US 8059137

I'll search for authoritative information on US 8059137, including any litigation or CAFC activity.

Let me check specifically for litigation and any CAFC activity involving this patent.

US Patent 8,059,137 — Summary

Bottom line up front: I found no CAFC 2026 docket activity for this patent, and the patent's own record shows it expired for failure to pay maintenance fees (anticipated expiration 2023‑10‑23) — so it is not a live 2026 enforcement vehicle. Details and verification notes below.

Bibliographic data

Family / lineage: This is a divisional of U.S. Pat. No. 7,839,419 (application 10/691,450, filed Oct. 23, 2003), per the "PRIORITY" section of the specification and the ADR record. The published family includes WO 2005/045736, EP 1702289 A2, EP 2112592, and related national filings (AU 2004279190, CA 2501600, CN 10100225, JP 2007510202, MX PA05007140, RU 2360284, etc.).

Abstract

"A method and system for rendering a desktop on a computer using a composited desktop model operating system are disclosed. A composited desktop window manager, upon receiving content information from application programs, draws the window to a buffer memory for future reference, and takes advantage of advanced graphics hardware and visual effects to render windows based on content on which they are drawn. The windows may also be rendered based on environment variables including virtual light sources. The frame portion of each window may be generated by pixel shading a bitmap having the appearance of frosted glass based on the content of the desktop on top of which the frame is displayed. Legacy support is provided so that the operating system can draw and render windows generated by legacy applications to look consistent with non-legacy application windows."

Plain-language overview

The patent describes the architecture behind the Windows Vista-era "Aero" compositing desktop. Instead of the older "invalidation" model (where the OS tells an app which rectangles to repaint), a Compositing Desktop Window Manager (CDWM) keeps a copy of every window's surface in memory and re-draws the whole desktop bottom-to-top through a Unified Compositing Engine (UCE) built on Direct3D. Each window is a 3D mesh with its content as a diffuse texture, plus optional pixel shaders, light maps and environment maps, so window frames can be rendered as physically modeled frosted glass (refraction, reflection, spectral highlights, blur of underlying content). To support old "legacy" applications that only draw when they receive a paint message, the OS keeps the legacy USER/GDI subsystem alive, redirects each legacy window's rendered output into an off-screen buffer ("window graphical output redirection"), strips the legacy frame/border/caption, and re-composites the remaining client pixels using the new glass frame.

Independent claims (plain language)

⚠️ Numbering caveat: the patent text I fetched from Google Patents is truncated before the claims, so I am relying on the Justia granted-patent claim listing and the pre-grant publication text (uspto.report for US 2011/0072391 A1). The pre-grant publication shows claims 1–48 cancelled and independent claims 49, 58, and 68. The Justia granted-patent page shows the same subject matter under renumbered identifiers (e.g., an independent "claim 6" and "claim 14"), indicating the claims were renumbered at issuance. I cannot confirm the exact final numbering of the granted claim set from the material available; treat the numbers below as the publication numbering, with substance being reliable.

Claim 49 — Method: translucent glass window frame over opaque content
Receive application content to display in a window in a GUI; display at least a portion of it in an opaque content portion of the window, where the window has a translucent frame portion that "comprises a likeness of glass."
Dependents add: frosted glass (50); applying a texture to a mesh (51); resizing the window by dividing the mesh into three regions per mesh dimension, maintaining vertex offsets in dimensions where a region is bounded by the window's bounding box while scaling vertices in dimensions not so bounded (52–53); equally/unequally sized regions; minimum-size border regions; and a vertex resizing filter function determining displacement direction/magnitude per dimension per vertex (57).

Claim 58 — Computer storage medium: dual-path CDWM/DWM legacy redirection
Instructions that cause a computer to: receive, at a CDWM, application content from advanced applications in bottom-to-top order; receive, at a DWM, application content from legacy applications in top-to-bottom order, where the DWM redirects that content to the CDWM; strip out content received from legacy applications so that the legacy primary-content texture is retained but legacy frames, borders, and captions are ignored; convert the stripped content to a graphical representation; and display at least a portion in windows having translucent frame portions.
Dependents add: pixel shader content beneath the frame (59); glass / frosted glass (60–61); legacy-application-origin content (62); CDWM modeling the window by applying a texture to a mesh (63); the three-region-per-dimension resize method (64–67).

Claim 68 — Method: physically modeled highlights via pixel shader
Receive application content to display in a window; display at least a portion in a content portion having a frame portion, where displaying includes rendering spectral highlights on the frame portion based on a virtual light source by a CDWM configured to provide transparency, shadows, lighting effects, bump mapping, and environmental mapping via a pixel shader that manipulates pixels of the application content based on desktop-global properties and window-material properties.

(An earlier variant of this claim appears as claim 14 on the Justia granted-patent page — "A computer implemented method for rendering a desktop window in a graphical user interface of an operating system shell…" also including the mesh-resize limitation — which is consistent with post-issuance renumbering.)

Litigation / CAFC 2026 check

• No CAFC 2026 docket activity found for US 8,059,137. Targeted searches for "8059137"/"8,059,137" combined with "CAFC," "Federal Circuit," "appeal," and "2026 docket" returned no matching results. I cannot positively state that no such proceeding exists — only that I could not locate one.
• A keyword hit for a "'137 patent" appears in a W.D. Wash. declaratory-judgment answer (Eagle Harbor Holdings / MediusTech v. Ford Motor Co., filed Nov. 7, 2011) involving invalidity/non-infringement of a "'137 patent." I could not confirm that this refers to US 8,059,137 — it is more consistent with a different, earlier-issued patent sharing the last three digits. Do not treat these as the same patent without independent confirmation.
• Practical note: because the patent record shows "Expired – Fee Related" with anticipated expiration 2023‑10‑23, it would not be a candidate for newly filed 2026 infringement suits (subject to any lapsed-rights/reinstatement or pre-expiration damages issues I have not verified).

Uncertainty disclosure: I could not run a direct PACER/CourtListener docket query against the patent number or retrieve the as-issued claim list in full. The bibliographic data above is consistent across Google Patents, the USPTO-hosted PDF, Justia, and uspto.report; the claim numbering is the one item I would verify against the official USPTO full-text before relying on it.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8059137/en · https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/15/c8/04/14b50bd42f321f/US8059137.pdf · https://patents.justia.com/patent/8059137 · https://uspto.report/patent/app/20110072391 · https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/43/94/4b/db92d29569b404/WO2005045736A3.pdf · http://data.epo.org/pise-server/rest/collections/lgpi/EP1702289A2.pdf · https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.[176922](/patent/176922).35.0.pdf

I'll research litigation involving US patent 8059137 across patent litigation databases.

Initial searches returned irrelevant results (unrelated numbering systems). Let me search patent-specific litigation platforms.

Litigation Search Results for U.S. Patent No. 8,059,137

Bottom line: I found no evidence of any known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 8,059,137.

What the patent is

Before addressing litigation, note the patent's identity (per the authoritative full text and Google Patents):

• Patent No.: US 8,059,137 B2 — "Compositing Desktop Window Manager"
• Inventors: Scott Hanggie, Victor Tan, Gerardo Bermudez, Gregory D. Swedberg, Mark Richard Ligameri, Greg Scott Melander
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation (now Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC)
• Application No.: 12/940,514 (divisional of 10/691,450, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,839,419)
• Priority date: October 23, 2003; Granted November 15, 2011
• Status: Expired – Fee Related (anticipated expiration October 23, 2023)

This is the Microsoft Windows Vista/7 "Aero"/Desktop Window Manager family patent covering composited desktop rendering, frosted-glass window frames, and legacy (invalidation-model) application support.

Searches performed

I searched patent-litigation and related sources, including material indexed under Unified Patents' litigation/PTAB portal, PTAB (PTActs) filings, court records surfaced via Docket Alarm and CourtListener, and general web indices, restricted to the specific number 8059137 (and its parent 7,839,419).

Findings

• No district court cases (no PACER/CourtListener hits) naming US 8,059,137 as an asserted patent were found.
• No ITC (Section 337) investigations referencing this patent were found.
• No PTAB proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM) with this patent as the patent-at-issue were found. The Unified Patents results that appeared concern entirely different patents (e.g., RE 45,543; 8,958,853; 7,454,002; 10,013,158; 10,311,073) and unrelated patent owners.
• The only "8059137"-like hits returned were irrelevant product/part numbering systems (e.g., an ESCHA robotic-connector catalog), which I discount as noise.

Caveats and confidence

• This is a negative finding based on the searches I could run, not a certification that no suit ever existed. I could not directly query the full PACER docket system or the complete Docket Alarm/Unified portal case lists for this specific number within my available tools.
• Given the patent's ownership (Microsoft/Microsoft Technology Licensing) and subject matter, it is plausible it was licensed within the Windows ecosystem rather than asserted. NPE-style assertion of a Microsoft desktop-compositor patent would be unusual, which is consistent with a no-litigation finding.
• Note also that fee-related expiration in 2023 would make it a poor litigation vehicle even if it had once been asserted.

Recommendation: To confirm definitively, run the exact number 8059137 through PACER's Case Locator, the Unified Patents litigation/PTAB case list, and Docket Alarm / LexMachina with a party filter for Microsoft. If those return nothing, the conclusion is that no known litigation exists for US 8,059,137.

If you'd like, I can also check the closely related family members — U.S. Pat. No. 7,839,419 (the parent) and publication US 2011/0072391 A1 — for any assertion activity.

I'll research this systematically. Let me start with searches to verify PTAB activity and find any proceedings the ODP may not have indexed.

Initial searches surfaced no IPR on this patent. Let me dig deeper with multiple targeted queries.

Let me check the patent family, litigation history, and PTAB E2E directly.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 8,059,137. The structured ODP block is unambiguous — no IPR, PGR, or CBM has ever been instituted, denied, or terminated against this patent — and my independent web checks (Google Patents, PTAB document repositories, docket aggregators, and PTAB E2E-indexed petition text) surfaced no petition, institution decision, or Final Written Decision naming U.S. Patent No. 8,059,137. That is a 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution-denied breakdown. The defensive posture this produces is not "the patent is hardened by surviving IPRs" — it is that the patent is dead by its own terms: per the authoritative record it carries legal status Expired – Fee Related, with an anticipated expiration date of 2023-10-23. Any demand letter citing this patent is asserting an expired Microsoft asset that no challenger has ever bothered to take to the Board.

I want to be explicit about the limits of that finding: I confirmed the absence through the ODP structured data plus targeted searches, but I could not exhaustively sweep PTAB E2E docket-by-docket or every district-court docket within my search budget. Treat "no proceedings" as high-confidence pending your own E2E check (path below), not as a certified negative.

Note on claim granularity: there are no proceedings, so there is no FWD and no claim-level outcome to report. The authoritative text supplied to me also does not reproduce the claim set, so I cannot quote or characterize individual claims — doing so would be fabrication.

Proceeding-by-proceeding detail

Not applicable — there are no proceedings to list. No claim-invalidated proceeding exists, so nothing sorts to the top. For completeness, the following have NOT occurred for this patent, per ODP and my searches:

• No IPR petition (any year) naming US 8,059,137 as the challenged patent.
• No PGR petition — and none is legally available: PGR under § 321 requires claims with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16, whereas this patent's priority date is 2003-10-23.
• No CBM review — and none is available going forward: the AIA § 18 CBM program sunset on 2020-09-16.
• No FWD, no settlement/termination, no § 315(e)(2) estoppel, no Federal Circuit appeal arising from an AIA trial on this patent.

Strategic summary

Claim status: UNTESTED across the board. Because no AIA trial has ever been instituted against US 8,059,137, no claim of the patent has been canceled, confirmed, or construed by the PTAB. There is no "surviving claim" list to hand you, and equally no dead independent claim to build a non-infringement freebie on. The real-world narrowing of this asset came from patent term, not from claim cancellation: the record shows the patent expired on 2023-10-23 and is now Expired – Fee Related (Microsoft Corporation was the original assignee; the patent was reassigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC on 2014-12-09). For a defendant, expiration is more decisive than any IPR would have been, but read the next paragraph before you treat it as a complete answer.

The expiration is a partial shield, not a full one. An expired patent can still be asserted for past infringement within the 35 U.S.C. § 286 six-year lookback measured from the filing of the complaint. So the live question for a defendant today is not "can they sue?" but "were your accused products making or selling the claimed functionality, and were they doing so during the pre-2023-10-23 window that remains recoverable?" Equally important: you cannot get an injunction on an expired patent, and ongoing/after-expiration relief is off the table. Practically, that collapses the exposure to a backward-looking damages claim — which re-frames the negotiation posture substantially. Also note the patent is a divisional of U.S. 7,839,419 (from application Ser. No. 10/691,450, filed 2003-10-23), so check whether any sibling in that family with a later expiration is being asserted separately; I could not verify the family's PTAB/litigation history within my search budget and am flagging it as unverified rather than clear.

Estoppel landscape: no bars exist. Because no IPR was ever instituted against this patent, § 315(e)(2) estoppel is inapplicable — there is no petitioner/privy of record and no ground that was "raised or reasonably could have been raised." That means a defendant retains a completely clean slate: all § 102/§ 103 grounds built on patents and printed publications remain available, subject only to ordinary district-court invalidity practice (§ 282, local rules, and any estoppel imported from other patents or other parties' proceedings, which do not exist here). The only IPR-side constraint worth flagging is procedural, not estoppel-based: if a defendant has already been served with a complaint asserting this patent, the § 315(b) one-year time bar applies to any IPR it might still want to file — and if service predates 2025-10-01 by more than a year, that door is closed absent joinder. Given expiration, an IPR is largely academic anyway (an expired patent cannot be amended, and the Board's practical value in invalidating it is diminished).

Pattern signals: none. There is no repeat petitioner, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or similar) in the chain, and no patent-owner appellate track record to read — because there has been no proceeding at all. That absence, for a 2003-priority Microsoft compositing-window-manager patent with broad "frosted glass / redirected-surface-as-texture" claims, is itself informative: well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs. This one never did. Combined with the 2023-10-23 expiration, the most likely explanation is that the patent was never a meaningful assertion vehicle.

Recommended next steps

• Confirm the negative yourself before relying on it. Run the patent number through USPTO PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/) and the PTAB "Patent Number" search at https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab, plus the Google Patents Litigation tab at https://patents.google.com/patent/US8059137/en. If E2E returns nothing, the "no PTAB activity" finding is locked and you can quote it.
• If a demand letter cites this patent, lead with expiration, not invalidity. The record shows status Expired – Fee Related with anticipated expiration 2023-10-23 (family priority 2003-10-23; divisional of U.S. 7,839,419). Demand pre-2023-10-23 damages under 35 U.S.C. § 286 before conceding anything; push opposing counsel to identify the specific accused functionality and the specific pre-expiration sales/revenue it maps to. There is no FWD to quote here — there is no proceeding — so your weapon is the expiration date, not a PTAB disposition.
• No statutory estoppel constrains you. Because no IPR was instituted, § 315(e)(2) does not bar any ground. Preserve and develop § 102/§ 103 invalidity positions from patents and printed publications without IPR-derived estoppel exposure. If you nevertheless contemplate an IPR and you were served with a complaint asserting the patent, check the § 315(b) one-year bar immediately — it may already have run.
• Check the divisional at the same time. Pull PTAB and district-court history for the parent U.S. 7,839,419 and any other members of the 10/691,450 family, since a sibling with a later expiration could be the real assertion threat. (I could not complete this check and am not asserting it is clean.)
• Verify terms of any license or covenant. With Microsoft Technology Licensing as the current assignee, confirm whether an existing Microsoft license — or a standards/OS covenant — already covers the accused functionality before negotiating any stand-alone figure.

Verification caveat: The "no proceedings" conclusion rests on the authoritative ODP structured data plus the web sources above. I did not locate, and therefore do not represent, any FWD, panel composition, or Federal Circuit docket for this patent, because none appears to exist. All dates are given as YYYY-MM-DD, and no proceeding number has been invented.

I'll start by verifying the assignment records and legal events for US 8059137 across the sources you named.

Let me dig into the specific assignment record (reel/frame) and cross-check the parent patent's chain.

Let me try to pin down the specific reel/frame and correspondent for the Microsoft → MTL assignment.

Inventors

Determinable employer: Microsoft Corporation. The face of US 8,059,137 names "Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA" as assignee; the PCT sibling publication (WO 2005/045736 A3, PCT/US2004/018940, claiming priority to 10/691,450) names MICROSOFT CORPORATION as applicant, with all six inventors listed and residential addresses in Redmond/Kirkland/Bellevue/Snohomish, WA — a Puget Sound cluster consistent with Microsoft employment. Victor Tan is listed with dual AU/US nationality in the PCT; the rest appear US-only.

Pattern notes:

• No evidence any inventor departed Microsoft within 12 months of the 2003-10-23 priority filing. Residential addresses are ordinary personal addresses, not agent-service addresses. This is not a departure/fire-sale pattern.
• Inventors Hanggie, Tan, Bermudez and Swedberg recur on the sibling 2003 Microsoft filing "Dynamic window anatomy" (10/691,442), and Swedberg also on "Protocol for remote visual composition" (10/692,371) — i.e., the same in-house Windows shell/DWM team, filed the same week. Concentration, not rotation.
• No inventor is named as an assignor of record in any transaction found (see below) — all rights flowed through the corporate chain, not through individual inventors.

Original assignee

Microsoft Corporation (One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399), a Washington corporation; assignee on the face of the patent.

• Product embodying the claims: Yes. The claimed compositing Desktop Window Manager is the Windows Vista/7/8/10 DWM (the compositing window manager driving Aero/glass). Vista shipped the compositing DWM in 2006, three years after the 2003 filing. US 8,059,137 is a divisional of 10/691,450 (issued as US 7,839,419 on 2010-11-23); the divisional 12/940,514 was filed 2010-11-05 — days before the parent issued — a standard mechanism to keep a continuation alive, not an asset-sale move.
• Primary line of business: software, operating systems, and cloud platforms; publicly traded (Nasdaq: MSFT).
• Current status: Operating. The patent's current owner of record is Microsoft's wholly owned subsidiary Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC (see below). No bankruptcy, dissolution, or insolvency event.

Assignment timeline

Important data limitation, stated plainly: I was unable to complete a live query of the USPTO Assignment Center index in this session, and the public search results returned did not surface the patent-specific reel/frame for US 8,059,137. The one post-issuance transaction below is corroborated by Google Patents legal events (which mirror USPTO reassignment data, "2014-12-09 — Assigned to MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING, LLC"). The reel/frame shown is from an INPADOC record for a different Microsoft patent (US 2007/0182999 A1) bearing the identical assignor, assignee, and recordation date — it is very likely the same blanket Microsoft→MTL recording, but I am not representing it as the verified frame for this patent. Treat the reel as provisional pending Assignment Center confirmation.

• (executed) 2014-10-14 / (recorded) 2014-12-09 — Reel 034543/0001 (provisional; see caveat above — reel taken from a sibling Microsoft record with the same parties and recordation date)

  • Conveyance: Assignment — "Assignment of Assignors' Interest"
  • Assignor: Microsoft Corporation
  • Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC (Washington)
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved. USPTO assignment-record correspondent was not obtainable in this session. For context only (not a finding): Microsoft's in-house correspondence address in its own patent instruments is "Attn: Patent Group Docketing (Bldg. 8/1000), One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399," and the outside prosecution agent of record for the 2003 PCT filing was Ross A. Dannenberg, Banner & Witcoff, Ltd., Washington DC. Neither is confirmed as the assignment correspondent — do not treat either as the correspondent of record on this recording.
  • Context: Internal corporate reorganization — the October 2014 Nadella-era carve-out of Microsoft's patent portfolio into a wholly owned licensing/litigation subsidiary. Approved effective date 2014-10-14 per the sibling INPADOC entry.

• Inventor → Microsoft Corporation (original assignment): No reel/frame retrieved. This transfer is implicit in the face of the patent ("Assignee: Microsoft Corporation") and Microsoft's standard inventor-assignment practice, but I could not pull the recorded instrument and will not fabricate a reel/frame for it.

No other recorded assignments were found. There is no evidence of any transfer to a third-party/assertion entity, no security agreement, no merger, no change of name, and no release.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 8059137
    2003 : Inventors file parent application
    2010 : Divisional application filed
    2011 : Issued to Microsoft Corporation
    2014 : Assigned to Microsoft Tech Licensing LLC

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Additional non-signal fact worth recording: Google Patents legal-status data shows anticipated expiration 2023-10-23 and status "Expired – Fee Related." If accurate, this patent is past its term/expired and is no longer an assertion candidate regardless of ownership — which independently caps the NPE risk here.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion

The entire chain is Microsoft-internal. The patent issued 2011-11-15 to Microsoft Corporation, which shipped the claimed compositing DWM in Windows Vista and successors, and the sole recorded post-issuance transaction moves it (rec. 2014-12-09, eff. 2014-10-14, provisional reel 034543/0001) to Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC, a wholly owned Microsoft licensing/litigation subsidiary — an internal reorganization, not a transfer to an unaffiliated assertion entity. None of the eight NPE signals is present on the available evidence; the one gap (signal 3, correspondent recurrence) is unverifiable rather than suggestive, and the patent appears expired as of 2023-10-23 per Google Patents legal status.

Caveat on the verdict label: MTL is Microsoft's licensing/litigating arm rather than the product-manufacturing entity itself, so if the test is read strictly as "the named assignee itself ships products," this sits closer to a non-NPE internal reorganization — which is not one of the five enumerated verdicts. On the enumerated options, "Operating-company assertion" is the only defensible fit; NPE is affirmatively ruled out.

Verify: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 8059137, or by assignee "Microsoft Technology Licensing"); Google Patents legal events — https://patents.google.com/patent/US8059137/en. Priority action for a follow-up analyst: pull the actual reel/frame and correspondent for the 2014-12-09 Microsoft→MTL recording to close out signal 3 and to replace the provisional reel cited above.

I'll research US patent 8059137 and its cited prior art references.

I have partial citation data. Let me get the complete reference list from the patent documents.

Let me retrieve the remainder of the citation list and the non-patent citations.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 8,059,137 B2

Important scope note up front: What I could access are the patent's own "References Cited" section (via the issued‑patent PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../US8059137.pdf) and the international search report for the counterpart PCT (WO 2005/045736). I did not query USPTO Patent Center / Patent Public Search directly, and the OCR of the "References Cited" list was truncated mid‑list (it stops at "2004/0075670 A1…"), so the list below may be incomplete on the trailing entries and on the full non‑patent‑literature list. Every date below is the date as printed in the patent's citation list (i.e., issue/publication dates), not filing dates — which matters for §102. I have flagged below where I could not verify a description rather than inventing one.

1. The patent itself (literal identifiers)

Because priority is Oct. 23, 2003, this is a pre‑AIA patent. Anticipation therefore turns on pre‑AIA §102(a), (b) (printed publication/patent more than one year before Oct. 23, 2003, i.e., before Oct. 23, 2002), and (e) (earlier U.S. filing date).

2. The "References Cited" list (U.S. Patent Documents)

These are the references printed on the face of US 8,059,137. Dates are as-printed (issue/publication dates).

* "Possible §102 target claims" are preliminary hypotheses only. I did not retrieve the full text of these references, and I do not have the granted claim set of US 8,059,137 in hand (see §6). Two references are marked with an asterisk (*) in the printed list as being of particular interest by the examiner: 4,694,404 and 5,307,449 (both 3‑D graphics), plus 6,980,209 (lighting).

3. Non‑patent citations (as printed on the face of the patent)

4. The references the examiner/ISA actually flagged as "most relevant"

The International Search Report attached to the counterpart publication WO 2005/045736 A3 (PCT/US2004/018940) lists these under "DOCUMENTS CONSIDERED TO BE RELEVANT," all in the highest relevance category "X":

These three are the "most relevant" prior art according to the search authority — but note two problems:

1. Dates. All three published after the Oct. 23, 2003 priority date. Under pre‑AIA §102 they therefore cannot be §102(a) or §102(b) art. They can only qualify under §102(e) if their effective U.S. filing dates precede Oct. 23, 2003 — I could not verify their filing dates, so I cannot confirm even that.
2. Category "T." The ISA's own "T" designation means "later document… cited to understand the principle or theory underlying the invention." A "T" document is, by definition, not anticipatory. So the "X,T" labels are internally inconsistent with a true anticipation position against the 2003 priority date.

In short, the three "X" references are the ones the examiner considered most on‑point, but they are weak to unusable as §102 art unless a §102(e) filing‑date advantage can be shown. US 2004/0075670 A1 (Bezine et al.) is the only one with any realistic §102(e) prospect, and even that is unverified.

5. §102 framework applied to this patent

• This is a pre‑AIA patent (priority Oct. 23, 2003), so pre‑AIA §102(a)/(b)/(e) govern.
• §102(b) candidates require publication/patenting before Oct. 23, 2002 — i.e., items #1–20 in the table above plus the Morgenstern article. These are the strongest potential anticipatory references in the list.
• §102(a) candidates are those published between Oct. 23, 2002 and Oct. 23, 2003 (e.g., #21, #25–30).
• §102(e) candidates are U.S. patents/published applications whose effective filing date precedes Oct. 23, 2003 (potentially #22, #23, #24, #31, #32, #33).
• Cannot be §102 art at all (absent §102(e)): the three ISA "X" references in §4, plus any reference first published after Oct. 23, 2003.

Because the patent issued over this art, none of these references was evidently sufficient, alone, to defeat the claims.

6. The claims (needed for §102 mapping) — and a caveat

I retrieved the published claim set of the parent application 10/691,450 (US 2005/0088447 A1), claims 1‑48. Because US 8,059,137 is a divisional, its granted claims are a subset/variant, and I could not retrieve the exact granted claim text of the '137 patent. The published claim structure is:

• Claim 1 – core method: receive application content; display it in an opaque content portion of a window having a translucent frame portion.
• Claims 2‑4 – pixel shader applies a bitmap to the frame to distort underlying content; bitmap is a likeness of glass / frosted glass.
• Claim 5 – content from a legacy application.
• Claims 6‑11 – CDWM receives content; physically models the window by applying a texture to a mesh; mesh/texture from visual style or from the application.
• Claims 12‑16 – legacy support: legacy app → legacy DWM; stripping out app content; conversion to raster; switching between CDWM and legacy DWM (based on visual style or power configuration); legacy DWM redirects content to CDWM.
• Claims 17‑19 – spectral highlights from a virtual light source; reflective content; translucent frame on input focus.
• Claim 20 – window resize by dividing the mesh into three regions per dimension (offset vs. scale).
• Claims 21‑40 – computer‑readable‑medium counterparts of 1‑20.
• Claims 41‑43 – spectral highlights / reflective / refractive frame rendering.
• Claim 44 – legacy‑support method (legacy DWM + strip client content + raster image + CDWM texture‑on‑mesh).
• Claims 45‑48 – mesh‑resizing method (three regions per dimension; equal/unequal; minimal bounding regions).

Likely §102 attack surfaces: claim 1 (translucent frame + opaque content) and claims 7/20/45‑48 (texture‑on‑mesh, 3‑D window frames, mesh resizing) are the broadest and most exposed to the older 3‑D‑graphics references (#1, #5, #19, #23); claims 5/12‑16/44 (legacy support / redirection / mode switching) are the most exposed to legacy‑windowing art; claims 2‑4/17‑19/41‑43 (frosted‑glass pixel shading, highlights, reflection, refraction) are the hardest to anticipate.

7. Honest limitations

1. The "References Cited" OCR was truncated at U.S. 2004/0075670 A1 — later entries and the full NPL list are missing.
2. I could not retrieve full texts (or filing dates) for most references, so I have not verified actual title, subject matter, or dates of invention; I did not fabricate descriptions where I could not confirm them.
3. I could not retrieve the granted claim text of US 8,059,137 (only the parent's published claims), so claim mapping above is preliminary.
4. This is a claim‑charting exercise, not a legal opinion; it is retrospective (the patent has expired).

If you want, I can next: (a) pull the full PDF of US 8,059,137 to capture the complete citation list, and (b) verify filing dates for the three ISA "X" references to see whether any can qualify as §102(e) art.

I'll research the prior art landscape for US 8059137 before building the obviousness analysis.

Let me pin down the exact claim set and the key cited references.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 8,059,137 B2 (“Compositing Desktop Window Manager”)

0. Scope, sourcing, and a caveat on “the Prior Art section of this page”

The Google Patents page for US 8,059,137 does not itself reproduce a reference list in the text supplied to me — it carries only the five extracted “Prior art keywords” (window, content, desktop, legacy, mesh) and the asserted prior art date 2003‑10‑23. The substantive prior-art record for this patent lives in two places I did locate and pulled:

1. The “References Cited” section on the face of the patent (U.S. patents, U.S. published applications, a GB document, and “Other Publications”), available at the patent PDF: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/15/c8/04/14b50bd42f321f/US8059137.pdf and mirrored at https://patents.justia.com/patent/8059137.
2. The PCT International Search Report for PCT/US2004/018940 (parent family), publication WO 2005/045736 A3, which carries the relevance categorizations: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/43/94/4b/db92d29569b404/WO2005045736A3.pdf.

I use those two as “the Prior Art section.” Where I cannot verify the content of a cited reference from the retrieved material, I flag it rather than describe it.

1. Governing law and the critical date

• The patent is a divisional of US 7,839,419 (application 10/691,450, filed 23 Oct 2003); it was filed 5 Nov 2010 and granted 15 Nov 2011 with 14 claims. Under pre‑AIA 35 U.S.C. § 120 it takes the 23 Oct 2003 filing date.
• Because the application family predates 16 Mar 2013, pre‑AIA §§ 102(a)/(b)/(e)/(g) and § 103(a) apply (see the § 3 transition provisions).
• Therefore:
  • § 102(b) bar date ≈ 23 Oct 2002. Anything public before that is statutory prior art regardless of the inventor’s date of invention.
  • § 102(a)/(e) art must predate 23 Oct 2003 (or the actual invention date).
  • Pre‑AIA § 103(c) disqualifies, for obviousness purposes, § 102(e) art that was commonly owned at the time the invention was made — which matters a great deal here because the most on‑point “art” is Microsoft’s own.
• KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) governs the motivation inquiry: a predictable, finite set of identified, understood solutions with a design need/market pressure supports a § 103 conclusion.

2. What the granted claims actually require

The granted claim 1 (from https://patents.google.com/patent/US8059137#6) is far narrower than the published claims of its own pre‑grant publication US 2011/0072391 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20110072391#8, 21 claims). Claim 1 requires:

1. receiving application content to display in a window of an OS‑shell GUI;
2. displaying at least a portion in an opaque content portion, the window having a translucent frame portion comprising a “likeness of glass”;
3. wherein displaying further comprises applying a texture to a mesh;
4. resize: dividing the mesh into three regions per mesh dimension; for each region, maintaining offsets to mesh vertices in any dimension in which the region is bounded by the window bounding box, and scaling vertices in any dimension in which it is not so bounded; and
5. determining, by a vertex resizing filter function, the displacement direction and magnitude in each dimension for every member vertex.

Independent-style claim language in the family also recites spectral highlights from a virtual light source via a pixel shader, and legacy‑application redirection/stripping of legacy frames, borders and captions.

Key analytical point: the published parent‑family claims (the broad “frosted glass frame over opaque content” concept) were not granted. The allowed claim 1 effectively grafts the nine‑region/nine‑slice mesh‑resize algorithm plus a per‑vertex resizing filter function onto the glass‑frame concept. That is a strong internal signal that the broad concept was not considered allowable, while the resize algorithm was the surviving point of novelty.

3. Prior‑art inventory (from the sources in § 0)

Critical qualification: Miserocchi (2005), Cihula (2005) and Bezine (2004) all published after the 23 Oct 2003 critical date. They are usable in a § 103 rejection only if their underlying U.S. filing dates precede 23 Oct 2003 (pre‑AIA § 102(e)). Their publication dates suggest filings near late‑2003/2002 respectively, but I have not verified those filing dates, and each would need a § 102(e) date check. Bezine is expressly categorized “X,P,” i.e., published in the window between the priority date and the PCT filing date — the ISR itself did not treat Bezine’s publication as pre‑priority art.

4. Proposed § 103 combinations

Ground 1 — Quartz Extreme NPL + applicant’s admitted prior art (strongest combination; § 102(b))

References: Morgenstern (22 Aug 2002) + AppleInsider/Moki (28 Jan 2002), in view of the invalidation‑model USER/GDI desktop that the patent admits was prior art (“Microsoft Windows® XP window manager, historically known as USER… employs the 2‑dimensional Graphics Device Interface (GDI) graphic rendering engine”).

• Quartz Extreme (consumer release Aug 2002, i.e., before the Oct 2002 § 102(b) bar date) encapsulates each rendered window backing store in an OpenGL texture map/surface and directs the GPU to compose the surfaces and maps into the final image delivered to the frame buffer (see corroborating description at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Extreme and the survey at https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2%3a830908/FULLTEXT01.pdf). That discloses the core of “applying a texture to a mesh” for window composition in a bottom‑up compositing DWM.
• The Moki/AppleInsider 2002 NPL documents Aqua’s GPU‑assisted translucent window chrome in the same period — supplying “translucent frame portion … likeness of glass.”
• The patent’s own Background supplies the motivation: memory and GPU bandwidth had become cheap (“Real time, hardware‑based 3D acceleration is now available to consumers at reasonable cost”), and prior invalidation‑model DWMs made transparency, shadows, 3‑D and lighting “extremely difficult and very resource intensive.”
• KSR motivation: a finite, known set of solutions (backing store → texture → GPU composite) addressing an identified problem (rich desktop effects unattainable in GDI/USER), with market pressure from 3‑D games. Predictable result.

Where this ground fails: it does not reach the nine‑region mesh‑resize + vertex resizing filter function of granted claim 1.

Ground 2 — the ISR’s “X” art: Miserocchi (US 2005/0071804) alone or in view of Cihula (US 2005/0275661)

The PCT examiner categorized both Miserocchi and Cihula as “X” against claims 1–48 — i.e., each was regarded as bearing on novelty or inventive step standing alone, not merely as a secondary reference. If either has a pre‑23 Oct 2003 U.S. filing date, it is a straightforward § 102(e)/§ 103(a) ground against the broad parent claims: one reference, whole document, Figures 1–7 / 1–5 respectively. This is the single most important lead, and it is the one I could not independently verify because the tooling hit its step limit before I could retrieve the two documents’ specifications and filing data.

Ground 3 — Bezine (US 2004/0075670) + Ground 1 art

Bezine, cited “X,P”, concerns displaying 2‑D windows in a 3‑D display model — directly relevant to the “displaying the window as a 3‑D object / frame primitive” aspect the specification relies on. Combined with Quartz Extreme’s backing‑store‑as‑texture teaching, this supplies the 3‑D window composition aspect. Again: only a § 102(e) date makes it available.

Ground 4 — Nine‑slice/nine‑patch scaling as common knowledge (for the mesh‑resize limitation)

Claim 1’s “three regions per mesh dimension,” offset‑at‑the‑borders / scale‑in‑the‑middle scheme is the classic nine‑patch (nine‑slice) scaling technique long used in UI frameworks — precisely the technique the specification explains is needed so that a rounded corner radius (FIG. 7, corner radius 707) does not scale with the window. The specification even states the alternative that a person of skill would have had: “An example of the latter method is a pair of vectors … defining six sizing margin planes … effectively dividing the volume of the bounding box into 27 cubic subregions.”

Evidentiary gap I must flag: none of the references actually listed in this patent’s prior‑art record that I could verify discloses the nine‑region resize with a per‑vertex resizing filter function. To make this limitation obvious, the Office/defendant would need a new reference or a well‑documented “common knowledge” showing — the patent record as I can retrieve it does not contain one.

5. Motivation to combine — summary

1. Same field / analogous art — all references are windowing, compositing, and 3‑D rendering systems; the problem to be solved (rich desktop under a compositing model with legacy support) is identical.
2. Express teaching in the patent itself — the Background admits (a) compositing is known, (b) memory/GPU cost was the only historical barrier and that barrier had fallen, and (c) legacy applications “will not function properly in a compositing environment,” which frames redirection as the predictable fix.
3. KSR design incentives — a predictable, enumerated solution space; commercial pressure from 3‑D game‑driven GPU evolution; a desire for a competitive, visually rich desktop.

6. Where a § 103 challenge is weak — honest assessment

• Granted claim 1 is narrow. The nine‑region resize with a vertex resizing filter function (and, in related claims, the pixel‑shader/virtual‑light treatment) is not clearly disclosed by anything in the verified prior‑art record. A § 103 rejection resting only on Morgenstern + Aqua + Windows XP would likely be answered by the “resizing filter function” limitation.
• Date qualifications. Miserocchi, Cihula and Bezine all post‑date the critical date on their faces; their use depends on unverified § 102(e) filing dates.
• Common‑ownership (§ 103(c)). The UCE application (10/692,288) and this family are both Microsoft’s. Commonly owned § 102(e) art cannot be used in a § 103 rejection against this patent. Any obviousness theory built on the UCE must rest on what it shows about the state of the art, not on it as § 102(e) prior art.
• Prosecution history as evidence of non‑obviousness. That the applicant had to merge separately published claims (49, 51, 53, 57 of US 2011/0072391) into granted claim 1 is consistent with the examiner having found the broad concept anticipated/obvious and only the resize algorithm allowable.
• Practical posture. Google Patents records the patent as Expired – Fee Related, with anticipated expiration 23 Oct 2023; an IPR or reissue challenge is moot today.

7. Bottom line

• On the record as I can verify it, the broad concepts the patent describes — a bottom‑to‑top compositing desktop window manager, treating each window’s rendered backing store as a texture composed by the GPU, a translucent “glass‑like” window frame, and redirection of legacy invalidation‑model window output — are highly likely obvious under pre‑AIA § 103, most cleanly over Quartz Extreme as documented in the Morgenstern (22 Aug 2002) and AppleInsider (28 Jan 2002) publications cited on the face of the patent, in view of the USER/GDI invalidation‑model desktop the patent admittedly treats as prior art, with § 103 motivation supplied by the patent’s own admissions about falling hardware costs and the need for legacy compatibility.
• Miserocchi (US 2005/0071804) and Cihula (US 2005/0275661) are the most promising single‑reference § 103/§ 102(e) grounds, because the PCT search report itself categorized each as “X” against claims 1–48 — but their availability for the 23 Oct 2003 priority date must be confirmed by checking their pre‑critical‑date U.S. filing dates.
• The granted claim 1 as issued is the hard target. Its combination of an opaque content region + translucent glass‑like frame + texture‑to‑mesh rendering + the three‑regions‑per‑dimension mesh resize with bounding‑box offsets and a per‑vertex resizing filter function is not, so far as the verified prior‑art record shows, fully disclosed or suggested. Absent a nine‑patch/nine‑slice reference or a strong common‑knowledge showing, a § 103 rejection of claim as granted would likely fail, whereas the broader claims of the published application (US 2011/0072391, claims 1–48 equivalents) appear vulnerable.