US 7775501

I'll search for this specific patent number in patent databases and litigation dockets.

Let me search specifically for any litigation or CAFC docket activity involving this patent.

Let me verify the PTAB/IPR context I found and check for any CAFC appeals.

US Patent 7,775,501 — "Pinch Valve"

Search scope note: I checked both the USPTO/Google Patents record for this number and current litigation dockets. I found no CAFC 2026 docket (or any appeal) in which U.S. Patent No. 7,775,501 is itself the patent-in-suit. The only 2025–2026 proceedings I located that mention this patent are PTAB inter partes reviews, where the patent (or its pre-grant publication) is being used as prior art, not asserted. Details below. If you have a specific CAFC case number or caption suggesting otherwise, I could not confirm it from available sources — treat that as an explicit uncertainty rather than a negative finding of law.

Bibliographic Data (authoritative, from the patent record)

Abstract (as issued)

A pinch valve has a hose-like valve member with a flexible peripheral wall adjacent to whose outer periphery two diametrally opposite pinch elements are arranged able to be moved toward and away from one another with a greater or lesser pinching of the peripheral wall while performing an operating movement athwart the valve member longitudinal axis. An annular actuating ring coaxially surrounding the valve member may act on the pinch elements for causing the operating movement. The actuating ring is placed in a working space surrounded radially from the outside by a peripheral valve housing wall and is able to be acted on by drive means separate from the actuating ring with a drive force controlling the actuating movement.

Plain-Language Overview of the Independent Claims

Claim 1 — the base "pinch valve" claim (mechanical core + fail-safe spring).
A pinch valve built around a flexible hose "valve member" spanning between two end fittings ("unions"). Two opposed "pinch elements" sit outside the hose and squeeze it shut (or open) by moving at right angles to the hose axis. The key structural innovation is that the actuating member is not a manually-slid clamp, but an actuating ring that coaxially surrounds the hose, sitting inside an annular working space bounded radially by the outer housing wall. The ring is pushed by drive means that are separate from the ring (so force is applied symmetrically and with high magnitude, and the ring isn't directly handled). Claim 1 additionally requires a spring in the annular working space that biases the actuating ring toward the pinch elements so the valve closes when the drive force is absent (i.e., a fail-safe / normally-closed arrangement).

Claim 18 — the fluid-driven, externally-plumbed variant.
Same overall valve architecture, but reciting that the drive means apply a fluid (e.g., pneumatic) drive force, and adding: an annular drive chamber axially adjacent to the actuating ring; a fluid control duct connecting to it for controlled supply/removal of drive fluid; and the duct opening at the outer face of the housing fitted with connection means for a fluid line. It expressly requires the drive fluid to be independent of the fluid flowing through the valve member.

Claim 22 — the guided-support variant.
Same architecture, adding that the hose is coaxially surrounded by a sleeve-like support means (to resist radial inflation/rupture under internal fluid pressure). The support means is made of two coaxially aligned, axially spaced support sleeves forming a guide gap in which the pinch elements slide radially. The facing end faces of the two sleeves each carry a first linear guide structure that slidingly mates with a second linear guide structure on the pinch elements, so the elements are linearly guided radially and supported perpendicularly (preventing skew).

Claim 23 — the molded valve-member variant.
Same architecture, reciting that the hose valve member is a rubber-elastic molding whose peripheral wall, in its unloaded initial state (and purely from its own dimensional stability, not from pressure), has a shape tapering axially from the ends toward the pinch-element engagement area.

Litigation / Docket Findings (2025–2026)

• No CAFC appeal (including no 2026 CAFC docket) naming US 7,775,501 as the patent-in-suit could be found. My searches of Federal Circuit 2026 materials did not surface this patent as an asserted or appealed patent.
• The patent or its publication does appear as prior art in PTAB proceedings: In the PTAB filings for IPR2025-00289 and IPR2025-00989 (Imperative Care, Inc. v. Inari Medical, Inc.), the exhibit list identifies "U.S. Patent No. 7,775,501 B2 to Kees ('Kees')", and Exhibit 1037 in IPR2025-00989 is U.S. Patent Publication US 2008/0087853 A1 to Kees (the pre-grant publication of this patent). These IPRs concern hemostasis-valve patents owned by Inari (e.g., the '291 patent), and Kees is being relied on as a printed-publication/patent prior-art reference. That is the extent of any current docket involvement I can confirm.

Caveat on the docket point: I could not independently verify a live U.S. district court case in which Festo has asserted '501, and I found no CAFC matter. The absence of a result is not proof that no such filing exists (docket databases are sometimes incomplete or paywalled). If you supply a case caption or docket number, I can target it directly.

Points of Uncertainty

1. CAFC 2026 involvement: no confirming source located; the patent appears to be prior art in PTAB, not a litigated patent. Flagging as unverified rather than asserting a definitive negative.
2. Expiration date: the record lists "Active, expires 2028-11-05" — this is a database-computed adjusted-expiration notation and is not a legal conclusion. The stated priority/filing dates (2006/2007) would ordinarily run a 20-year term from the 2007 U.S. filing date, so a 2028 date is plausible as an adjusted term, but I did not verify the PTA calculation.
3. Assignee name: records show the original entity as "Festo AG & Co.," later "Festo AG & Co. KG," then "Festo SE & Co. KG." I have reported these literally as they appear rather than normalizing them.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 7775501 across patent litigation databases.

Let me check specialized litigation databases for this specific patent.

Let me run a few more targeted checks to confirm the absence of litigation.

Litigation Report — U.S. Patent No. 7,775,501

Patent: U.S. 7,775,501 B2 — "Pinch valve"
Inventor: Ulrich Kees
Assignee/Patent Owner: Festo SE & Co. KG (originally Festo AG & Co.; name changed to Festo AG & Co. KG in 2008, then Festo SE & Co. KG in 2020)
Priority date: 2006-10-13 (DE 10 2006 048 573.4)
Filing date: 2007-10-11 (Application No. 11/974,010)
Grant date: 2010-08-17
Status: Active; adjusted expiration 2028-11-05

Finding: No litigation found

Based on my searches of the available sources, I found no record of any litigation (district court action, CAFC appeal, or PTAB proceeding) in which U.S. Patent No. 7,775,501 was asserted as a patent-in-suit. I could not identify any plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, or filing date for a case involving this patent.

What I searched and what appeared:

• Google Patents litigation metrics for the patent show no "Litigation" or "Litigation Alert" entries. The record instead shows the patent being cited as prior art against others (listed among "Cited By" / "Families Citing this family" and in third-party submission lists), which is a citation relationship, not a lawsuit.
• The patent appears in prior-art citation tables inside other proceedings — e.g., Inari Medical patents (which cite 7,775,501 as a background reference) and various reexamination/PTAB file histories (e.g., an examiner search string referencing "7775501"). These are citations, not enforcement actions involving the '501 patent.
• The only Festo litigation surfaced by the searches involves entirely different patents (e.g., Festo v. Shoketsu Kinzoku / SMC, on U.S. 4,354,125 and 3,779,401 — the doctrine-of-equivalents line of cases). Those are unrelated to the '501 pinch valve.

Important caveats

This should be treated as a negative finding from a limited search, not a certification of no litigation. Specifically:

1. I was not able to directly query PACER, the CAFC docket, or the Unified Patents litigation caselist for this specific number within the search steps available. A definitive "no litigation" conclusion would require running the number through those dockets directly (e.g., Docket Alarm, Lex Machina, Docket Navigator, RPX, or Unified Patents' litigation search).
2. Name variants matter. A case involving this patent could be captioned under a party that acquired or licensed it, not just "Festo." A proper clearance search would query the patent number across PACER/RECAP full-text.
3. The patent is a component-level pneumatic valve owned by an operating company (Festo), which is the profile of a patent less likely to generate public patent-infringement litigation than an NPE-held patent — consistent with, though not proof of, the absence of suits.

Bottom line: No known litigation involving U.S. 7,775,501 was found. If you need a litigation-grade, defensible clearance, I recommend running the number directly against PACER/RECAP, Docket Navigator, Lex Machina, and the Unified Patents litigation database, since those were not fully accessible here.

I'll verify the canonical "no proceedings" baseline against what's publicly searchable.

Let me run a few more targeted checks before concluding.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 7,775,501: 0 — zero IPRs, zero PGRs, and zero CBMs. Per the USPTO Open Data Portal structured block provided in this prompt, no AIA trial has ever been instituted (or, so far as the ODP index reflects, even petitioned) against this patent: 0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained by the Board, 0 settled, 0 institution denials. My independent searches (Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, PTAB-hosted petition documents, general web) surfaced no petition, no institution decision, no Final Written Decision and no Federal Circuit appeal touching the '501 patent.

Bottom line for a defendant: there is no PTAB record to lean on — but there is also no adverse Board precedent hardening the patent. All 25 claims (claims 1–25) stand exactly as issued, untested at the Board. A defendant cannot say "claim 1 is already dead." What a defendant can say is that nobody has yet been forced to try, and that the § 315(e)(2) estoppel slate is completely clean.

No proceedings to report

Because the canonical list is empty, there is no proceeding to walk through claim-by-claim. Rather than pad this section with speculation, here is the one item that could be mistaken for a proceeding, plus an explicit statement of what I could not verify:

⚠️ False positive to be aware of (NOT a proceeding on the '501 patent)

Search results for the '501 patent return IPR2025-00989, Imperative Care, Inc. v. Inari Medical, Inc. — and the '501 patent's own publication, US 2008/0087853 A1 (Kees) (i.e., the pre-grant publication that matured into US 7,775,501), appears in that case as Petitioner's Exhibit 1037, filed 2026-04-09. (PTAB docket mirror)

• What this is: the '501 patent family being used as prior art against somebody else's patent (an Inari Medical patent). Imperative Care is the petitioner; Inari Medical is the patent owner.
• What this is not: an attack on US 7,775,501. Neither Festo nor the '501 patent is a party or the challenged patent. Do not cite IPR2025-00989 as an IPR against the '501 patent — that would be a factual error in a brief or a client memo.
• Why it's still useful: it's a clean confirmation of the '501 patent's prior-art status as of 2007-2008 in the medical hemostasis-valve space — someone is affirmatively relying on the Kees disclosure against later claims. That is a signal about the breadth of the Kees disclosure, not about its validity.

Verification limits (stated plainly)

• The ODP-derived block in this prompt is the controlling source, and it reports none. I am treating that as authoritative.
• Web search is a weak instrument here: petitions, institution decisions and FWDs are often indexed only by docket-service aggregators (PTAB E2E, Docket Alarm, Docket Navigator) that are partly paywalled or staging-hosted, so an exhaustive negative cannot be proven by search alone. I found no affirmative evidence of a proceeding, and the ODP confirms none.
• No judge panel, grounds, institution reasoning, FWD disposition, settlement or CAFC appeal exists to report for an empty proceeding list. I will not synthesize any. To confirm independently: USPTO PTAB E2E (search "7,775,501"), USPTO Patent Center, and CourtListener (search patent number or "Festo SE & Co. KG").

Adjacent post-grant context worth noting (not AIA trials)

The '501 patent's family has had mixed fortunes abroad, which is background, not Board activity:

The EP and BR drops are foreign national-phase events; they do not cancel, narrow, or otherwise affect the US claims, and they create no US estoppel. No ex parte reexamination, no inter partes reexamination and no reissue appears in the record either — unusual for a 2010 patent that is still active, and consistent with a patent that has simply not been litigated hard.

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is UNTESTED. Claims 1–25 of US 7,775,501 are intact and unamended. There is no IPR certificate cancelling any claim, no Board holding of unpatentability, no adverse judgment that would give a defendant a free shot. Independent claim 1 (actuating ring in an annular working space + separate drive means + spring biasing the ring closed in the absence of drive force), independent claim 18 (the fluid-drive/control-duct variant with the drive fluid independent of the process fluid), independent claim 22 (the two-support-sleeve linear-guide variant), and independent claim 23 (the rubber-elastic molding with the self-stabilized tapered peripheral wall) all survive at full scope, with dependents 2–17, 19–21, 24 and 25 attached. Note the trade-off: untested is not the same as strong. The '501 claims were never squeezed through the Board's broadest-reasonable-interpretation lens, so their construed scope is also unknown — there is no claim construction on the record from any forum. That cuts both ways, and it means the claim boundaries recited in a demand letter are the applicant's own framing, not an adjudicated one.

Estoppel landscape: a clean slate, and a closing window. Because no IPR/PGR has been filed, no § 315(e)(2) estoppel exists against anyone. A defendant today can raise every § 102/§ 103 ground it can find, including grounds it might have "reasonably could have raised" in a hypothetical earlier IPR — because there was none. The flip side is § 315(b): if you have been served with a complaint alleging infringement of the '501 patent, you have one year from service to petition. Miss it and you are barred from the IPR entirely, which is the worst of both worlds (no estoppel benefit, no Board forum). The prior-art backbone is short and tractable: the file's citation list is only 11 references, headlined by DE 22 43 173 A1 (Spirax Sarco, 1973), US 3,830,462 (Spirax Sarco, 1974), DE 29 41 278 A1 / C2 (Viggo, cannula connector), DE 7 500 720 U (Beul hose valve), DE 33 18 817 A1 (Madgal-Glil-Yam mixing battery), DE 34 45 740 A1 (Jakob full-bore valve), JP S58-46271 A (Asahi Organic, pinch valve) and US 7,168,444 B2 (Nelson Irrigation) — plus the non-patent AKO BSV mechanical pinch valve datasheet (Oct. 2001), which the specification itself concedes discloses a pneumatic pinch valve. The obvious first-question for any invalidity theory is whether the AKO BSV sheet, alone or with a secondary reference supplying the separate-drive-piston and guide-gap features, renders claims 1/18/22 obvious — and the answer is genuinely open because no panel has ever looked.

Pattern signals: none exist, and the absence is itself an inference. No serial petitioner, no follow-on petitions, no joinder, no Unified Patents or other defensive aggregator in the chain, and no Festo appeal to the Federal Circuit over this patent. The practical read: this patent has not been asserted in a way that provoked a well-funded defense. IPRs are reactive instruments — they appear when a patent is used in district court or the ITC against a defendant with the budget to petition. Zero IPRs across 16+ years of enforceability (granted 2010-08-17) usually means either (a) low assertion activity, (b) assertions resolved quietly, or (c) a patent owner who has chosen licensing over litigation. One further constraint on the calculus: the structured data lists an adjusted expiration of 2028-11-05 — roughly two years of remaining life as of today (2026-09-28). A newly filed IPR would need to be petitioned promptly to have a trial and FWD land meaningfully before expiry; long-tail damages exposure is shrinking, which materially lowers the expected value of a full IPR campaign and raises the relative appeal of a cheaper district-court invalidity case or an early license.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant being asserted against: the honest headline is that there is no PTAB activity on file for US 7,775,501. You cannot point to a cancelled claim; all 25 claims are live and untested. Do not represent otherwise in a Rule 11-sensitive filing. Instead, run a fresh § 102/§ 103 search against the narrow claim-1/claim-18/claim-22/claim-23 limitations — in particular the "actuating ring in an annular working space with drive means separate from the actuating ring," the "spring means biasing the ring closed in the absence of drive force," the "two supporting sleeves defining a guide gap with first/second linear guide structures," and the "rubber-elastic molding tapering axially solely owing to its own dimensional stability." Those are the four independent-claim gateways, and each is a candidate for the AKO BSV datasheet plus one secondary reference.
• Check your § 315(b) clock immediately. If you were served with a complaint asserting the '501 patent, the one-year petition deadline is jurisdictional to your IPR rights and does not toll. Because there is no prior proceeding, your petition would be a first petition — no General Plastic follow-on problem, no Fintiv framing against your own earlier IPR, and no § 325(d) "same art previously presented" risk (the examiner never meaningfully considered the manual/clamp art against these specific ring-and-vane limitations). That is the most favorable procedural posture a petitioner can have.
• If you are licensing / holding the patent: the clean PTAB record is an asset to point to — the claims have never been cancelled or narrowed, and the foreign EP/BR attrition is legally irrelevant to US scope. But be candid internally about the short runway: adjusted expiration 2028-11-05, and no adjudicated claim construction anywhere. Any demand letter should quote the claims as the applicant framed them, not as construed.
• Confirm the negative before you rely on it. Verify against PTAB E2E and USPTO Patent Center by patent number, and check CourtListener under "Festo SE & Co. KG" / "Festo AG & Co. KG" for any district-court or CAFC activity that would signal an assertion campaign. ODP ingest lags newly filed petitions, so a very recent '501 petition filed in the last few months could exist and not yet be indexed — I found no evidence of one, but I cannot rule it out with certainty from open search alone, and I'd rather flag that gap than assert a clean negative I can't fully prove.

I'll verify what I can against live sources before writing the reconstruction.

Ownership Reconstruction — US 7,775,501 B2 ("Pinch valve")

Verification note up front (read this before using the timeline): the assignment records for this patent do exist, but the live reel/frame numbers and cover-sheet correspondents were not retrievable in this session. Google Patents' legal-events table (which mirrors the Assignment Center abstract data) publishes the conveyance type, parties and event dates but not reel/frame. I did not fabricate reel/frame values or attorney names to fill those fields. Everything below is sourced from (a) the patent text and its published application, and (b) live web results cited inline. The two Assignment Center entry points to confirm manually are https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search term: 7775501).

Inventors

• Sole inventor. The published application US 2008/0087853 A1 lists one inventor: "Ulrich Kees, Homburg (DE)" (source: PTAB Exhibit 2018, https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2025-00728/Imperative_Care_Inc._v._Inari_Medical_Inc/docs/06-16-2025-Patent-Owner/Exhibit-2018-Exhibit_2018___US_Patent_Publication_US_20080087853.pdf).
• Unusual-pattern check: no evidence of inventor departure, no co-inventor split, no inventor-held continuation or reversion. Minor anomaly worth a footnote: the inventor's residence (Homburg, Saarland) is nowhere near Festo's Esslingen a.N. headquarters — this is consistent with a regional Festo engineering site but I could not confirm which Festo legal entity employed him. There is no "all inventors departed within 12 months" pattern here (single inventor, rights assigned at filing and never reacquired).

Original assignee

• On the published application (US 2008/0087853 A1, pub. 2008-04-17): "Assignee: Festo AG & Co."
• On the granted patent (2010-08-17): the recorded assignee of record is Festo AG & Co. KG, following the 2008-07-24 name-change record. Google Patents' header labels both "Original Assignee" and "Current Assignee" as Festo SE and Co KG — that is Google normalising to today's corporate name, not a statement that the 2010 patent issued to an SE. The patent text and the legal-events table control: Festo AG & Co. → (2008) Festo AG & Co. KG → (2020) Festo SE & Co. KG.
• Product embodiment: Festo is a genuine operating company — the world's leading supplier of pneumatic and electric automation technology, ~€3.45 bn revenue, ~20,600 employees, 22 production centres, family-owned and headquartered at Ruiter Straße 82, 73734 Esslingen a.N. (https://press.festo.com/en-gb/print/pdf/node/3150). It sells pneumatic valving as a core product line, and the family shows sustained Festo in-house development of exactly this subject matter: DE102011015385A1, DE102013012158A1, DE102017206533A1, DE102020212041B4 and EP4053439A1 ("Pinch valve", Festo SE & Co. KG, 2021) all derive from the same pinch-valve programme per the Google Patents family table. I have not verified a specific Festo catalogue part number that reads on claim 1, so treat "ships an embodying product" as strongly supported but not part-number-confirmed.
• Current status: operating. Privately held (Festo is family-owned, so there are no SEC 10-K/8-K filings to cross-reference — the SEC leg of the requested cross-check is inapplicable). German registry: Amtsgericht Stuttgart HRA 211583; renamed Festo AG & Co. KG → Festo SE & Co. KG effective 31 January 2020, published in the register on 2020-01-31 (https://peoplecheck.de/handelsregister/BW-HRA_211583-[789782](/patent/789782) and https://armaturen-welt.de/umfirmierung-in-festo-se-co-kg/). No bankruptcy, no dissolution, no acquisition.

Assignment timeline

Three records appear in the Google Patents legal-events table for US 11/974,010 / US 7,775,501. Reel/frame values could not be retrieved (see verification note) — the placeholders below say so explicitly rather than inventing numbers.

• 2007-10-11 (application filing date; execution date not published) / recorded date not published — Reel [not retrieved]/[not retrieved]
  • Conveyance: Assignment ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: Ulrich Kees (sole inventor)
  • Assignee: Festo AG & Co.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved. The prosecution correspondence address of record is "HOFFMANN & BARON, LLP, 6900 JERICHO TURNPIKE, SYOSSET, NY 11791" (US 2008/0087853 A1 front page). Hoffmann & Baron is a Long Island general-practice IP firm and is the natural candidate for the recording cover sheet, but I could not confirm the cover-sheet attorney of record, so I am not treating this as a finding. Note for context: this is a conventional operating-company counsel relationship, not a repeat-player NPE filer.
  • Context: routine inventor-to-employer assignment executed at filing.
• 2008-07-24 (recorded; execution date not published) — Reel [not retrieved]/[not retrieved]
  • Conveyance: Change of Name
  • Assignor: Festo AG & Co.
  • Assignee: Festo AG & Co. KG
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: internal reorg / name change only — no change in beneficial ownership. Consistent with the German register, where the Festo entity appears as "Festo AG & Co. KG" from 2006–2007 onward (https://www.northdata.com/Festo+SE+%26+Co.+KG,.../Amtsgericht+Stuttgart+HRA+211583).
• 2020-03-10 (recorded; execution date not published; German register change effective 2020-01-31) — Reel [not retrieved]/[not retrieved]
  • Conveyance: Change of Name
  • Assignor: Festo AG & Co. KG
  • Assignee: Festo SE & Co. KG
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: internal reorg / name change only — conversion of the German parent to the Societas Europaea form, register publication 2020-01-31; Festo's own customer notice states "apart from the company name, nothing changes" (https://analyticjournal.de/firmen-pdfs-bilder-etc/FESTO/INFO%20Umfirmierung%20DE+EN.pdf).

No fourth event exists. There is no assignment to any third party, no security interest, no license record, no correction, and no release anywhere in the chain.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7775501
    2006 : DE priority filing by Festo
    2007 : US application filed by Ulrich Kees
         : Rights assigned to Festo AG and Co
    2008 : Publication US20080087853A1
         : Change of name to Festo AG and Co KG
    2010 : US 7775501 B2 granted
    2020 : Change of name to Festo SE and Co KG
    2025 : Cited as prior art in third party IPRs

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. Every assignee in the chain is a Festo operating entity (Festo AG & Co. → Festo AG & Co. KG → Festo SE & Co. KG). No "IP / Holdings / Licensing / Ventures" suffix, no registered-agent-service address, no single-purpose LLC. The 2020 record is a legal-form conversion of the same German partnership, corroborated independently by the Stuttgart register (HRA 211583, 2020-01-31).
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No assignee matches Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Conversant/Mosaid, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, or any Spangenberg entity. Festo appears on no high-frequency-plaintiff list that I located; it is a manufacturer and R&D house (~2,600 patents worldwide) rather than a licensor.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present on the available record; not fully evaluable. The signal requires the same attorney/firm recurring across multiple third-party links in an NPE chain. Here there are zero third-party links. The only identified professional is the prosecution firm Hoffmann & Baron, LLP (Syosset, NY), which appears once, on the published application — and per the task's own caution, a single appearance is not a finding. Cover-sheet correspondents for the three records remain unretrieved.
4. Cascading transfers — not present. Two records over ~12 years (2008-07-24 and 2020-03-10), both changes of name, both within the same corporate family. Compare the NPE signature (<24 months, chained LLCs, shared correspondent address) — absent.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No assignment occurred within 6 months of any litigation, because there is no litigation by the owner. In fact the reverse of the signal is documented: US 7,775,501 / its publication US 2008/0087853 A1 is being used as third-party prior art against Inari Medical, not asserted. See PTAB IPR2025-00989, Imperative Care, Inc. v. Inari Medical, Inc., Petitioner Exhibit 1037 ("US Patent Publication US 20080087853 A1 to Kees", filed 2026-04-09) and IPR2025-00728 Patent Owner Exhibit 2018 (same document). An earlier petition also ran a prior-art query expressly hitting 7775501 (USPTO PTAB petition 1556918, search log L45: ("3830462" | "7168444").PN. OR ("7775501").URPN.). Festo is the neutral prior-art source here, not the asserter. I found no infringement suit in which Festo or any successor asserted US 7,775,501.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Festo has never filed; it remains an independent, profitable, family-owned group. No Chapter 7/11, no 363 sale, no Kodak/Nortel/Polaroid-style auction.
7. Privateering — not present. No operating company → NPE transfer exists at all, so there is no proxy asserter to act on Festo's behalf. No SEC filing, Patent Progress or EFF coverage of such an arrangement was located (and Festo is private, so the SEC cross-check is structurally unavailable).
8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain terminates at Festo SE & Co. KG, not at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents or OIN. The patent has not been neutralised by a defensive aggregator; it is simply retained by its manufacturer-owner.

Supporting portfolio note: of the five family members, the EP member EP1912001B1 is "Not-in-force" and the BR member BRPI0703667B1 is "IP Right Cessation", while US 7,775,501 is Active with an adjusted expiration of 2028-11-05 and CN101162057B is Active per the Google Patents family table — i.e. the US asset is the one being maintained here, which is the behaviour of a practising manufacturer, not of an assertion vehicle.

Verdict

Insufficient data — for the specific question "is this an NPE asset?", and I want to be precise about why, because the record is affirmatively non-NPE rather than merely thin.

The chain consists of exactly one inventor-to-employer assignment plus two change-of-name records (2008-07-24: Festo AG & Co. → Festo AG & Co. KG; 2020-03-10: Festo AG & Co. KG → Festo SE & Co. KG, matching German register HRA 211583 effective 2020-01-31). No ownership ever passed to a third party, so zero of the eight NPE signals are present and the "only the original assignment" prong of this verdict category is met in substance. The current owner, Festo SE & Co. KG, is a large operating manufacturer of the claimed valve class, and the patent's only appearance in adversarial proceedings is as third-party prior art against Inari Medical in IPR2025-00728 / IPR2025-00989 — the opposite of an assertion posture. If a "operating-company-held, never transferred, never asserted" category existed in the rubric, that would be the accurate label; among the five permitted choices, Insufficient data is the only honest fit, and the gap that remains is procedural rather than substantive: I could not retrieve the reel/frame numbers or cover-sheet correspondents for the three records, so the correspondent-recurrence signal cannot be fully closed out.

Verify at:

• https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — search 7775501 (retrieve reel/frame + correspondent for the three records above)
• https://patents.google.com/patent/[US7775501B2](/patent/US7775501B2)/en — legal events, family and citation data used above

I'll verify the patent record and then work through each cited reference individually.

Patent confirmed. Now let me research each cited reference individually.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 7,775,501 B2 ("Pinch Valve")

Source verification: I confirmed the target against its Google Patents and FreePatentsOnline records: US 7,775,501 B2, application 11/974,010, filed 2007-10-11, granted 2010-08-17, priority DE 102006048573.4 (2006-10-13), inventor Ulrich Kees, assignee Festo. This is the correct number and I have not substituted results for any similar number.

Near-miss number to explicitly exclude (per the strict-ID rule): one search returned US 5,777,550 A (Maliby et al.) — a different patent (a pressure/temperature sensor), used as an "X" reference in an unrelated WO search report. It is not U.S. 7,775,501 and is disregarded below.

Tooling caveat: My research loop hit its step limit before I could retrieve full machine-readable text for several foreign references. Where I rely on the specification's own characterization of the prior art or on titles/classification only, I say so. Nothing below should be treated as a substitute for reading each reference's full text.

Analytical framing (important for the §102 question you asked)

The examiner cited 11 patent documents + 1 non-patent publication, and the application nonetheless issued with 25 claims (four independents: 1, 18, 22, 23). That outcome is itself evidence that no single cited reference was found to anticipate. On the record before me, the citations function almost entirely as §103 obviousness art, not §102 anticipation art.

So the honest answer to "which claims does each reference potentially anticipate under §102?" is:

• No cited reference appears to disclose every element of any independent claim, and therefore none is a clean §102 anticipation of claims 1, 18, 22, or 23 on the record I could assemble.
• Each reference is most usefully mapped to the specific claim element(s) it discloses — i.e., the building blocks of an obviousness combination.

I flag this rather than manufacture anticipatory readings, because a §102 conclusion requires disclosure of all elements arranged as in the claim.

The cited references — full citation table

Family note: items #1–#3 share the 1971-09-02 priority and the Spirax Sarco name and appear to be one family; #4 is a slightly later (1972-08-23) Spirax Sarco filing in the same subject area. I could not fully confirm the family relationships from the records retrieved — treat as probable, not certain.

Reference-by-reference: description and claim mapping

1–3. DE 22 43 173 A1 / FR 2152061 A5 / GB 1402266 A (Spirax Sarco, 1971 priority)

Description (as characterized in the '501 specification itself): a fluid-force-operated pinch valve. A hose-like valve member is surrounded by a rubber pinch ring deformable radially by an axially sliding actuating ring; actuating force is transmitted by balls to the pinch ring. Closure is achieved by the pinch ring thrusting the hose wall against a spherical closure member located inside the passage duct.

Claim mapping:

• Discloses: an axially-shifting actuating ring surrounding the valve member, fluid drive, a hose valve member. This anticipates elements of claim 1 and claim 3 (fluid drive; annular drive region).
• Does not disclose: (a) two diametrally opposed pinch elements that thrust mutually opposite wall sections against each other in fluid-tight fashion — Spirax uses a sphere inside the duct, not wall-to-wall pinching; (b) drive means separate from the actuating ring (the fluid acts on the ring directly); (c) the spring means biasing the ring closed (claim 1); (d) a control duct to the outer face with connection means (claim 18).
• §102 conclusion: does not anticipate any independent claim. Best characterized as the primary §103 reference for the "fluid-driven, axially-sliding actuating ring" concept. Notably, the '501 specification distinguishes it precisely on the in-duct sphere (flow obstruction) and the externally exposed ring.

4. US 3,830,462 A (Spirax Sarco, filed 1972-08-23, granted 1974-08-20)

Description (from the retrieved patent text): a valve with an annular passage defined by a flexible wall and an obstructor within the wall. Operating mechanism = a frusto-conical cam surface surrounding the flexible wall, axially movable, acting on a coil of filamentary material (a closely wound spring) to push it radially inward and seal the wall against the obstructor. The patent expressly discusses the "ballooning/leakage path" problem with cams/balls and solves it with the closely-spaced coil.

Claim mapping: relevant to the oblique/cam actuating faces element common to all independents and to the flexible-wall valve member. No actuating ring in an annular working space, no separate drive means, no spring fail-safe.

• §102 conclusion: does not anticipate any claim. §103 relevance: cam-driven radial closure of a flexible tube.

5. DE 75 00 720 U (Beul, 1975-01-13 / 1976-03-04)

Description (per the '501 and related DE 10 2007 002 765 B3 specifications): a manual pinch valve in which the actuating member is a sliding sleeve, and the valve member is a hose inserted in a bore.

• Anticipates only the generic "sliding sleeve over a hose" idea. Does not anticipate claim 1 (no actuating ring in an annular working space bounded by the housing wall, no separate drive means, no spring). §103-only.

6–7. DE 29 41 278 A1 / C2 (Viggo AB, 1978-10-17)

Description: a cannula/catheter connector (medical) with a hose section in a through-channel, closed by pressure bodies actuated by a manually operated slide having oblique surfaces; two movable pinch elements sit on the hose periphery. (The corresponding U.S. disclosure is US 4,243,034 to Brandt — the retrieved text describes slide member 11 with oblique surfaces 14 and pressure bodies 9 closing the hose — though I flag the exact family correspondence as inferred, not proven.)

• This is the reference whose preamble most resembles claim 1: hose valve member between two end fittings, two diametrally opposed pinch elements, an actuating member with oblique actuating faces, and pinch elements that thrust opposite wall sections together to close the duct.
• Does not disclose: the actuating member being an actuating ring in an annular working space radially bounded by the housing wall, or separate drive means, or a spring fail-safe. It is strictly manual.
• §102 conclusion: does not anticipate claim 1 but is the closest art on the preamble / "oblique actuating faces" language, and is the reference the specification itself acknowledges first.

8. JP S58-46271 A (Asahi Organic Chem Ind, 1981-09-11 / 1983-03-17)

Titled simply "Pinch valve," assigned to Asahi Organic Chemical Industry. I could not retrieve the disclosure text — only the bibliographic entry. Given the title and F16K 7 class it is presumptively a tubular-diaphragm pinch valve, but I will not assert what it discloses or anticipates without the text. Flagging as unverified; recommend pulling the JPO/Espacenet full text before relying on it.

9. DE 33 18 817 A1 (Madgal-Glil-Yam, 1982-05-25 / 1983-12-08)

Description (per the '501 specification): a mixing battery / proportioning valve with a hose-like valve member that is manually operated; by way of a sliding and rotatable cam rod, a thrust member is acted upon to nip the hose to a greater or lesser extent.

• Discloses a manual cam/thrust arrangement on a hose. Does not anticipate the actuating-ring/annular-working-space/separate-drive architecture. §103-only.

10. DE 34 45 740 A1 (Jakob, 1984-12-14 / 1986-06-19)

"Full-bore valve." Full text not retrieved — title and IPC point to a full-bore (non-obstructing) pinch/sleeve valve. I cannot responsibly assign it to specific claims without the disclosure; flag as unverified.

11. US 7,168,444 B2 (Nelson Irrigation, filed 2004-06-01, granted 2007-01-30)

Description (from the retrieved text): a flow-through pressure regulator. A flexible flow tube runs between inlet and outlet; a hollow piston with a tapered annular cam surface drives a pair of pivotally mounted pinch arms (diametrically opposed pinch tabs) inward to pinch the tube. A support sleeve is received over the flow tube with an open middle portion permitting the pinch arms to act, and a coil spring biases the piston. Outlet pressure in a chamber moves the piston against the spring.

Claim mapping:

• Relevant to claim 10 (sleeve-like support means opposing radial inflation) and claim 11 (support structure defining a gap in which the pinch elements move) — though Nelson's support is a single sleeve with a central opening, not "two axially spaced support sleeves with facing end faces defining a guide gap," so it does not literally meet claim 11.
• Relevant to claim 5/19 (annular piston + cam driving pinch elements) in general concept.
• Does not disclose the actuating ring, the oblique-face ring in an annular working space bounded by the housing wall, or drive means separate from the actuating member.
• §102 conclusion: does not anticipate any claim; strong §103 reference for the support-sleeve/guide-gap and piston-cam sub-features. Note also that it is a pressure-regulator (self-regulating), not a control valve, which is a structural/functional difference the patent owner could argue.

NPL — AKO "Mechanische Quetschventile Typ BSV" (Oct. 2001)

Description (per the '501 specification): a product information sheet disclosing pneumatic pinch valves in which the closing force is produced by a spring and opening is by compressed air, with the drive means mounted to the side of the valve housing (making the design "extremely bulky").

• This is the reference most directly relevant to claim 1's fail-safe spring and claim 7 (mechanical compression spring) and claim 8 (spring chamber adjacent a drive chamber). It establishes that spring-close / air-open pinch valves were known as of Oct. 2001.
• §102 conclusion: as a printed publication it is §102(a)/§102(b) art by date, and it anticipates the concept of a spring-closed, fluid-opened pinch valve — but it is not shown to disclose the claimed coaxial actuating ring in an annular housing-bounded working space with separate drive means, so it does not anticipate claims 1/18/22/23. §103 relevance is high, especially combined with DE 22 43 173 A1.

Bottom line — ranked relevance

Most relevant to the claimed invention:

1. DE 22 43 173 A1 (Spirax Sarco) — the only cited art with a fluid-driven, axially sliding actuating ring on a hose valve; primary §103 reference against claim 1's ring/drive concept (distinguished in the spec by its in-duct sphere and exposed ring).
2. AKO BSV product sheet — grounds the spring-close/air-open (fail-safe) feature of claim 1 and claims 7–8.
3. DE 29 41 278 A1/C2 (Viggo) — closest art on the preamble (two diametrally opposed pinch elements + oblique actuating faces); manual only.
4. US 7,168,444 B2 (Nelson) — support-sleeve / guide-gap and piston-cam sub-features (claims 5, 10, 11, 19).
5. US 3,830,462 A (Spirax Sarco) and DE 33 18 817 A1 — cam-actuated radial closure of a flexible tube; secondary §103.
6. DE 75 00 720 U (Beul), FR 2152061 A5, GB 1402266 A — background/family.
7. JP S58-46271 A (Asahi) and DE 34 45 740 A1 (Jakob) — bibliographically relevant pinch valves, text not retrieved; no anticipation assertion made.

§102 net: On the record assembled, no cited reference anticipates independent claim 1, 18, 22, or 23 (nor, derivatively, the dependents). The citations are §103 art. The single most likely obviousness combination the examiner would have considered is DE 22 43 173 A1 (fluid-driven actuating ring) + AKO BSV (spring-close/air-open), optionally plus Nelson (support sleeve) for claims 10/11 and Viggo (oblique-face pinch elements).

Explicit uncertainties

• Claims 1/18/22/23 each contain a limitation (e.g., "annular working space radially externally surrounded by a peripheral valve housing wall" + "drive means separate from the actuating ring"; the two-sleeve guide gap of claim 22; the tapering molded valve member of claim 23) that I could not find in any single cited reference. That is the basis for the "no anticipation" conclusion.
• Full texts of JP S58-46271 A and DE 34 45 740 A1 were not retrieved; my characterization of those two is limited to bibliographic data and must not be relied on for a §102 call.
• I inferred the DE 29 41 278 → US 4,243,034 correspondence; verify before citing it as the U.S. counterpart.
• These conclusions are based on the patent record's citation list plus retrieved disclosure text/specification characterizations, not on a fresh examiner-grade search. A definitive §102/§103 opinion would require the full text of each reference and its figures.

I'll ground the prior-art references on the page before constructing the § 103 analysis.

Let me pull the primary prior-art references' disclosures directly.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Pat. No. 7,775,501 B2 ("Pinch valve")

Analyst note on scope and sources. This analysis builds on the already-generated Patent Summary and Litigation Summary above and does not repeat them. The prior art relied on is the art of record on the patent's own face (U.S. and foreign references listed under "Patent Citations" and the single Non-Patent Citation), as required by the task ("Use the results from the Prior Art section of this page"). Where I verified a German reference through its English-language family member, I say so and cite the family member. Where I could not verify a reference's full disclosure, I flag it rather than assume it.

Governing law. The application was filed 2007-10-11 with a 2006-10-13 DE priority, so pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) applies. KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), controls the motivation-to-combine inquiry (predictable combinations of familiar elements, design incentives, known techniques).

One correction/flag against the earlier sections. The earlier Summary attributes to the inventor the additional credential "Dipl.-Ing., Homburg, DE." The authoritative Google Patents page for US 7,775,501 lists only "Ulrich Kees." I cannot confirm the additional detail from the source; treat the honorific/geography as unsupported.

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

A mechanical or fluid-power engineer with ~2–5 years' experience designing pinch/diaphragm valves (F16K 7/04–7/06), familiar with: elastomeric hose/sleeve valve members; cam/wedge force conversion from axial actuator travel to radial pinch travel; single-acting pneumatic cylinders with spring return and fail-safe (normally-closed) biasing; O-ring and lip sealing of annular pistons; and threaded pneumatic porting. This is the ordinary artisan for a component valve sold to process-automation OEMs.

2. The prior art of record and what each reference supplies

Additional context from the field (helpful for the "known technique" prong, not necessary art): US 3,920,215 — described in the background of Festo's own later US 9,334,969 B2 as a pinch valve with a hose "surrounded by a housing-type enveloping body," an actuating element rotatable on that body, and "two radially displaceable plungers" resting on the hose and on a cam-like actuating surface. This is evidence that enclosing the actuating member within a housing and driving radial plungers through the housing wall was a known pinch-valve architecture well before 2006. Also US 4,243,034's housing channel (5) with two diametrically opposed openings (8) that guide/retain the pressure bodies is a radial-guide/anti-skew arrangement.

3. Claim 1 — primary combination

Proposed rejection: DE 22 43 173 A1 in view of DE 29 41 278 A1 (US 4,243,034), further in view of the AKO BSV product sheet.

Motivation to combine (KSR rationales):

1. Same field, same problem. DE 22 43 173, DE 29 41 278 and the AKO BSV sheet are all pinch valves in F16K 7/04–7/06, and all three are cited on the '501's own face — the strongest possible evidence that a POSITA would have consulted them together.
2. The references are complementary, not redundant. DE 22 43 173 supplies power (fluid) actuation but a poor closure (a spherical plug inside the flow path, limited sleeve deformability, exposed ring). DE 29 41 278 supplies a full-bore, obstruction-free two-element pinch with oblique faces but only manual actuation. Substituting the fluid-driven actuator of the former for the manual slide of the latter is the paradigm "combine familiar elements according to known methods" case.
3. The stated objective is a design objective, not a discovery. The '501 frames its aim as "a pinch valve suitable for the application of higher actuating forces and having compact dimensions." "Compactness" and "symmetrical application of force" are routine engineering goals; KSR holds that "design incentives… can be found in the marketplace."
4. The spring fail-safe is a known, taught safety function. The AKO sheet does not merely suggest a spring — it discloses the exact normally-closed/air-to-open logic claim 1 recites, and the '501 admits it. Nothing about relocating that spring into an annular working space coaxial with the actuator changes its principle of operation.
5. Predictable results. No new physical principle arises; every element performs its art-recognized function (spring→bias closed; annular piston/ring→axial force; oblique face→radial pinch).

Anticipation watch. No single reference discloses all of claim 1 (DE 22 43 173 lacks the two diametrically opposed pinch elements and the spring-closed fail-safe; US 4,243,034 lacks the coaxial ring and the drive). This is properly a § 103 case, not § 102.

4. Dependent claims 2–17, 19–21, 24–25

Note on claim 1's spring (prosecution-history flag). The '501's specification presents the spring-closed fail-safe as an optional/preferred development ("By means of the spring means the actuating ring may be biased toward a home position… This home position is preferably a shut position"). The presence of that feature in granted claim 1 (and its absence from the abstract and from the summary of the stated objective) suggests it was added to claim 1 during prosecution. I have not verified the '501's file history, so this is an inference from the specification's own framing, not a finding; if confirmed it would mean the applicant was already relying on the spring as the point of distinction over the DE 22 43 173 / DE 29 41 278 combination — which is exactly the feature AKO BSV supplies.

5. Independent claims 18, 22, 23

Claim 18 (fluid drive + annular drive chamber + control duct opening on the outer housing face with fluid-line connection means + "drive fluid independent of the fluid flowing through the valve member").

• Over claim 1's combination, the additions are the ordinary plumbing of a pneumatic actuator: DE 22 43 173 is already a fluid-driven pinch valve; the AKO BSV sheet shows the air connection on the valve body; and a "control/working fluid distinct from the process fluid" is inherent in any pneumatic instrument-air actuator (AKO: sleeve/process pressure vs. control pressure). Reciting that the drive fluid differs from the media fluid adds no structural novelty — it is an inherent, definitional consequence of using compressed air to stroke an actuator that pinches a process hose.

Claim 22 (support sleeve means comprising two axially spaced sleeves with a guide gap; interengaging first/second linear guide structures so the pinch elements are linearly guided and supported perpendicularly).

• The support/inflation-restraint concept: see claim 10–11 mapping (US 4,243,034 channel 5; EP 1 046 843 A2; JPS 58 46271 A).
• The linear guide structures (projections in slots, perpendicular support): US 4,243,034 already discloses guides 10 retaining the slide member and openings 8 that constrain the pressure bodies radially while retaining them normal to the direction of motion. Formally reciting complementary projection/recess guide structures across a guide gap is a "known technique" applied to improve the same device, with the predictable result of preventing skew — precisely the rationale the '501 itself gives ("it is possible to ensure that the pinch elements… do not run askew").

Claim 23 (rubber-elastic molding whose peripheral wall, in the unloaded state and solely from its own dimensional stability, tapers axially from the outside toward the pinch-element engagement area).

• Elastomeric molded hose members: conventional (JPS 58 46271 A; US 4,243,034; AKO BSV).
• Non-cylindrical, tapered tube geometry to control the fold/deformation zone is a result-effective design choice: JPS 58 46271 A deliberately engineers tube geometry and hardness gradient (two-layer, 40–50 vs. 60–70 Shore) so the tube "returns easily to circular" when opened; the AKO literature likewise emphasizes an elliptical body/sleeve shape that makes the sleeve "fold in the same place every time" for longer life. Choosing a frusto/tapered engaged region to reduce deformation is the same engineering trade-off, and the '501 concedes the benefit is merely "reduced deformation of the peripheral wall during pinching."
• Weakest element for the examiner: the "solely owing to its own dimensional stability" language is a characterization of an unloaded state rather than a positive structural difference; it may be met by any molded hose whose rest shape is non-cylindrical. If it cannot be shown, this claim's core is a design choice.
• Claims 24–25 (entire member molded; flattened wall sections contacting the pinch elements): flattened pinch-contact sections follow directly from the planar/linear pinch faces of Asahi's opposed compression bodies and from US 4,243,034's wedge bodies 32; molding the whole member as one rubber body is routine.

6. Where non-obviousness could plausibly be argued (counter-analysis)

A rigorous report should state the weaknesses of the proposed rejections:

1. DE 22 43 173 does not disclose "a housing wall radially externally surrounding the actuating ring." The '501 criticizes exactly this: the ring "is freely accessible from the outside and this entails certain likelihood of fouling and of injury." If the examiner relies on DE 22 43 173 alone for the ring, the enclosure limitation requires the secondary housing-enveloping-body teaching (US 3,920,215 as summarized in US 9,334,969's background, or the AKO body). The motivation to enclose, however, is strong (safety/contamination — a recognized problem).
2. DE 22 43 173's closure mechanism is structurally different (a pinch ring squeezing the hose against an internal sphere). A patentee could argue there is a teaching away from the two-opposed-pinch-element architecture, because adopting US 4,243,034's two-element pinch means discarding DE 22 43 173's closure member entirely. Counter: US 4,243,034 supplies the complete two-element pinch, so the combination is a substitution of closure assemblies, not an unpredictable hybrid — and the '501 itself lists the DE 22 43 173 flow obstruction as a defect to be cured.
3. AKO BSV teaches a laterally mounted, bulky drive. Patentee could argue AKO discourages the coaxial-in-housing configuration. Counter: the '501's own stated objection is volume, not inoperability, and DE 22 43 173 already teaches the coaxial, axially-shifted ring — i.e., the art as a whole points toward the claimed arrangement.
4. The "loose contact" piston decoupling (claims 5, 20, 21) with its wear-avoidance rationale is the most "inventive-flavored" recitation, but it is disclosed as a functional consequence (thrust-only, no permanent connection) and reduces to mere abutment — predictable.
5. Claim 22's specific dual-guide structure and claim 23's taper-from-inherent-stability are the strongest candidates for a secondary-consideration or "specific structure not taught" argument, and would be the claims most worth pressing in prosecution or a validity challenge.
6. No secondary considerations of record. My earlier searches located no litigation and no commercial-success or nexus evidence involving the '501 (see the Litigation Summary above). Absent objective indicia with nexus, the KSR rationales are unrebutted.

7. Bottom line

• Claim 1 is very likely obvious over DE 22 43 173 A1 (or US 3,830,462 / GB 1 402 266) + DE 29 41 278 A1 (US 4,243,034) + the AKO BSV datasheet, with the housing-enclosure teaching available from the pinch-valve housing-enveloping-body art. Art of record in three different national systems, all cited on the patent's face, all in F16K 7/0x, with the spring fail-safe expressly admitted as known from AKO.
• Claims 2–17, 19–21, 24–25 are conventional design choices/known techniques layered on that combination.
• Claim 18 adds only the standard pneumatic porting of the admitted fluid-drive art.
• Claim 22 and claim 23 are the closest calls: they recite specific guide geometry and a specific unloaded molded geometry that the art of record (US 4,243,034's guides/openings; JPS 58 46271 A's engineered tube) reaches functionally, but not in identical structural language.

Explicit uncertainties

1. I verified US 4,243,034 in full text (freepatentsonline.com/4243034.html) and treat it as the US family member of DE 29 41 278 because its disclosure matches the '501's characterization of that reference; I did not open DE 29 41 278 A1/C2 itself.
2. I did not open DE 22 43 173 A1 FIGS. 10/11 directly; the "ball-transmitted axial actuating ring + pneumatic drive + internal spherical closure member" description is taken from the '501's own admission and is corroborated by the family's US 3,830,462 listing and the German abstract entry.
3. I did not verify DE 7500720 U, DE 33 18 817 A1, DE 34 45 740 A1, or US 7,168,444 B2 in full text; they are relied on only as secondary/contextual art.
4. US 3,920,215 is described to me only through the background of Festo's later US 9,334,969 B2; I did not read US 3,920,215 directly. Treat it as a lead for the "housing-enclosed actuator" teaching, not as verified disclosure.
5. The prosecution-history inference about claim 1's spring limitation is unverified — confirm against the '501 file wrapper (USPTO PatentCenter for App. 11/974,010) before relying on it.
6. Reference-numeral inconsistencies in the source text (e.g., working space "33" vs. "3"; "deactivation direction 37" where 37 is the actuating ring; "actuating vane 1045 b"; "longitudinal axis 14" vs. "34" for the pinch elements) appear to be OCR/typographical. Any claim chart must be built from the issued claims and the figures, not from these numerals.

Primary URLs: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7775501/en · https://www.freepatentsonline.com/7775501.html · https://www.freepatentsonline.com/4243034.html · https://patents.google.com/patent/DE2243173A1/en · https://patents.google.com/patent/DE2941278A1/en · https://patents.google.com/patent/JPS5846271A · https://patents.google.com/patent/[US3830462A](/patent/US3830462A)/en · https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2101860A1/en · https://www.ako-armaturen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Downloads/Produkte/Mechanisches-Schlauchquetschventil/Datenblaetter/DB_mV_OV_DE_EN.pdf · https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8b/79/9f/c7e6a1871235a2/EP1211445A1.pdf