US 7936279

I'll search for authoritative information on US 7936279, including any CAFC 2026 docket activity.

US Patent 7,936,279 — Summary

Note on sourcing: The following is drawn from the patent text supplied as authoritative in the user message (Google Patents, fetched 2026-09-24) plus corroborating search results (Justia, FreePatentsOnline). I did not find any CAFC 2026 docket activity for this number — see the litigation note below.

Abstract

Embodiments include systems and methods of illuminating indicator lights. One embodiment is an apparatus for indicating status of an electrical device, having a housing attachable to the electrical device, an electrical input on the housing receiving an electrical signal, a lighting element in the housing outputting light in response to the signal, and a first optical element in the housing. The apparatus further includes a second optical element attachable to a panel; the first and second optical elements are positioned so the first transmits at least part of the output light to the second, which outputs light received from the first.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 — Apparatus for indicating status of an electrical device (light-pipe/optical-fiber version).
A two-part indicator: (a) an illuminator housing that mounts on the electrical device, takes in an electrical signal, has a connector for the near end of an optical fiber, contains a lamp/LED driven by that signal, and has an optical element that feeds the emitted light into the fiber; and (b) a luminaire side with a second connector for the far end of the fiber and an optical output element (mountable on a panel, e.g., a cover plate) that emits the light carried by the fiber. In short: the electrical and light-generating parts stay at the device; only a passive optical fiber runs to where a person can see the indicator.

Claim 15 — Apparatus for indicating status of an electrical device (means-plus-function version).
Same overall concept as claim 1, but recited in "means for" language: means for attaching a housing to the device, means for receiving an electrical signal, means for receiving a fiber's proximal end, means in the housing for emitting light in response to the signal, means for receiving/transmitting that light to the fiber, means for receiving the fiber's distal end, and panel-attachable means for outputting the received light. The claim's scope is defined by the structures disclosed in the specification that perform these functions plus equivalents (35 U.S.C. § 112(f)).

Claim 18 — Apparatus for providing an indicator (luminaire-only version).
A standalone indicator unit that does not include the lamp or the electrical device: a connector for one end of an optical fiber, an optical element attached to that connector that outputs light received from the fiber, and a housing holding the optical element and configured to attach the unit to a panel. This covers the panel-mounted "output" half (e.g., a snap-in or retaining-ring luminaire for a cover plate) independently of the illuminator module.

Uncertainty flag: The grant text in my authoritative source is truncated at claim 9. Justia's rendering of the granted claims shows independent claims 1, 15, and 18, with 20 claims total. I could not confirm from the supplied text whether claim 20 is also an independent claim, so that specific point should be verified against the printed patent. The pre-grant publication (US 2009/0284385 A1) used different language ("first/second optical element" instead of "optical element" + "optical output element"), so claim wording changed during prosecution.

Dependent-claim highlights (context)

Claims 2–14 depend from claim 1 and add: integral housing with the device; electrically insulating housing; environmental seal; input attached to a device terminal; a control circuit modulating the light (claim 6) and communicating measurement data (claim 7); integration of the second connector/output element on the panel (claim 8); interchangeable attachment to the cover (claim 9); device types including circuit breaker, outlet, switch, network/peripheral/audio-visual connectors (claim 10); a light guide (claim 11) with fiber entry at ~90° (claim 12) or 10–80° (claim 13) to the optical axis; and a fiber-capture device (claim 14).

CAFC / USPTO litigation and docket check — negative result

I found no evidence of any Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit 2026 docket, appeal, or district-court litigation involving US 7,936,279. Searches for "7936279 CAFC 2026 docket" returned only unrelated third-party documents that merely happen to share the number (e.g., a Brazilian municipal registry entry and a 2026 Santa Catarina state gazette item — neither relates to this patent). I also saw no USPTO post-grant proceeding (IPR/PGR) referenced.

Caveat: my tooling here is general web search, not a live PACER/CAFC docket query or the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board API. Absence of results in these searches is not affirmative proof of no litigation. For a definitive check, search PACER (courts), the CAFC CM/ECF docket system, and the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board and Patent Assignment Search databases using the exact application number 12/121,114 and patent number 7,936,279.

Verdict on the record

The patent is a long-expired (fee-related) Lex Products Corp. indicator-light patent that separates the electrically-active illuminator module from the panel-mounted optical output (luminaire) using an optical fiber or optical coupling, with later-dependent claims extending to modulated data/measurement signaling. Treat any litigation claims as unverified — I found none.

I'll search litigation sources for US 7,936,279 specifically.

Let me run additional targeted searches on litigation-specific sources.

Litigation Search — US Patent 7,936,279

Bottom line: I found no known litigation involving US 7,936,279. No district court case, no CAFC appeal, and no PTAB post-grant proceeding naming this patent turned up in any of the searches I ran. The results returned were either the patent's own bibliographic records or unrelated documents that merely share the digits "7936279."

Searches run and what they returned

Noise to explicitly rule out (do not confuse these with litigation on our patent)

• Signify v. (defendant), E.D.N.Y. No. 1:24-cv-04479 (docket document at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.[440779](/patent/440779)/gov.uscourts.nyed.440779.1.0.pdf) is about LED cover-plate / luminaire patents ('604, '929, '525) — not 7,936,279.
• DSS v. Nichia, C.D. Cal. 2:17-cv-08849 ('297 and '787 patents) — unrelated.
• Broadcom ITC Investigation 337-TA-1119 ('187, '027, '844, '583 patents) — unrelated.
• The Brazilian municipal filings (JUCISRS Ata 22/10/2021; Diário Oficial de Santa Catarina, Ato nº 7936279, SAMAE Timbó, Jan 2026) and PubMed ID 7936279 are not patent records.
• The only formal legal-encumbrance event I can confirm for this patent from the authoritative record is a security agreement to Webster Bank, N.A. recorded Dec. 24, 2013 — a secured-lending UCC/assignment filing, not litigation.

If you need a definitive answer

Web-search coverage of litigation is not authoritative. To close this out with certainty, run the exact identifiers:

1. PACER / CourtListener RECAP — search docket text for 7,936,279 and 7936279, and for 12/121,114.
2. CAFC CM/ECF — check appeals from any district court or PTAB decision naming the patent (I found no CAFC 2026 activity; note the earlier summary's identical negative result).
3. Unified Patents litigation caselist — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist and PTAB caselist.
4. USPTO PTAB (IPR/PGR/CBM) and USPTO Patent Assignment Search — confirm no post-grant challenge and confirm ownership chain (Lex Products → Webster Bank security interest).

Confidence: High that no litigation is discoverable for US 7,936,279. Because my tooling is general web search rather than a live PACER/CAFC/PTAB query, absence of results is not affirmative proof of no litigation — treat this as "none known," not "none exists."

One housekeeping flag: your task header states the current date as April 26, 2026, while the earlier generated sections are dated 2026-09-29. I used April 26, 2026 as the operative date per your instruction; the discrepancy doesn't change the negative result, but you may want to reconcile it.

I'll verify the structured data with targeted searches before writing.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks before concluding.

PTAB / AIA Trial Analysis — US 7,936,279 B2

Verification runs performed: searches for US 7936279 PTAB inter partes review Lex Products, "7,936,279" IPR petition Patent Trial and Appeal Board, "7936279" Lex Products lawsuit patent infringement, and ptacts.uspto.gov "7936279". Every hit was either the patent's own Google Patents / Justia / FreePatentsOnline page, or an unrelated document that merely contains the digit string "7936279" (a Brazilian municipal registry PDF and a 1944 punched-card mathematics paper). No petition, institution decision, FWD, or appeal surfaced.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings — 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution-denied — because no IPR, PGR, CBM, or DER petition appears to have ever been filed against US 7,936,279. The structured PTAB block supplied with this prompt (USPTO ODP) confirms the blank, and my independent web searches produced nothing to contradict it.

Bottom-line defensive posture: this is neither "hardened" nor "gutted" — it is untested at the Board, and untestable for practical purposes. A defendant gets no free roadmap from an FWD, but also faces no adverse PTAB precedent and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel. More decisively, the patent is expired (fee-related) per its Google Patents legal status, so enforcement exposure is limited to past damages within 35 U.S.C. § 286's six-year window — there is no injunctive relief to enjoin. See Google Patents — US7936279B2.

Per-proceeding detail

(none) — no proceeding to report

There is no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, ground, institution decision, or FWD to populate here, and I will not invent one. Per the constraints on this task, the absence is stated plainly rather than filled with a plausible-looking placeholder.

Why the usual AIA vehicles were never available or are now foreclosed (practitioner gloss, not record fact):

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is UNTESTED. No claim of 7,936,279 has been canceled, confirmed, or even subjected to a Board claim-construction. Independent claims 1, 15, and 18 stand as issued and unchallenged. That means the ordinary defensive playbook — "the FWD killed claim 1, so the demand letter is bluff" — is unavailable, and the patent must be attacked the old-fashioned way (district court invalidity, § 101, or non-infringement). The countervailing point is expiration: with an expired patent, the patentee cannot recover for any infringement occurring after expiry, so a defendant's realistic exposure is pre-expiration conduct measured against the § 286 six-year lookback from the complaint. Confirm the maintenance-fee lapse date and any reinstatement/petition-to-revive in USPTO Patent Center under application 12/121,114 before relying on this — Google's "Expired – Fee Related" label is a secondary-source characterization, and one I have not independently confirmed against the fee history.

Estoppel landscape: wide open. Because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted against anyone, no party is under § 315(e)(2) estoppel with respect to this patent, and there are no petitioner/privy constraints to map. Every prior-art ground a defendant can find — anticipation under § 102, obviousness under § 103, printed-publication and patent art, product/system art — remains fully available in district court and, subject to the timing and discretionary-denial hurdles above, in a fresh IPR. Conversely, no prior-art ground has been tested and rejected by a panel, so there is no Board finding to leverage either way.

Pattern signals: none. There is no repeat petitioner, no defensive aggregator (e.g., Unified Patents) challenge that I could locate, no patent-owner appeal of an adverse Board decision, and no Federal Circuit docket activity. The patentee — Lex Products Corp., a real operating company in power distribution (Stamford, CT; security interest later granted to Webster Bank, N.A., recorded 2013-12-24) — does not present the profile of an entity that weaponizes a patent portfolio through the Board. That is consistent with a low-assertion, internally-practiced utility patent rather than a litigation asset. I found no district-court assertion of this patent in my searches either; treat that as a negative search result, not proof, since my tooling is general web search rather than a live PACER/DPI query.

One contradiction/uncertainty to flag for the reader. The earlier-generated summary correctly declined to confirm whether granted claim 20 is independent. The record I can now add: the pre-grant publication US 2009/0284385 A1 on Justia shows 26 claims with four independent claims — 1, 15, 18, and 26 — where pre-grant claim 26 is the no-fiber "first optical element … second optical element" (air-coupled, FIGS. 15A–15B) embodiment reproduced in the granted patent's Abstract. The granted patent has only 20 claims. That arithmetic means the air-coupled independent claim (or its equivalent) was very likely canceled or rewritten during prosecution, and the granted patent's Abstract no longer matches an issued independent claim. Do not assume an issued independent claim covers the air-coupled embodiment without pulling the printed claims — the authoritative text supplied to me is truncated at claim 9, so this remains an open question worth resolving from the USPTO Patent Center "Claims" view or the issued PDF before any infringement or invalidity position is framed.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant facing assertion of 7,936,279:

1. Lead with expiration, not validity. Pull the maintenance-fee history for application 12/121,114 in USPTO Patent Center. If the patent lapsed for non-payment and was never revived, the enforcement window is closed except for pre-lapse conduct inside § 286's six years, and injunctive relief is off the table. This may moot the dispute faster than any invalidity theory.
2. There is no PTAB record to cite. State that explicitly in any demand-response or case-assessment memo: no AIA trial proceeding has ever been instituted against this patent, per the USPTO ODP structured data and confirmed by independent search. Do not represent it as "the patent has survived IPRs" — surviving nothing is weaker than surviving something.
3. Mine the pre-grant file wrapper. The prosecution amendment that took 26 claims down to 20 (including the likely excision of the air-coupled independent claim) is your best § 112 / estoppel / claim-scope material, and it is free. Pull the full file wrapper from Patent Center; the Justia '385 publication text is a useful cross-reference for the pre-amendment language.
4. If you still want Board review, evaluate a single IPR targeting independent claims 1, 15, and 18 on § 103 art, filed before any § 315(b) clock runs, and weigh it against the discretionary-denial risk. Given expiration, an IPR's only real value is extinguishing past-damages exposure — which may or may not justify the cost. Note that a § 315(e)(2)-clean posture is an asset you would give up by filing.

If you are the patent owner: there is no favorable proceeding to point to. The absence of challenges is a double-edged signal — it suggests the patent has not been asserted in a way that provoked a well-funded defendant, which is not the same as validation.

Sources for follow-up verification (all negative as of this review):

• USPTO PTAB E2E / PTACTS — search patent number 7,936,279
• USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board Decisions
• USPTO Open Data Portal API — AIA trial proceedings endpoint
• CourtListener and the Federal Circuit CM/ECF docket — no appeal found

Caveat, stated once and applicable throughout: my tooling is general web search, not a live PACER, CAFC CM/ECF, or PTAB E2E query. The conclusion above rests on the canonical USPTO ODP structured block plus corroborating absence of search results. Absence of evidence is not affirmative proof, and the maintenance-fee question in particular should be resolved against primary USPTO records.

I'll research the assignment chain and ownership context before building the record.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check — not present. The classic red flag (all inventors departing the original assignee within ~12 months of filing, preceding a fire-sale) cannot be established here, and the circumstantial evidence points the other way: both inventors executed an assignment of their entire interest to Lex Products Corp. one day after the 2008-05-15 filing date, which is the signature of a routine employee-invention assignment rather than a distressed or pre-planned divestiture. I found no evidence of an inventor departure, a later inventor-held reversion, or a second application family under either name. Note the geographic split (inventor in Anaheim, CA vs. Lex's Shelton, CT headquarters and Sun Valley, CA offices) is consistent with Lex's stated California operation and is not by itself anomalous.

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: Lex Products Corp. Per the patent's own front-page and USPTO publication data the assignee's address is rendered as Stamford, CT in at least one indexed source (Radaris), while Google Patents and Lex's corporate materials give the headquarters as Shelton, CT. This is a minor address-of-record discrepancy, not a chain-of-title discrepancy — flagging it explicitly per the cross-reference rule.
• Primary line of business: Manufacturer of portable and specialty power distribution, interconnect, and power control systems — portable distribution boxes, cable assemblies, cable protectors, power switches, connectors and portable work lights. Markets: entertainment (concert touring, motion picture, theatrical), industrial, and military/defense. Founded 1989 by Robert R. (Bob) Luther; ISO 9001 / AS9100C certified.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Partially verifiable / unclear. The patent's claims are directed to an illuminator module for electrical devices (receptacles, breakers, switches) plus a panel-mounted luminaire. Lex demonstrably ships the host devices (distribution boxes, connectors, wiring devices, breakers, work lights), and the Lex LuxCommander work-light line is expressly described in company materials as a "Patent[ed] design" — but I found no Lex marketing, catalog, or press material that specifically advertises a fiber-optic or light-pipe status-indicator feature corresponding to claims 1, 15, or 18. The patent appears to be a development/protective filing around the company's indicator architecture rather than the banner on a named SKU. Treat "product embodying the claims" as unconfirmed.
• Current status: Operating, but restructured. Lex Products Corp. merged with TM3 Systems Inc. to form LexTM3 LLC (announced via Lex's own site and tED Magazine), and the business has since rebranded, with a grand opening of "Lex Innovations" corporate headquarters in Shelton covered by WTNH. It is not dissolved, in bankruptcy, or in an assignment-for-the-benefit-of-creditors proceeding on any record I found. Earlier bolt-on acquisitions (Kimchuck Metal Processes 2005, Electrol Engineering 2006, ATS Lighting's industrial work-light line in February of a later year per Thomasnet) show a buyer, not a seller, of IP during the relevant period.

Assignment timeline

Important sourcing limitation, stated up front: I queried the USPTO Assignment Center base pages and general web indexes and could not retrieve the recorded reel/frame numbers or the recorded correspondent for this patent's chains. Neither the Google Patents legal-events panel (supplied as authoritative) nor Justia/FreePatentsOnline expose reel/frame, and my search tooling is general web search rather than a live Assignment Center session. I will not invent reel/frame values. What follows is dated with the dates that are documented; the reel/frame fields are marked "not retrieved."

1. 2008-05-15 (executed) / recorded 2008-05-16 — Reel not retrieved / not retrieved

   • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
   • Assignors: TANG, ARNOLD; FEHRMANN, WILBUR GORDON JR.
   • Assignee: LEX PRODUCTS CORP.
   • Correspondent: not retrieved. Related flag: A separate USPTO filing (issue-notification document surfaced in search) lists Charles N.J. Ruggiero, Ohlandt, Greeley, Ruggiero & Perle, L.L.P., One Landmark Square, 10th Floor, Stamford, CT 06901-2682, with Deposit Account 01-0467 in that firm's name, as the correspondence attorney/agent for Lex-linked patent prosecution. This is a candidate but unverified as the correspondent on the assignment record itself — I am flagging it as a lead to confirm at Assignment Center, not as a finding.
   • Context: Initial employee-invention assignment to the operating company, executed one day after filing.

2. 2013-12-24 (recorded) — Reel not retrieved / not retrieved

   • Conveyance: SECURITY AGREEMENT
   • Assignor (grantor/debtor): LEX PRODUCTS CORP.
   • Assignee (secured party): WEBSTER BANK, N. A.
   • Correspondent: not retrieved.
   • Context: Securitization / commercial lending collateral. This is a credit-facility lien recorded against the patent portfolio; it conveys no ownership interest. It recurs as a customary event for family-owned manufacturers refinancing in the post-2008 credit cycle.

No further records. Google Patents' legal-events panel shows only these two entries — no subsequent assignment, merger, change of name, license, or release of security interest. Two consequences worth stating plainly:

• The title chain has exactly one link: inventors → Lex Products Corp. The patent has never left the operating company's hands on any recorded basis, and therefore the ownership record, as recorded, runs to Lex Products Corp. / LexTM3 / Lex Innovations today.
• The Webster Bank security interest appears unreleased in the USPTO record. That is extremely common (lenders frequently never record releases) and is not evidence of default, distress, or a foreclosure of IP. Do not read it as a distress signal without corroboration.

If Assignment Center shows no additional entries when you run it yourself, stop there — that absence is the finding: the original assignee still owns the patent.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7936279
    2008 : Filed by Arnold Tang
         : Wilbur Fehrmann Jr co-inventor
         : Rights assigned to Lex Products Corp
    2011 : Patent issued
    2013 : Security interest to Webster Bank NA
    Present : No title transfer ever recorded

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — the recorded title chain consists of the original assignment only.

Justification: the USPTO record for US 7,936,279 contains exactly one title-conveying document (2008-05-15 executed / 2008-05-16 recorded, assignors Tang and Fehrmann to Lex Products Corp.), plus one non-title lien (2013-12-24, security agreement to Webster Bank, N.A.), which is §112(f)-irrelevant to ownership. Because the chain terminates at the original operating-company assignee — a Shelton, CT power-distribution manufacturer that still operates today as Lex Innovations — none of the eight NPE signals is present, and there is nothing here to grade as an NPE posture. The honest read is a never-asserted, operating-company-owned patent that has since expired for non-payment of maintenance fees, not an NPE vehicle.

Verification links (run these directly — my reel/frame fields are the one gap in this report):

• USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search by patent number 7936279 and by application 12/121,114, and pull the recorded correspondent for both entries.
• Legacy Assignment Search (same underlying records): https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Confirm via USPTO ODP/PEDS that no later assignment, name change (Lex Products Corp. → LexTM3 LLC → Lex Innovations), or release of security interest was recorded.

Explicit uncertainty flags: (1) Reel/frame numbers and recorded correspondents for both entries were not retrieved — do not treat the Ohlandt, Greeley lead as confirmed. (2) Claim 20 independence remains unverified from the prior section and is unaffected by this ownership analysis. (3) The Stamford vs. Shelton address discrepancy for the original assignee should be resolved against the printed patent front page.

I'll search for the prior-art citations on US 7,936,279 across patent databases.

Let me query the specific patent-literature databases that render the "References Cited" section.

The citation list hasn't surfaced yet. Let me pull the front-page "References Cited" directly from the patent PDF and other renderers.

Prior-Art / Citation Analysis — US 7,936,279 B2

Important, up-front limitation: I was unable to retrieve the front-page "References Cited" (backward-citation) list for US 7,936,279. That list is the only thing that can answer the question you actually asked (which references the examiner/applicant cited as § 102 prior art, and which claims they map to). I am not going to invent it. Below I state exactly what I did retrieve, what I could not, and I give you a defensible analytic framework plus the exact sources where the missing list can be pulled.

I stopped at the search-step budget before I could confirm every entry, so every item below is labeled Verified (appeared in retrieved search results) or Analysis (my reasoning) or Not retrieved.

1. Terminology problem in the task premise (needs correcting before any § 102 mapping)

"Citations" for a patent runs in two directions, and only one of them can be § 102 prior art:

The task instruction "look at each patent citation for 7936279… which claim(s) it potentially anticipates under 35 U.S.C. § 102" only works against the backward set. The backward set is precisely the set I could not obtain.

2. What I actually retrieved

2a. Sources checked (Verified — all returned no "References Cited" box)

• Authoritative patent text supplied in the user message (Google Patents fetch of patents.google.com/patent/US7936279/en, 2026-09-24). Confirmed: the fetched text goes Classifications → Definitions → Abstract → Description → Claims (truncated at claim 9). There is no "References Cited" section and no "Citations" section in it.
• Justia (patents.justia.com/patent/7936279) — returned claim text, not the citation box.
• FreePatentsOnline (freepatentsonline.com/7936279.html) — returned claim/description text, not the citation box.
• patentsencyclopedia (app/20090284385), patents-review.com, wiki.golden.com — returned bibliographic + description text only.
• My targeted queries for the citation box (e.g., patentimages US7936279.pdf "References Cited") returned unrelated patents' reference boxes (US 10,510,536; EP 3,244,855; US 8,764,326, etc.) — none was 7,936,279.

Conclusion: the examiner/applicant-cited prior-art list for US 7,936,279 is Not retrieved. Any § 102 claim-mapping I produced without it would be fabrication, so I am not producing one.

2b. The one citation list I did retrieve: the forward "Cited By" set

From the Google Patents page for the pre-grant publication US 2009/0284385 A1 (same family, app. 12/121,114), the entry shows "Cited By (52)". The named entries captured in my results are (Verified, as snippets):

Also captured (Verified): US 7,936,279 appears in the "Cited By"/"Citations" tables of unrelated later documents — CA 3,123,586 A1, EP 2,237,647 A2, US 2014/0054059, and US 11,205,011 (Amber Solutions). These merely corroborate that 7,936,279 is a citing document there; they are not prior art against it.

Critical analytic point (Analysis): none of the 52 forward-citing documents is § 102 art against 7,936,279, because all postdate May 15, 2008. What this list actually tells you is the reverse: post-2011 examiners treated 7,936,279 as relevant prior art against the SnapPower/Snaprays "Active cover plate" family. That is a forward relevance signal, not an anticipation analysis of 7,936,279 itself.

3. Applicable § 102 framework (so you can evaluate retrieved references correctly)

• Governing law: pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102, because the effective filing date is May 15, 2008 (pre-AIA applies to applications filed before March 16, 2013). The AIA first-inventor-to-file §§ 102/103 do not govern.
• Key dates: filing/priority May 15, 2008; statutory § 102(b) one-year bar date May 15, 2007; § 102(a)/(e) "before the invention by the applicant" cut-off is the invention date (≥ May 15, 2008).
• Anticipation standard: a single reference must disclose each and every element as arranged in the claim (Net MoneyIN v. VeriSign); missing element or different arrangement → at most § 103.
• Category notes: a US patent or published application qualifies under § 102(e) as of its effective filing date, not its publication date — relevant when checking the cited-set effective dates.

4. Claim-element map you can use to score any backward reference you retrieve

Because I cannot name the cited references, here is the element-by-element test any candidate § 102 reference must satisfy. Independents are claims 1, 15, and 18 (consistent with the prior section; 20 claims total — the supplied grant text truncated at claim 9).

Independent claim 1 — fiber-coupled two-piece indicator (7 elements)

1. Housing attached to an electrical device
2. Electrical input on the housing receiving an electrical signal
3. First connector on the housing receiving the proximal end of an optical fiber
4. Lighting element in the housing outputting light in response to the signal
5. Optical element in the housing transmitting ≥ a portion of the light to the optical fiber
6. Second connector receiving the distal end of that fiber
7. Optical output element positioned relative to the second connector to receive light from the fiber's distal end, attachable to a panel, outputting the received light

Highest-value discrimination points: the claim is an apparatus claim in which the light-source housing and the panel-mountable output element are connected by an optical fiber. A reference showing an indicator lamp mounted directly on a panel with electrical wiring (the classic pre-2008 art) does not meet elements 3/5/6/7; a reference showing a fiber-optic light pipe from a device to a panel remote from the device would be the closest art to hunt.

Independent claim 15 — means-plus-function version

Governed by pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 112, ¶ 6. Scope = the structures disclosed in the specification performing each function plus equivalents. Mapping (Analysis, from the specification):

Practitioner note (Analysis): Because this claim is in § 112 ¶ 6 form, its scope is limited to the disclosed structures and equivalents. A prior-art reference that discloses a different structure for any function does not anticipate claim 15 even if it performs the same function — it would be an equivalents/§ 103 question, not § 102.

Independent claim 18 — luminaire-only (panel-mounted output half)

1. Connector receiving an end of an optical fiber
2. Optical element attached to the connector, outputting light received from the fiber
3. Housing holding the optical element, configured to attach the apparatus to a panel

Discrimination point: this claim is silent as to the lamp and the electrical device. The single most relevant potential § 102 art for claim 18 is any pre-2008 panel-mount fiber-optic indicator lamp / fiber-optic "pilot light" — i.e., a fiber-fed bezel or lens that snaps or screws into a panel. That art area (panel-mounted fiber-optic indicator lights, e.g., fiber-optic annunciators) is where claim 18 would most plausibly have been met, and where the examiner's cited set would most likely point.

Claim-types to expect in the backward set, and where they'd land

5. How to obtain the actual § 102 reference list (definitive next step)

Because my tooling is general web search (not a live USPTO full-text/citation API), retrieve the backward set directly:

1. USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter — search 7936279 or application 12/121,114; open the "References Cited" / "Patent Citations" tab.
2. USPTO Patent Full-Text (patft) — the issue PDF front page carries the examiner-cited "U.S. PATENT DOCUMENTS" and "FOREIGN PATENT DOCUMENTS" boxes.
3. Google Patents — patents.google.com/patent/US7936279B2/en — the "Citations" (backward) table, distinct from "Cited By" (forward).
4. FreePatentsOnline 7936279.html — "Referenced Cited" block.
5. Espacenet / Global Dossier — "Cited documents" of the US family member.
6. File wrapper — PatentCenter "Documents & Transactions" → the IDS / PTO-1449 / PTO-892 (Notice of References Cited) for a complete, dated record of what the examiner actually applied.

Pull those, and the element map in § 4 above will let you score each reference against claims 1, 15, and 18 (and dependents 2–14) in one pass.

6. Contradictions / discrepancies flagged

1. Date inconsistency: this task header states the current date as April 26, 2026, whereas the system context date is 2026-09-29. I used neither to alter any patent date; the operative dates are the patent's own (filed/priority 2008-05-15, issued 2011-05-03).
2. Prior section's claim-sets: the earlier-generated summary says the granted patent has independent claims 1, 15, 18. My retrieved Justia grant text confirms claim 15 is the means-plus-function independent claim — which is inconsistent with the pre-grant publication US 2009/0284385, where claim 15 was the "at least one connector / at least one lighting element" claim and claim 18 was luminaire-only. Claim numbering and scope shifted between publication and grant. Treat grant-claim numbering as authoritative and re-verify from the printed patent.
3. Prior section's CAFC item (carried forward): the earlier summary flagged search hits for "7936279" that were unrelated (a Brazilian municipal registry, a Santa Catarina gazette). Those remain false positives — they are not this patent and are not § 102 art or litigation. No CAFC 2026 activity is confirmed; absence of results is not proof of absence.

7. Bottom line

• Deliverable requested: full citation + date + description + § 102 claim mapping for each reference cited in US 7,936,279.
• Delivered: the backward reference list is Not retrieved — it is absent from the authoritative text I was given and did not surface in my searches. I have not fabricated any citation or any anticipation mapping.
• What I could verify: the forward "Cited By (52)" set (SnapPower/Snaprays "Active cover plate" family + CN 103197242 A + Alltrade US 9,997,860), which cannot anticipate 7,936,279 because it all postdates May 15, 2008 — it instead shows later examiners used 7,936,279 as prior art against those cover-plate patents.
• Action to close the gap: pull the PTO-892 / IDS and the "Citations" table from USPTO PatentCenter or Google Patents per § 5, then apply the element map in § 4 (claims 1, 15, 18 + dependents 2–14; pre-AIA § 102; § 112 ¶ 6 for claim 15).

I'll gather the prior-art record for US 7,936,279 — the supplied patent text omits the front-page "References Cited" tables, so I need to retrieve what the patent itself cites and what analogous art exists.

Good — I've surfaced a highly relevant primary reference (US 4,255,780). Let me pin down its bibliographic data and find the remaining pieces (the face-of-patent citations, plus data-modulation art for claims 6–7).

Preliminary note on the "Prior Art section of this page"

I have to flag a sourcing problem before the analysis, per the operating rules.

The prior-art section is not present in the authoritative text supplied. The Google Patents fetch jumps from "Classifications" straight to "Definitions" — the front-page "References Cited" (U.S. Patent Documents / Foreign Patent Documents) table, which is normally between those two blocks, was stripped by the fetch. The only prior-art-adjacent content that survived is the machine-generated line:

"Prior art keywords — electrical, housing, optical, light, optical fiber"

and the post-issuance "Cited By (52)" list on the sibling publication US 2009/0284385 A1.

So I did two things: (1) treated the surviving "prior art keywords" line as the field-of-search fingerprint it is, and (2) went out and retrieved verifiable pre-2008 art in the same field. I could not retrieve the actual list of references cited on the face of US 7,936,279, and I say so rather than inventing one. All references below are identified as retrieved and verified by URL, retrieved but title-unverified, or post-dating art (unusable).

I also note one contradiction with the earlier sections worth recording: the earlier summary says the granted claims are 1, 15, 18 independent; I have no independent basis to verify claims 16–17 or 19–20, so my analysis covers claims 1–15 and 18 and flags the rest as unverified. The date discrepancy the litigation section raised (Apr. 26, 2026 vs. 2026-09-29) is not resolvable from the record; I use April 26, 2026 as instructed, and note it does not affect any legal conclusion here.

Obviousness analysis — US 7,936,279 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

1. Governing framework

Which § 103 applies. US 7,936,279 was filed May 15, 2008, with a priority date of the same day and no earlier priority claim in the record. Because the application was filed before March 16, 2013, pre-AIA § 103(a) governs. Prior art therefore includes § 102(a), (b), (e), (f), and (g) art. The most powerful provision here is § 102(b) — patents and printed publications more than one year before May 15, 2008, i.e., anything published on or before May 15, 2007.

Standard. Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), as refined by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) — which issued April 30, 2007, i.e., before this application was filed and was therefore the operative standard during prosecution. Under KSR: (a) the four Graham factors; (b) combinations of known elements according to known methods are obvious; (c) the "obvious to try" branch applies where there is a finite number of identified, predictable solutions; and (d) design incentives, market demand, and known techniques addressable by the same problem overcome an argument of nonobviousness. MPEP 2143 supplies the motivation-to-combine rubric (teachings, suggestions, commercial demand, field of endeavor, predictable variation, design choice).

Level of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA). A person in mid-2008 with a bachelor's degree in electrical or mechanical engineering and 2–4 years' experience designing wiring devices (receptacles, switches, breakers, cover plates) and/or indicator and light-guide/fiber-optic hardware. Fiber-optic light guides, panel indicators, and lighted cover plates were mature, catalog-level technologies well before 2008 (see § 3 below), so the POSITA would not regard optical coupling as a research problem — only an integration exercise.

2. Claim 1 — the core two-part indicator

2.1 The reference

US 4,255,780 A — "Illumination assembly for use with electrical terminal units" (retrieved: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4255780). This single reference is the centerpiece of the analysis. Its own summary of advantages is, in substance, this patent's stated problem statement and solution:

"It is only necessary to provide a light source and an optical fiber means… [T]he illumination assembly… permits a light source (such as lamp 58) to be mounted behind a cover plate. Thus, the light source does not encumber the appearance of a light switch or electrical plug receptacle. The optical fiber means, being small, unobtrusively permits light to be transmitted from the light source for viewing in front of the cover plate."

That is the invention of the '279 patent — electrical/light-generating half at the device, passive optical path to a panel-mounted visible output — described in a patent that issued roughly twenty-seven years before the '279 filing.

2.2 Element-by-element chart (claim 1 → US 4,255,780)

Conclusion on claim 1: Every element is disclosed. The mapping is essentially 1:1. Claim 1 therefore appears anticipated under pre-AIA § 102(b) by US 4,255,780, and a fortiori obvious under § 103(a). Even on the patentee's most favorable reading — requiring a discrete "optical element in the housing" distinct from the fiber-entry aperture, and requiring the output element to be "attached to a panel" rather than integral with a fastener — the difference is at most the substitution of a known lens/light guide for a known contact coupling, which is a predictable variation of a known technique (KSR; MPEP 2144.04).

2.3 Secondary reference filling any residual gap

US 7,002,453 B2 — "Remote lamp status display via fiber optic system" (retrieved: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US7002453B2](/patent/US7002453B2)/en; issued 2006, i.e., § 102(b) art). Teaches expressly: "Light is received from the illumination device by an optical fiber. The light is transmitted to a display, wherein the display displays the status of the illumination device based on the light." It discloses an optical port 216 in the lamp reflector housing, an optical fiber 218, and a coupling "achieved through a variety of matter, for example a lens," with the illumination element being "a Light Emitting Diode (LED) or a light bulb."

Motivation to combine with US 4,255,780: same field (fiber-optic relay of a light-generating device's status to a remote viewing location); same problem (make a hidden electrical indicator visible remotely without running electrical wiring to the viewing point); and 7,002,453 supplies the express lens-coupling teaching and the express LED-for-bulb substitution, removing any argument of unexpected difficulty. KSR "obvious to try" applies squarely: a finite set of known coupling options (contact, lens, waveguide) with predictable results.

3. Claims 15 and 18

Claim 15 (means-plus-function, § 112(f)). Scope is the structures disclosed in the specification performing each recited function, plus equivalents. US 4,255,780 supplies: means for attaching the housing (casing/light-source assembly mounted interiorly of the terminal box, adjacent the switch assembly); means for receiving the electrical signal (conductors 60, 62 to terminals 40); means for receiving the fiber's proximal end (aperture 54a); light-emitting means (lamp 58); means for transmitting the light to the fiber (aperture 54a contact coupling / bore; plus the '453 lens as an equivalent); means for receiving the distal end (bore 68); and panel-attachable output means (frusto-conical transparent display means 64 secured through cover plate 46 via beveled recess 47, doubling as the cover fastener). Obvious for the same reasons as claim 1; likely anticipated as well. A means-plus-function claim adds nothing where the disclosed structures are identical.

Claim 18 (luminaire-only: fiber connector + optical element + panel-attachable housing). This is exactly the "illumination display means 64" of US 4,255,780: a body with an elongate bore 68 to receive the fiber end (the recited "connector"), a transparent frusto-conical optical element 70 that outputs and concentrates the received light, all unitary ("of unitary construction") and threadably attachable through the cover plate. Anticipated/obvious over US 4,255,780 alone.

Supplementary references for claim 18's "attach to a panel" limitation, all § 102(b) art in the same field, cited in the illuminated-cover-plate family: US 4,000,405 A (Product Concepts, Dec. 28, 1976) and US 4,038,582 A (Product Concepts, Jul. 26, 1977) — light-emitting wall/cover plates; US 6,883,927 B2 (Cube Investments, Apr. 26, 2005) — "Frame assembly and light for an electrical wall conduit." Retrieved via the Google Patents citation table of the later "Active cover plates" family (see § 6 for the attribution caveat).

4. Dependent claims 2–14

5. Motivation to combine — articulated per MPEP 2143

A POSITA facing the problem the '279 patent itself recites — an indicator is needed at a convenient, visible location, but the electrical component lives inside a box where wiring to the indicator is "messy, complex," costly, and prone to shorts — would have been motivated to reach the claimed combination by at least five independent rationales:

1. Same field of endeavor and same problem, already solved. US 4,255,780 addresses the identical problem for terminal units and expressly states the advantage: keep the light source behind the plate ("does not encumber the appearance," "virtually impossible for children to interfere with the light source") while the fiber transmits light out for viewing.
2. Predictable, catalog-level technology. Fiber-optic light guides and panel light pipes were commodity items by 2008 (the "prior art keywords" line — electrical, housing, optical, light, optical fiber — is exactly the intersection the examiner searched). KSR: where the elements are known and the combination yields nothing more than their expected sum, the claim is obvious.
3. Design incentive / market demand. Separating the electrics from the visible optics (a) satisfies safety and inspection norms by keeping mains wiring inside the box, (b) eliminates labor to fish indicator wiring to the cover, and (c) enables interchangeable luminaires and cover kits — the patent's own stated commercial rationale. KSR treats these as recognized design incentives.
4. The reference itself supplies the express teaching. 4,255,780 teaches the fiber transmitting illumination exteriorly, plus the panel-mounted output that "doubles as a cover-plate fastener"; 7,002,453 teaches the lens coupling and the remote display; EP 0 509 920 teaches that the same optical channel can carry data, not just illumination. Teaching/suggestion/motivation is express, not merely inferential.
5. No teaching away and no unexpected result. Nothing in the retrieved art disparages the combination, and the '279 specification reports no data, no comparative results, and no criticality for any claimed parameter.

Secondary considerations. On the supplied record there is no evidence of commercial success with nexus, no praise, no copying, and no long-felt-but-unmet need. Indeed, the long-felt-need factor cuts against the patentee: the need was met in 1981 by US 4,255,780. The patent's status — Expired – Fee Related, adjusted expiration 2029-03-20 — is a maintenance-fee fact, not a validity indicator. I found no reexamination, IPR/PGR, or litigation that would have already tested these claims, so there is no prior adjudicated validity finding to rely on either way.

6. What I could not verify, and how it changes the opinion

1. The face-of-patent "References Cited" list is missing from the supplied authoritative text. If the examiner's references are among the pre-2007 art identified here, invalidity is stronger; if the examiner considered an illuminated-cover-plate reference and allowed claim 1 anyway, that would signal a narrower construction of "optical element disposed in the housing" or of "second connector," and I would re-run claim 1 under that construction. This is the single most important document to obtain.
2. File history not available. Whether claim 1 was amended to overcome art (as the wording change between US 2009/0284385 A1 and the granted claims suggests) matters for prosecution-history estoppel and for identifying what the examiner actually treated as the point of novelty.
3. Claims 16–17 and 19–20 text unverified. My chart covers claims 1–15 and 18. If 20 is independent (as the earlier section flagged as unconfirmed), it needs its own analysis; method claims would likely fall to the same references.
4. Bibliographic gaps. I verified the number, title, content, and URL for US 4,255,780 but not its exact issue date (it is 1981, far outside any § 102(b) question). The titles for US 5,485,356 A (Nguyen, Jan. 16, 1996), US 5,683,166 A (Lutzker, Nov. 4, 1997), and US 6,423,900 B1 (Technical Systems Corp., Jul. 23, 2002) were truncated in the retrieved citation table and I have not asserted titles for them.
5. Attribution caveat on the cited "family" list. The seven pre-2008 references in § 3 (US 4,000,405 / 4,038,582 / 5,485,356 / 5,683,166 / 6,423,900 / 6,883,927 / plus US 8,668,347) came from the Google Patents citation table on the page for the later "Active cover plates" / Ebeling "Receptacle cover" family, retrieved 2026-09-24. They are all pre-2008 documents and therefore usable as § 103 art, but I could not confirm they appear on the face of US 7,936,279. I have not treated them as the patent's own IDS.
6. Art that must NOT be used. The "Cited By (52)" list (SnapPower/SnapRays "Active cover plates," US 8,912,442 et seq.; CN 103197242 A; US 9,997,860 B1) and the retrieved Schurter "Light Pipe" application note all post-date May 15, 2008 and are not available as § 102/§ 103 prior art against this patent. They are useful only as evidence that the field converged on this design after 2008 — which, if anything, is corroborative that the design space was obvious, but it is not itself a ground.

7. Bottom line

US 7,936,279 is, on the retrieved prior art, highly vulnerable under § 103 — and claim 1 is arguably anticipated outright.

• Claim 1 reads element-for-element on US 4,255,780 (1981) → pre-AIA § 102(b) anticipation; if not, § 103(a) obvious, optionally with US 7,002,453 supplying the lens-coupling and LED-substitution teachings.
• Claim 15 (means-plus-function) adds nothing; same structures, same result.
• Claim 18 is the "illumination display means 64" of US 4,255,780 restated; obvious over that reference alone, with US 4,000,405 / US 4,038,582 / US 6,883,927 as secondary panel-attachment art.
• Claims 6–7 are the only claims that add anything beyond the 1981 reference's disclosure, and they fall to EP 0 509 920 A1 (electrical-to-optical pulse conversion, fiber out of a shielded enclosure, to a processing unit) in view of the ADE7100/ADE7500 energy-meter ICs the specification itself concedes are known.
• Claims 11–13 (light guide, 90°, 10–80°) are routine optimization of a result-effective variable with no asserted criticality.
• No secondary consideration of record overcomes this, and the long-felt-need factor is affirmatively undone by a 27-year-old reference teaching the same separation.

Confidence: High on the substance of the § 103 analysis against the retrieved references; moderate-to-high on the overall invalidity conclusion, capped by the missing face-of-patent citation list and file history (items 1–2 above), which are the documents that would convert this from a strong invalidity opinion into a complete one.