PAYMENTS, LLC (Kansas)
• Correspondent: Not retrieved (same gap as above). No recurring‑correspondent finding can be made on this chain.
• Context: Internal reorganization — a same‑family, same‑principal rename/re‑titling of the holding entity, ~16 months after filing and ~2.5 years before the patent issued. There is no third party anywhere in this hop.

2020‑12‑07 (executed) / recorded 2020‑12‑07 — Reel 054566/0808

• Conveyance: Assignment
• Assignor: GOFIGURE PAYMENTS, LLC
• Assignee: GOFIGURE SOCIAL, LLC (Kansas) — current assignee of record, and the "Parent Company" field on Unified Patents' portal
• Correspondent: Not retrieved. This is the single most important missing data point in the file — see Signal 3 below.
• Context: Internal reorganization / portfolio segmentation — the banking/online‑social patent is carved out of the "Payments" vehicle into a purpose‑named "Social" vehicle, executed ~18 months before the patent lapsed for unpaid maintenance fees. There is no accompanying litigation, no third‑party transferee, and no evidence the transfer was made to enable assertion.

No other recorded assignments exist in the record of which I am aware, and I specifically found no security agreement, license, merger, or change‑of‑name conveyance for this patent. (Verify with a fresh Assignment Center pull; the record is short enough to eyeball in one screen.)

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7729985
    2006 : Filed by Devon A Rolf
         : Assigned to GoFigure LLC
    2007 : Assigned to GoFigure Payments LLC
    2010 : Patent issued
    2020 : Assigned to GoFigure Social LLC
    2022 : Expired for unpaid maintenance fee

NPE / troll‑pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data.

The chain itself is short, complete on its face, and entirely self‑contained — Rolf → GoFigure, L.L.C. (reel 018104/0466, eff. 2006‑07‑13) → GoFigure Payments, LLC (reel 020240/0185, eff. 2007‑11‑20) → GoFigure Social, LLC (reel 054566/0808, eff. 2020‑12‑07) — which is a reorganization signature, not an NPE signature: no third‑party licensing entity, no defensive aggregator, and zero of the eight signals lands as "present." Signals 1 and 3 are the only ones that could flip this, and both are gated on facts I could not retrieve: whether GoFigure Social, LLC has any product or licensing program, and the recorded correspondent on the three reel/frame entries (the repeat‑player tell). If the correspondent on all three recordings proves to be one attorney/firm and GoFigure Social, LLC is confirmed non‑practicing, this becomes NPE — moderate confidence; on the record as it stands, that would be naming‑based speculation, which the brief prohibits. The dominant practical fact remains that the patent expired 2022‑07‑04 for unpaid maintenance fees, so assertion value is effectively nil regardless of the classification.

Verify at: USPTO Assignment Center — search patent 7729985, then open reels 018104/0466, 020240/0185, and 054566/0808 to capture the correspondent and confirm no fourth record exists.

I'll verify the citation record and pull details on the key references before building the § 102 mapping.

Good — I have verified the First Data '588 reference. Let me pull the other keystone references.

Now let me pull the remaining key references — the GoFigure prior patent (the most legally delicate one), Digital World Access, and PayPal.

Prior-Art Analysis Under 35 U.S.C. § 102 — US 7,729,985 B1

0. Record verification (scope control)

I searched for the exact identifier 7729985, and the results resolve to one asset, not a family of look-alikes:

I excluded non-matching hits — e.g., a French thermostat part "7729985," the "N-stabu1 / 7729985" column entry in an unrelated University of Perugia optimization paper, and unrelated PCT search reports. No auto-correction was applied to any identifier.

Scope-of-search disclosure. I confirmed the citation list from the authoritative Google Patents record for US 7,729,985 and independently verified the four keystone references (US 6,829,588; US 6,347,305; US 2006/0085259; US 7,376,583) plus US 7,089,208 against full-text sources. I did not retrieve the actual file wrapper (the examiner's PTO-892/PTOL-326 forms and the examiner's § 102/§ 103 rejection rationales) for application 11/485,699 — my search budget was consumed verifying the references themselves. Everything in § 3–5 below is my independent § 102 reconstruction, not a recitation of the examiner's rejections. Two other flags carried forward from earlier sections: (a) the task's stated date (2026-04-26) differs from the environment date (2026-09-27) — irrelevant to § 102 but noted; (b) the patent's own citation tables disagree by one entry (the "Citations (40)" table omits US 2006/0212393 A1 (Brown), which appears in the "Patent Citations (41)" table). I report 41 and flag the discrepancy rather than reconcile it.

1. The legal standard, and the answer up front

Anticipation under § 102 requires a single reference disclosing every limitation of the claim, arranged as recited. Pre-AIA § 102 governs (filing 2006-07-13, no earlier priority). The statutory categories in play:

• § 102(b) — patented or printed-published more than one year before 2006-07-13, i.e., before 2005-07-13.
• § 102(a) — known or published by others before the invention.
• § 102(e) — U.S. patent or published application filed before 2006-07-13 (which is why several references published after the '985 was filed still qualify — but only if "by another").

Bottom line under a strict § 102 analysis: none of the 41 cited patent references — and none of the 9 non-patent citations — anticipates claim 1, and therefore none anticipates any of claims 2–16. That conclusion is structural, not a judgment about reference quality:

1. Claim 1 requires a common account serving both deposit services and online social community Internet services provided by the provider. No cited reference discloses a deposit-bearing account that is also a social-community account. The social-network references (Nicholas, Fasciano, Visible Path) have no deposit function; the deposit references (First Data '588, E-Duction '305, PayPal '208, DWA '1370) have no social-community function.
2. Claim 1 also requires the processor performing the provisioning step be "associated with the provider of said online social community Internet services." No reference places the account-provisioning processor inside a social-community provider.
3. Because claims 2–16 are all dependent on claim 1 (directly or indirectly), each incorporates every claim-1 limitation. A dependent claim can only be anticipated by a reference that anticipates its parent. So the § 102 answer for claims 2–16 is the same answer: no anticipation.

This is consistent with the record's own search focus: Google Patents lists the examiner's prior-art keywords as account, set forth, payment, accountholder, deposit — with "social community" conspicuously absent. That signature indicates the prosecution clustered on deposit/payment/account mechanics, with the social-community dimension supplied mainly by NPL, i.e., a § 103 record, not a § 102 record.

Everything below therefore reports, for each reference, (i) whether it anticipates anything (uniformly: no), and (ii) which claim(s) it is the nearest miss for — i.e., which limitation(s) it supplies and would therefore anchor a § 103 combination. That nearest-miss mapping is the operationally useful part of a § 102 study of this patent.

2. Master table — the 41 cited patent references

Legend for the last column: Ant. = does this reference, alone, anticipate the identified claim? Near-miss = the claim whose limitations this reference most nearly supplies (usable only in a § 103 combination with another reference). Dates are priority-date / publication-date as printed in the patent's citation table.

Note on references 28–41: each was filed before 2006-07-13 but published after the '985 was filed, so each qualifies only under § 102(e)(1) (or § 102(a) if its publication preceded the invention). Several — 32, 33, 35, 40 — have no plausible bearing on claim 1 and appear to be search-completeness citations rather than substantive art. I say so rather than manufacture a mapping.

3. Non-patent citations (9) — § 102 assessment

Observation on the NPL set. Four of the nine NPL items are prosecution papers from the two same-day sibling applications (11/485,700 and 11/485,719), and two more are the siblings' specifications themselves. That is an unusual citation pattern — the examiner appears to have treated the siblings' prosecution as evidence bearing on the '699 case (typical of § 102(e)/obviousness-type double-patenting or common-disclosure purposes) rather than as substantive § 102 art. This is an inference; I did not retrieve the file wrapper to confirm the examiner's stated reason.

4. The most relevant prior art, ranked

Secondary but useful: US 5,806,045 (Cardone) → claim 3 incentives; US 5,870,722 (AT&T) + US 2006/0294025 + US 7,376,583 (Rolf) → claims 9/10/14 device; US 2005/0027700 (Turner) + US 2007/0287413 (Kleitsch) → claim 13 media/subscriptions; US 6,038,552 (Chase), US 2003/0004868, US 2003/0144942 → claims 4–7 account type; US 2004/0111361 (ADP) → (B)/claims 2, 8.

5. Claim-by-claim § 102 table

Structural takeaway: because claim 1 is the sole independent claim and every other claim depends from it, the entire § 102 analysis of the '985 reduces to a single question — does any one reference disclose a deposit-bearing account that is also an online social community account, provisioned by a processor associated with the social-community provider? No cited reference does. The patent therefore stands un-anticipated on this record; its vulnerability is § 103, not § 102.

6. The one reference whose status must not be assumed: US 7,376,583

US 7,376,583 is the citation most likely to be misused. It is the same inventor (Rolf, Devon A.) and the same original owner line (GoFigure, L.L.C.) as the '985. Two consequences:

• § 102(e)(2) requires the reference patent be "by another." A same-inventor patent is not § 102(e) art against the '985.
• Pre-AIA § 103(c) removes § 102(e)/(f)/(g) art that was commonly owned at the time the invention was made. Both assets trace to GoFigure, L.L.C., so '583 is disqualified as § 103 art as well.

Net effect: US 7,376,583 should be struck from any anticipation or obviousness case against the '985. This does not rescue the patent, because the strongest combination (First Data '588 + E-Duction '305 + Nicholas '259 + Digital World Access '1370, motivated by "Toward The Single Account") does not depend on '583. I flag it so that it is not mistakenly counted as an anticipatory reference.

Incidental cross-reference (not a finding about the '985): my searches surfaced IPR2024-01321 (Google LLC) in which Exhibit 1008 is US 7,376,583 (Rolf) — the prior-art Rolf patent, i.e., a different asset in this family being used as art against a third party. That is a lead about the family, not about the '985, and it does not alter the "no PTAB proceeding on the '985" conclusion reached earlier.

7. Conclusions and confidence

Conclusions.

1. No cited reference — patent or non-patent — anticipates claim 1 of US 7,729,985 under § 102. The reason is limitation-specific and structural: the "common account" that simultaneously provides deposit services and online social community Internet services, provisioned by a processor associated with the social-community provider, is found in no single reference.
2. Consequently, no reference anticipates any of claims 2–16, all of which depend from claim 1.
3. The art of record is § 103 art only. The realistic invalidity theory is the combination identified earlier in this file — "Toward The Single Account" (1974) + US 6,829,588 + US 6,347,305 + US 2006/0085259, backstopped by US 2004/0111370 and US 7,089,208 — which supplies every claim-1 limitation, with only the choice of a social-community account as the deposit vehicle genuinely contestable.
4. US 7,376,583 must be excluded from any § 102/§ 103 case on same-inventor/common-ownership grounds.

Caveats I will not paper over.

• I did not obtain the file wrapper (the examiner's actual § 102/§ 103 rejections or the reasons for allowance). If the examiner made a § 102 rejection of any claim, or if the applicant filed a Rule 132 declaration with objective evidence, my reconstruction would need revision. Treat this as an independent opinion, not the prosecution record.
• Descriptions of references I did not open in full (notably US 2006/0212393 A1 / Brown, and the more peripheral entries 1, 4, 5, 8, 13, 14, 19, 20, 22–25, 27, 32, 33, 35, 40) rest on the title and the patent's own citation table — moderate-to-low confidence. I have flagged #41 accordingly and have not inflated its significance.
• § 102(e) qualification for post-filing-file publications (e.g., Nicholas '259, Fasciano '458, Kleiber, Abadi) depends on the reference being "by another" and on my reading of its filing date as printed; verify each against its face before relying on it.
• Date discrepancies remain unreconciled, per the strict-ID rule: Unified Patents lists priority 2006-07-12, grant 2010-05-31, and expiration 2027-01-08 — each one day earlier than Google Patents' 2006-07-13 / 2010-06-01 / 2027-01-09. For § 102 purposes the operative date is the filing date, and I have used 2006-07-13 (Google Patents and the USPTO application number 11/485,699 both support it).
• The patent is expired for fee non-payment (effective 2022-06-01), so this § 102 analysis has defensive/portfolio-diligence value rather than case-dispositive value.

Sources cited in this section: Google Patents — US7729985B1 · Unified Patents portal — US-7729985-B1 · US 6,829,588 full text (Stoutenburg, First Data) · US 6,347,305 full text (Watkins, E-Duction) · US 2006/0085259 A1 / US 10,977,613 B2 (Nicholas) · US 7,376,583 B1 (Rolf, GoFigure) · Exhibit 1008, IPR2024-01321 (Google LLC).

I'll verify a few of the prior-art references flagged as unverified in the earlier section, then build the § 103 analysis on the verified record.

Obviousness Analysis Under 35 U.S.C. § 103 — US 7,729,985 B1

Built on the prior sections. This analysis extends, and does not repeat, the earlier summary, litigation, PTAB, assignment, and prior-art sections. The prior-art section concluded that no reference of record anticipates claim 1 because none discloses a single common account serving both deposit services and online social community Internet services. That conclusion is about § 102. It does not answer § 103, and it is important to say why: "[A] claimed invention may be obvious even though it is not anticipated," and the combined teachings of references may render a claim obvious even where no single reference discloses every limitation. The patent's principal vulnerability is § 103, not § 102 — and the examiner's allowance on the "combination" ground is the weakest possible signal of validity.

I. The § 103 Yardstick

Governing law. The patent is pre-AIA (filed 2006-07-13; no earlier priority claimed). Pre-AIA § 103(a) applies, and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) controls the analysis: "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results." The Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966) factors frame the inquiry, and the test is what the combined teachings suggest, not what each reference suggests in isolation (In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413 (CCPA 1981)). The examiner must articulate a rational underpinning (In re Rouffet, 149 F.3d 1350 (Fed. Cir. 1998)) — every motivation below is tied to express reference language or record evidence, not to hindsight.

Hypothetical PHOSITA (as of 2006-07-13). A person with a bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, finance, or business, plus approximately 2–4 years of experience designing or operating electronic payment, stored-value, or online-account products — or, equivalently, a multi-disciplinary team consisting of a payments/banking product manager and an Internet-services engineer. Critically, the PHOSITA is "a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton" (KSR) and is presumed familiar with the voluminous § 102(b) record on electronic payroll deposit and card/POS settlement amassed between 1974 and 2005.

Prior-art date table for the references this analysis relies on (Google Patents' "priority date" column mixes provisional and non-provisional dates — a discrepancy I already flagged for US 2006/0085259; the same artifact recurs below and must be checked per reference):

⚠ Important correction to the earlier section. It listed US 2004/0111370 as "filed 2000-06-27." My retrieval shows the "Single Source Money Management System" non-provisional was App. 10/700,720, filed 2003-11-03, claiming priority through 09/894,644 (filed 2001-06-27) to provisional 60/214,088 (filed 2000-06-27). The 2000-06-27 figure is therefore the provisional date, the identical artifact the earlier section correctly flagged for US 2006/0085259. The § 102(b) conclusion is unaffected (publication 2004-06-10 is more than a year before 2006-07-13).

II. Claim 1 Decomposed Into Sixteen Sub-Elements

Claim 1 is the only independent claim. Element-by-element, mapping the references the examiner already cited (all descriptions below are from the record or from text I retrieved this session):

The gap analysis that matters. Each of the two halves of claim 1 was squarely in the art: the banking half (E2, E3b, E4a) in Stoutenburg, DWA, E-Duction, and PayPal; the online-social-community half (E1a–E1c) in Nicholas and Fasciano. The only sub-elements no single reference supplies are the conjunction in E1a ("common account") and the provider identity in E1b/E1c. That is a combination question, and combination questions are where KSR bites.

III. Four Combinations a Challenger Would Run

Combination A (primary): DWA '1370 + Nicholas '5259 + Stoutenburg '588

• Coverage: DWA supplies E1a (account funded by automatic payroll deposit), E1b (financial institution plus linked network entities), E2a–E2c (employer pay into the employee's account), E3a–E3b (secure internet shopping with the customer authorizing payment from the account to a third-party vendor), and E4a verbatim (ATM/POS at a brick-and-mortar vendor site — purchase or withdrawal). Stoutenburg supplies E2b/E2c and reinforces E4a with affirmative retail-location disbursement at convenience/grocery "delivery sites." Nicholas supplies E1a's social half (social-network user account), E1c (cooperative purchase control server at the network/social node), and E3a.
• Why a PHOSITA would combine them: the product of the combination is precisely what Nicholas' own background identifies as the unmet need — see § IV.1 below.
• Reasonable expectation of success: high. Every component is a software/account function; the only "integration" work is exposing a deposit account through an existing online-service account and routing settlement through a known payment gateway — a predictable engineering step in 2005–2006.

Combination B: Stoutenburg '588 + Nicholas '5259 + "Toward The Single Account" (1974) + Fasciano '458

This is the cleanest all-§ 102(b)/§ 102(e) combination, because it avoids the common-ownership problem discussed in § VI.1. The 1974 article supplies E1a's "common account" concept directly and explicitly; Stoutenburg supplies E2/E4a; Nicholas and Fasciano supply E1a's social half and E1c.

Combination C: E-Duction '305 + Nicholas '5259 + DWA '1370

Attacks the salary-payment and employer-payor dependent claims (2, 8) and the E3a merchant limitation especially hard, since E-Duction is squarely an employer-authorized payroll-funded purchase at an online vendor. But E-Duction alone fails E3b (the purchase is satisfied by payroll deduction; no accountholder deposit account funded and then drawn down). It must be paired with DWA to supply the account.

Combination D: Nicholas '5259 + Fasciano '458 + '1370

The "single-provider" variant: the social-network operator is the same node that runs the cooperative purchase server and the linked bank/payment gateway (Nicholas' system architecture already names a bank server and credit gateway as nodes), so E1b/E1c are satisfied within a single provider's system.

IV. Motivation to Combine — Seven Grounded Rationales

This is the part the examiner apparently did not articulate, and the part that would decide a § 103 challenge. Each rationale is tied to express evidence.

1. Express teaching, suggestion, or motivation in the Nicholas reference itself. Nicholas' background states: *"A category of WWW site, commonly referred to as social networking sites, have been developed and grown in popularity in recent years. Site users establish accounts and then create relationships with other user accounts… While these have drawn large numbers of users, the introduction of commerce on these sites that take advantage of their capabilities has been limited. It would be useful to provide a method for establishing commerce that may be provided on social network sites."* That is a textbook express motivation with the express stated problem. Nicholas then expressly architects the solution around banking rails: the system diagram includes "credit processing gateway 350, bank server 360, alternate payment system 370, and social networks 380" as nodes; the specification names "Paypal or Verisign" as payment service providers and "Friendster, MySpace, or the like" as social network service providers; and it discloses a "payment marker" that "may include reference to a site, seller, product, user account, payment gateway, or any other information that may facilitate a payment." (US 2006/0085259 A1, pub. 2006-04-20; granted as US 10,977,613 B2, 2021-04-13.)

2. Known technique applied to a known device, yielding predictable results (KSR rationales A, C, D). Depositing a third party's payment into an account accessed by a portable card and drawn down at a retailer was old — Stoutenburg (2004) and, for the employee-card/disbursement model, the very prior art the '985 specification's own background distinguishes. Adding the debit/account architecture to an Internet-service account is "use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way." Nothing in the combination requires a new mechanism; each step is a routing/auth logic step the PHOSITA performed routinely.

3. Market forces and a known business incentive (KSR rationale F). The '985 specification itself concedes the incentive: "the invention provides a tool for communications and Internet companies to become banks and to receive deposits." That sentence is an admission that the commercial motivation — deposit funding, interchange revenue, float — was known at filing. The fee-sharing business model was likewise already documented: US 5,987,429 (Sun, computer-based fee processing for e-commerce, 1999), US 2004/0033797 (Nokia, sharing transmission revenue between mobile operators and content providers, 2004), and the Whewell billing references (2005). Recognizing a business opportunity is not a patentable contribution.

4. A finite set of identified, predictable solutions — "obvious to try" (KSR). The specification enumerates the "second function" as "at least one of a communications account, an online social community account, or an account that provides Internet services, such as media or content aggregation, auction services, advertising services, search services, or access services." Selecting "online social community" from that enumerated, closed list is the paradigm of a predictable variation among a finite set of identified options. This is an admission in the applicant's own specification that the identity of the second function was not the point of novelty — and it is the strongest single piece of evidence against claim 1.

5. The applicant's own characterization of the art. The specification states: "The present invention is therefore substantially independent of any specific details regarding actual implementation of the commerce feature itself, since electronic commerce with payment accounts are well-known." An applicant cannot simultaneously argue that the commerce/account machinery was well-known and that combining that well-known machinery with a well-known Internet-service account involved inventive skill.

6. A documented, decades-long trajectory toward account consolidation — long-felt need cutting against the patent. "Toward The Single Account" (1974-12-16) — cited by the examiner — argues that consolidation of a customer's financial relationships into one account is "a natural consequence of consumerist militancy," that "the electronic banking hardware and software exist or are moving from blueprint to construction stage," and that "if the single account can be called an eventual consequence of EFTS developments — indeed, the capstone of that evolving new financial system — then it similarly will come into being through an evolutionary process. It will not just occur; it will not come overnight…" A reference that names the endpoint, calls it the "capstone," and predicts its arrival supplies both motivation and a reasonable expectation of success — and it was publicly available 32 years before the filing.

7. Analogous art. All the references sit in the same field of endeavor — electronic payment, prepaid/stored-value accounts, e-commerce, and online service provision — and each is "reasonably pertinent to the particular problem with which the inventor was involved" (funding an online-service account with a third party's payment and making the balance spendable). Under In re Bigio, 381 F.3d 1320 (Fed. Cir. 2004), and In re Clay, they are analogous. The "single account" article and the sociological NPL (Davern 1997; Visible Path 2004) are pertinent at least as evidence of the state of the art and of the social-network construct.

V. Dependent Claims 2–16

Because every one of claims 2–16 depends from claim 1, each inherits claim 1's limitations. Once claim 1 is held obvious, the dependents fall unless the added limitation supplies a separate, non-obvious contribution. None does; each is a design choice or a known feature:

Note on claim 13 vs. the family. Rolf's own US 7,856,387 B1 ("Method for facilitating a purchase transaction using an account associated with a media account," granted 2010-08-24) claims the media-account variant. Because it issued after the '985 filing, it is not prior art and cannot be used against claim 13 — I flag it only to note that the media variant was pursued separately within the same family, which undercuts any argument that claim 13 captures a distinct inventive contribution.

VI. The Patent Owner's Best Defenses — and Their Weaknesses

1. The "common account / single provider" limitation is the real battleground. Two references resist it: DWA's architecture is two-account (money management + discretionary fund) with segregation of committed from discretionary spending — which a patent owner can argue teaches away from a single commingled account; and Nicholas never funds an account at all. A challenger must therefore rely on "Toward The Single Account" (which explicitly teaches collapsing the relationship into one account and calls it the industry's predicted endpoint) plus the '985's own statement that the account "also serves as at least one of" a list of functions. I would expect the patent owner to press a narrow construction of "common account" connoting a single account record at a single provider; on that construction the DWA/Nicholas pairing is weaker and the 1974 article becomes essential.

2. ⚠ A genuinely important finding: two of the examiner's most-cited references are probably disqualified as § 103 art.

• US 7,376,583 B1 (Rolf; GoFigure, L.L.C.) issued 2008-05-20 — after the '985 filing — and its B1 kind code means no pre-grant publication. It therefore qualifies as prior art only under § 102(e) (effective date 2000-08-10, or 1999-08-10 via provisional 60/147,987).
• U.S. App. Nos. 11/485,700 (which issued as US 7,788,174 B1) and 11/485,719 are same-day, same-inventor filings, also B1s with no pre-grant publication.
• Under pre-AIA § 103(c)(1), subject matter that "qualifies as prior art only under … subsection (e) … shall not preclude patentability … where the subject matter and the claimed invention were, at the time the claimed invention was made, owned by the same person or subject to an obligation of assignment to the same person." The '985 was assigned to GoFigure, L.L.C. on the filing date (reel 018104/0466) and '583 was assigned to the same GoFigure, L.L.C. The § 102(e)-only art is therefore disqualified from the § 103 combination — which removes the applicant's own prior work (the "commerce account that doubles as the communications-service account") from the challenger's arsenal and is a win for the patent owner on that narrow point.
• Caveat, stated plainly: (a) the disqualification depends on common ownership at the time the invention was made, and Rolf's assignment is dated the filing date itself, so a challenger could probe the conception-to-assignment gap; (b) I confirmed only the assignee names and reel/frame from the record, not the underlying ownership agreements. Verify before relying on this.
• Consequence for strategy: the challenger should build Combination B (Stoutenburg + Nicholas + 1974 article + Fasciano), which uses no same-inventor/same-owner art. Recall also that the earlier section flagged that the § 102(e) status of US 2006/0212393 A1 is unresolved — its own publication date (2006-09-21) is after the '985 filing, so it is available, if at all, only via an earlier US filing date in the DWA/Brown chain.

3. The examiner allowed it — but that proves little about validity. All the references above were of record, and the claims issued. That is a real data point, and it means a challenger must explain what the examiner missed. The explanation is available: the examiner appears to have treated each reference as addressing individual limitations (hence the § 102-style citations) without articulating a KSR motivation to combine the payroll-account art with the social-network art — a common pattern in 2007–2010 business-method prosecutions. Also note the timing: the '985 was examined across 2008–2010, i.e., straddling KSR (April 2007), so the examiner may have applied pre-KSR TSM rigor to the combination question.

4. Secondary considerations: the record is empty. The prior sections establish that (i) no litigation naming the '985 surfaced, (ii) no PTAB proceeding was ever filed, (iii) the assignee chain is an intra-family Kansas reorganization with no NPE marks, and (iv) the final owner let the patent expire for non-payment at the 11.5-year fee (lapse recorded 2022-07-04, effective 2022-06-01). There is no evidence of long-felt but unmet need, unexpected results, industry praise, copying, licensing, or commercial success attributable to the claimed subject matter. The absence is not affirmative evidence of obviousness, but it forfeits the one rebuttal that most often defeats a KSR combination.

5. A parallel, and likely stronger, attack: § 101. Claim 1 recites a "computer-implemented method" whose substance is providing an account, receiving a deposit, enabling a purchase, and enabling a withdrawal — each performed by "at least one electronic processor." Post-Alice, that pattern invites an abstract-idea challenge (fundamental economic practice / intermediated settlement; cf. Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, 573 U.S. 208 (2014); Bilski; Electric Power Group v. Alstom, 830 F.3d 1350 (Fed. Cir. 2016)). A generic "electronic processor" recitation may not supply an inventive concept. This is out of scope here but is material to how much the § 103 fight is worth: a challenger with § 101 and § 103 both available should lead with § 101 and hold § 103 as the alternate.

VII. Bottom Line and Confidence

Assessment. On this record, claim 1 is more likely than not obvious under § 103, and claims 2–16 fall with it — but not a confident call, because the "common account / single provider" conjunction (E1a/E1b) is a genuine limitation no single reference teaches, and a narrow construction of "common account" could sustain the claim. I would put this at roughly 55–70% in favor of obviousness, contingent on the fact-finder accepting (a) the Nicholas express motivation and (b) "Toward The Single Account" as supplying the consolidation teaching. The strongest combination is B (Stoutenburg '588 + Nicholas '5259 + 1974 article + Fasciano '458) because it avoids the § 103(c) problem entirely. The weakest link in every combination is the requirement that a single provider supply both functions.

Practical relevance caveat. This is largely academic: the patent expired for non-payment of maintenance fees effective 2022-06-01, no litigation or PTAB challenge ever existed, and § 286's six-year damages lookback now bars nearly the entire live term from recovery. The § 103 analysis matters for defensive/estoppel posture and for family-wide risk assessment, not for imminent exposure on the '985 itself.

Confidence and open items (strict literal-identifier handling):

• Verified this session: Nicholas US 2006/0085259 A1 — App. 11/254,581, filed 2005-10-20, published 2006-04-20, provisional 60/620,571 (2004-10-20), granted as US 10,977,613 B2 on 2021-04-13, assignee Dizpersion Technologies; its background text and system architecture (credit processing gateway 350 / bank server 360 / alternate payment system 370 / social networks 380; PayPal, Friendster/MySpace) were quoted. DWA "Single Source Money Management System" — App. 10/700,720 filed 2003-11-03, family chain to provisional 60/214,088 (2000-06-27); its ATM/POS and secure-internet-shopping disclosures and its "money management account … deposited directly from payroll using automatic deposit" language were retrieved. "Toward The Single Account" text retrieved from United States Investor / Eastern Banker, 1974-12-16, Vol. 85 Iss. 25.
• ⚠ Contradiction to flag (do not auto-correct): the patent's own citation record labels the 1974 source "United States Banker"; the full text I retrieved is from "United States Investor / Eastern Banker," Vol. 85 Iss. 25, 1974-12-16 — same date and same piece title, different masthead. I report both and assert no page-level identity; a challenger should pull the original to confirm the citation and pagination (pp. 5–6 as cited).
• ⚠ Unverified / flagged: the actual US filing date of the application that published as US 2006/0212393 A1 (I retrieved the family chain but not that application's serial; the 2006-09-21 publication is after the '985 filing, so its § 103 availability depends entirely on an unconfirmed earlier filing date). Likewise US 6,233,568 (§ 102(b), but its disclosure is to shipping/transportation fees and carries no weight here), US 2004/0111361 (ADP), US 2007/0208627 (Abadi), and the Davern/Visible Path disclosures rest on citation-record metadata plus only partially retrieved text — the earlier section flagged these and I did not close them.
• ⚠ The § 103(c)(1) conclusion in § VI.2 is my analysis, not a record fact. It requires confirmation of common ownership at the time the invention was made. If it holds, US 7,376,583 and the '700/'719 siblings are removed from the § 103 combination; if it does not, Combination C becomes available and the obviousness case strengthens.
• Not conflated: IPR2024-01321 (Google LLC) names US 7,376,583, not US 7,729,985 — as the prior-art section correctly warned. US 7,717,334, US 7,783,541, US 7,788,174, and US 7,856,387 are distinct Rolf-family patents (the '700 sibling issued as US 7,788,174 B1 at App. No. 11/485,700) and must not be merged with the '985 number. No litigation and no PTAB proceeding naming 7,729,985 surfaced, consistent with the earlier sections.
• Unreconciled date discrepancy, carried forward: the task header states 2026-04-26 while my operating brief states 2026-09-27. Nothing in this § 103 analysis turns on the difference, but it affects any § 286 damages-window arithmetic and I am not silently reconciling it.