US 8244582

Summary: US Patent 8,244,582 (US8244582B2)

Bibliographic details

Abstract (verbatim from the patent)

A descriptive-profile mercantile method, for use at a juncture in a data-communications topology having associated therewith a maintained databank of partial profiles, is disclosed. The method includes the steps of: from a user, receiving a transaction having therein a first partial profile; using the first partial profile, searching a databank having a plurality of second partial profiles, wherein is included in said databank at least one null profile so that said searching will always yield at least one proximate second partial profile to the first partial profile; and between the user and the databank, contracting: (I) for the databank to own or represent a right to a first mutually agreed portion of the first partial profile, and substantially thereafter said databank incorporating the agreed portion of the first profile into at least one second partial profile; or (II) for the user to own or represent a right to a second mutually agreed portion of at least one said proximate second partial profile, and substantially thereafter the databank transmitting to the user the second mutually agreed portion of the second profile. The present invention operates best on a brokerage representation model; and thereby provides a means for making viable the economic commerce in information attributes.

Independent claims — plain-language overview

Claim 1 (method): An automated method of collecting Internet-user profiles in which a programmed computer system, coupled to a global computer network, (a) electronically receives from a server controlled by one of several unaffiliated third parties a partial profile of an entity (a person using a user computer that is accessing a website), where the partial profile contains at least one profile attribute about that entity, and automatically stores it; (b) the receipt of the partial profile is triggered by automatic URL redirection from a portion of the accessed website's page; (c) the computer automatically merges the received partial profile into a maintained profile believed to relate to the same entity; (d) the computer automatically generates and stores an electronic record identifying which unaffiliated third party contributed which specific profile attributes to the maintained profile (source tracking); and (e) the maintained profile — including the added partial profile — is used as data for targeting third-party advertisements to the user's computer over the network.

Claim 11 (tangible, non-transitory data storage medium): Identical limitations to claim 1, but drafted as a computer-readable medium storing processor instructions that cause the recited method to be performed.

Dependent claims (brief)

• Claims 2 and 12: Using the source-tracking record, per a predetermined arrangement, to create electronic data identifying a payment amount due to the contributing third party for use of its contributed attribute(s) in ad targeting.
• Claims 3 and 13: Adding the partial profile to the maintained profile based on the two profiles being related to the same user computer.
• Claims 4 and 14: Determining same-computer relationship by automatically reading a cookie on the user's computer.
• Claims 5 and 15: Maintaining an electronic record of which unaffiliated third party contributed the attributes used in ad targeting.
• Claims 6 and 16: Determining whether the received partial profile contains attributes not previously in a maintained profile.
• Claims 7 and 17: Maintaining a credibility rating for at least one profile attribute.
• Claims 8 and 18: Reflecting the credibility rating in the price of the attribute.
• Claims 9 and 19: Selecting profile attributes from the maintained profile based on their source.
• Claims 10 and 20: Reading a cookie previously stored on the entity's computer as a result of the URL redirection.

CAFC 2026 docket activity for this patent

• CAFC Appeal No. 24-1834 — AlmondNet, Inc. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (appeal from PTAB IPR2022-01436). This is the 2026 Federal Circuit matter tied to this specific patent. The PTAB's IPR2022-01436 (filed May 31, 2022 by Meta; the Google Patents record for 8244582 lists this IPR as a "Final Written Decision") found the challenged claims of AlmondNet's advertising patent unpatentable as obvious. On April 13, 2026, the Federal Circuit (Judges Lourie, Dyk, and Taranto) entered a nonprecedential Rule 36 judgment AFFIRMING the PTAB decision (Bloomberg Law, April 14, 2026, described the affirmed patent as relating to "a mercantile method directed to brokerage of attributes of information," matching this patent's field). Oral argument was heard in the appeal.
• Note: The other 2026 CAFC dispositions involving AlmondNet — AlmondNet v. Amazon.com, appeals 25-1967 / 26-1326, dismissed by agreement (FRAP 42(b)) on April 6, 2026 — concern different patents (US 8,671,139 and US 7,822,639), not 8244582.

Other notable context

The patent has been heavily litigated by AlmondNet and its affiliate Intent IQ, LLC (e.g., W.D. Tex. and N.D. Cal. actions against Amazon, Samsung, Microsoft, Oracle, Roku, and others, per Unified Patents/Docket Alarm records). Related PTAB proceedings include IPR2022-01455 (not instituted) and CBM2017-00052 (not instituted).

Uncertainties

• I could not pull the USPTO PatentCenter record directly to independently confirm the bibliographic data; the details above are drawn from the authoritative Google Patents full-text record (which you supplied) and corroborating secondary sources (Unified Patents, FreePatentsOnline, Docket Alarm).
• The one-day discrepancy in the issue date (Aug. 13 vs. Aug. 14, 2012) is unverified and likely a time-zone artifact between databases.
• CAFC 24-1834's Rule 36 affirmance is a nonprecedential, per-curiam disposition; the precise claims held unpatentable (per the underlying IPR) were reported by Law360 as "all four challenged claims," but I did not verify that count against the PTAB decision directly.

Based on my searches of Unified Patents, Docket Alarm, IPWatchdog, PTAB records, and CAFC records, here is the known litigation involving US Patent 8,244,582 (note: the user provided patent text confirms this number; I am treating "8244582" as identical to 8,244,582 per the PTAB/PACER records, which use the form "8,244,582"). All cases are brought by AlmondNet, Inc. and/or Intent IQ, LLC (collectively, "AlmondNet") as patent owners, except where noted.

District Court Litigation

1. AlmondNet, Inc. et al. v. Oracle Corporation

   • Case No. 6:24-cv-00303 (W.D. Tex., Waco Div., Judge Alan D. Albright)
   • Filed: June 3, 2024
   • Patents: 8,244,582 and 8,677,398
   • Status: Closed/Dismissed — Order granting motion to dismiss entered June 20, 2025 (Dkt. 60); case flagged CLOSED/STAYED.

2. AlmondNet, Inc. et al. v. Microsoft Corporation and Xandr, Inc.

   • Case No. 6:21-cv-00897 (W.D. Tex., filed Aug. 27, 2021)
   • Patents: 8,244,582 asserted as part of a 10-patent portfolio (also 8,244,586; 7,979,307; 7,822,639; 8,677,398; 8,677,398; 8,959,146; 8,950,809; 9,830,615; 8,775,249; etc.)
   • Status: Dismissed with prejudice by stipulated Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(ii) dismissal after the parties resolved claims (settlement); mutual waiver of fees/costs.

3. AlmondNet, Inc. et al. v. Amazon.com, Inc.; Amazon.com Services LLC; Amazon Web Services, Inc.

   • Case No. 6:21-cv-00898 (W.D. Tex., filed Aug. 27, 2021); related later case 6:22-cv-01204 (W.D. Tex., filed Nov. 18, 2022, terminated June 1, 2023)
   • Patents include 8,244,582
   • Status: District court case carried an APPEAL flag; Amazon's related Federal Circuit appeal (25-1967, involving other family patents) was voluntarily dismissed under Rule 42(b) with no merits ruling.

4. AlmondNet, Inc. et al. v. Facebook, Inc. / Meta Platforms, Inc.

   • Case No. 6:21-cv-00896 (W.D. Tex., filed Aug. 27, 2021); transferred to N.D. Cal. and re-filed as 4:22-cv-08911 (N.D. Cal., filed Dec. 15, 2022, Judge Jon S. Tigar); related 4:23-cv-00438 (N.D. Cal., filed Jan. 31, 2023, reassigned/related to 4:22-cv-07515)
   • Patents include 8,244,582
   • Status: Transferred; consolidated with related N.D. Cal. actions; stayed pending IPRs.

5. AlmondNet, Inc. et al. v. [[Samsung Electronics Co.](/litigations/by-defendant/Samsung%20Electronics%20Co.), Ltd.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Samsung%20Electronics%20Co.%2C%20Ltd.); Samsung Electronics America, Inc.; AdGear Technologies Inc.

   • Case No. 6:21-cv-00891 (W.D. Tex., filed Aug. 26, 2021); transferred to N.D. Cal. as 4:22-cv-07515 (N.D. Cal., filed Nov. 30, 2022, Judge Jon S. Tigar)
   • Patents include 8,244,582
   • Status: Stayed April 18, 2023 pending IPRs (including IPR2022-01436 challenging the '582); closed per Unified Patents on June 24, 2025.

6. Roku, Inc. v. AlmondNet, Inc. and Intent IQ, LLC (declaratory judgment / infringement)

   • Case No. 1:21-cv-01035 (D. Del.), consolidated with 1:22-cv-01540 (D. Del.); related W.D. Tex. case 6:21-cv-00876 (Roku) transferred into the D. Del. action
   • Status: AlmondNet voluntarily withdrew all asserted claims of the '582 patent (October 2023); Roku opposed dismissal without prejudice, seeking dismissal with prejudice. Case was pending as of late 2023.

7. AlmondNet, Inc. et al. v. Yahoo! Inc. → Oath Holdings Inc.

   • Case No. 1:16-cv-01557 (E.D.N.Y., filed Mar. 30, 2016, Judge I. Leo Glasser), transferred to D. Del. as 1:19-cv-00247 (D. Del., filed Feb. 6, 2019, Judge Leonard P. Stark)
   • Patents include 8,244,582
   • Status: Terminated (per PTACTS petition listing the Oath Holdings case as terminated).

8. AlmondNet, Inc. et al. v. Viant Technology Inc. et al.

   • Case No. 1:23-cv-00174 (D. Del., filed Feb. 16, 2023)
   • Patents include 8,244,582 (also 7,861,260; 7,979,307; 8,775,249)
   • Status: Pending as of 2023–2025 (expert report deadlines in 2025); final disposition not confirmed in my search results.

9. AlmondNet, Inc. et al. v. LinkedIn Corporation

   • Case No. 1:23-cv-01373 (D. Del., filed 2023)
   • Related-family patents (the '249 patent family); the '582 is in the same family. Per PTACTS, this case was pending.
   • Status: Pending; exact assertion of '582 not confirmed.

10. AlmondNet, Inc. et al. v. Roku, Inc.

    • Case No. 6:21-cv-00731 (W.D. Tex., filed July 15, 2021)
    • Status: Dismissed (Order for Dismissal, Dkt. 30, June 20, 2025) — listed by Unified Patents in the '582 family litigation.

PTAB Proceedings (AIA reviews of the '582)

1. Yahoo! Inc. v. AlmondNet, Inc. et al. — CBM2017-00052, filed May 15, 2017. Institution denied Nov. 28, 2017 (petitioner failed to show CBM eligibility); petition refund processed Jan. 2018.

2. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. v. AlmondNet, Inc. — IPR2022-01260, challenging claims of the '582. Not instituted (merits denial).

3. Amazon.com, Inc.; Amazon Web Services, Inc.; Amazon.com Services LLC v. AlmondNet, Inc. — IPR2022-01455, challenging the '582. Not instituted (merits denial); Patent Owner's Preliminary Sur-Reply filed Feb. 15, 2023 addressed Fintiv factors.

4. Meta Platforms, Inc. v. AlmondNet, Inc. — IPR2022-01436, challenging the '582. Instituted; Final Written Decision issued (favoring Meta; the Samsung N.D. Cal. stay order confirms IPR2022-01436 was instituted). AlmondNet appealed.

Federal Circuit Appeal

• AlmondNet, Inc. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. — Appeal No. 24-1834 (Fed. Cir.), appeal from PTAB IPR2022-01436. Rule 36 judgment AFFIRMED on April 13, 2026 (per curiam: Lourie, Dyk, and Taranto, JJ.), affirming the PTAB's Final Written Decision in IPR2022-01436. This is a nonprecedential affirmance.

Caveats

• Several cases assert the '582 among a multi-patent portfolio; the exact claims/counts per patent are not always broken out in the public docket snippets I retrieved.
• The '582 patent's Google Patents legal status is "Expired – Fee Related" (anticipated expiration June 14, 2020), yet enforcement-related proceedings continued for years afterward.
• For the most precise, up-to-date docket text of any individual case (especially Viant 1:23-cv-00174, LinkedIn 1:23-cv-01373, and the Roku D. Del. consolidated action), PACER would be the authoritative source; my search results did not confirm final judgments in all of them.

Proceedings overview

Four AIA trial proceedings have been filed against US 8,244,582 (all surfaced by web search — the USPTO ODP "proceedings on file" block in this prompt is stale/empty and should be disregarded; PTAB decisions, PTACTS mandatory notices, the CAFC docket, and the parties' own joint status report in AlmondNet v. Oracle, 6:24-cv-00303 (W.D. Tex.), Dkt. 25 (2024-09-06), confirm all four): one IPR reached a Final Written Decision that invalidated every challenged claim (claims 11, 13–16, 19, 20), now affirmed by the Federal Circuit; three proceedings (one CBM, two IPRs) were denied institution with no merits ruling; zero proceedings are active; zero settled. Bottom line for a defendant: the entire claim-11 "storage medium" family — including the only independent claim that AlmondNet has been asserting against ad-tech defendants — is dead (canceled and affirmed on appeal), and the only surviving claim form (method claim 1 and its dependents 3–10, with claims 2 and 12 statutorily disclaimed) sits under a pending ex parte reexamination (90/015,285) that has already rejected claims 1–18 — while the patent itself expired around 2020-06-14 for non-payment of maintenance fees.

Data-integrity flags before the detail: (1) The "PTAB proceedings on file" block reports zero AIA trials per the ODP ingest — that is incorrect as of today; all four proceedings below are corroborated by primary PTAB decisions and court filings. (2) A previously generated section of this analysis dated IPR2022-01436's filing to 2022-05-31; the parties' joint status report in the Oracle case (a signed court filing) states 2022-08-19, and the petition-number sequence (01260 filed 2022-07-19 < 01436 < 01455 filed 2022-08-31) is consistent with 2022-08-19. I treat the court-filing date as authoritative and flag the conflict. (3) I could not retrieve the full text of the IPR2022-01436 Institution Decision or the petitions' prior-art charts, so specific reference names and the exact statutory subsection of Meta's grounds are not itemized below rather than guessed.

IPR2022-01436 — Meta Platforms, Inc. v. AlmondNet, Inc.

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2022-08-19 (per joint status report, AlmondNet v. Oracle, 6:24-cv-00303, Dkt. 25)
• Status: Final Written Decision — all challenged claims unpatentable; CAFC affirmed. (ODP block: not listed — stale.)
• Judge panel: Ken B. Barrett, Thomas L. Giannetti, and Lynne H. Browne, APJs; Browne, Administrative Patent Judge, author of the FWD.
• Petition grounds: Claims 11, 13–16, 19, and 20 — the entire challenged set consists of the claim-11 family (claim 12, statutorily disclaimed, and claims 17–18 were not challenged). Per FreeWheel Media's PTACTS mandatory notice (IPR2024-00701 filings), Meta's '582 grounds were "grounds included in the grounds presented in the second petitions by Petitioner against the '249 and '307 patents" — i.e., the same prior-art unpatentability theories Meta ran against the related family patents. The Board "instituted inter partes review on all challenged claims on the grounds presented in the Petition" (FWD, Paper 30, citing Paper 9).
• Institution decision: Granted in full — all challenged claims, all grounds (Paper 9). Exact decision date not confirmed in the sources I retrieved (the FWD confirms only that institution preceded the trial). Parallel W.D. Tex./N.D. Cal. litigation involving the '582 (including the Samsung N.D. Cal. case, 3:22-cv-07515, stayed 2023-04-18) was stayed pending IPR final decisions.
• Final Written Decision: Issued 2024-03-13 (Paper 30). Verdict at claim level: "we determine that Petitioner, Meta Platforms, Inc., has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that claims 11, 13–16, 19, and 20 (the 'challenged claims') of U.S. Patent No. 8,244,582 B2 ... are unpatentable." Oral hearing was held 2024-01-03 (Tr., Paper 29). No claim was held patentable, and no motion to amend succeeded.
• Settlement / termination: None — the case ran to hearing and FWD.
• Appeal: Yes. AlmondNet, Inc. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., Fed. Cir. No. 2024-1834 (appeal from PTAB IPR2022-01436). Argued by James Milkey (Russ August & Kabat) for AlmondNet and Phillip Morton (Cooley) for Meta. Disposition: nonprecedential Rule 36 judgment AFFIRMED on 2026-04-13 (per curiam: Lourie, Dyk, and Taranto, JJ.). Judgment PDF: https://cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/24-1834.RULE_36_JUDGMENT.4-13-2026_2674964.pdf
• Defensive value: Claims 11, 13–16, 19, and 20 are canceled — the entire "data storage medium" claim form is dead, and the affirmance is final. Any infringement theory, demand letter, or claim chart built on claim 11 or its dependents is sanction-bait. Note the limit: method claims 1 and 3–10 were not before this IPR, so this FWD alone does not kill the claim-1 family. FWD (DocketAlarm mirror of the official decision): https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01436/Meta_Platforms_Inc._v._AlmondNet_Inc/

CBM2017-00052 — Yahoo! Inc. v. AlmondNet, Inc.

• Type: Covered Business Method Patent Review (transitional § 18 AIA program)
• Filed: 2017-05-15 (Corrected Petition, Paper 3)
• Status: Institution denied — patent held not CBM-eligible; no merits ruling. (ODP block: not listed — stale.)
• Judge panel: Michael W. Kim, Justin T. Arbes, and Thomas L. Giannetti, APJs; Kim, Administrative Patent Judge, author.
• Petition grounds: Claims 1–6, 9, and 10 under 35 U.S.C. § 101 only (abstract idea / no inventive concept). Yahoo argued financial-activity eligibility principally from dependent claims 2 and 12 (payment limitations) and from "unaffiliated third parties" / "third-party advertisements."
• Institution decision: Denied 2017-11-28 — the Board "determine[d] that the '582 patent does not qualify as a covered business method patent for the purposes of § 18(d)(1) of the AIA" and therefore did "not institute a covered business method patent review of any claim." Notably, Patent Owner stated in its Preliminary Response that a statutory disclaimer had been filed as to dependent claims 2 and 12 — consistent with the later IPRs skipping claim 12.
• Final Written Decision: None (institution denied).
• Settlement / termination: N/A — procedural denial.
• Appeal: None.
• Defensive value: No merits holding; the § 101 "abstract idea" challenge was never adjudicated. Because § 101 is not an available IPR ground, Alice/§ 101 remains fully available to every defendant in district court — and Yahoo's 2017 § 101 brief is a ready-made roadmap. Institution-denial decision (DocketAlarm): https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/CBM2017-00052/Covered_Business_Method_Patent_Review_of_U.S._Pat._8244582/

IPR2022-01260 — [Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Samsung%20Electronics%20Co.%2C%20Ltd.) and Microsoft Corporation v. AlmondNet, Inc.

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2022-07-19 (per Oracle joint status report; POA/petition record confirms Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and [Microsoft Corp.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Microsoft%20Corp.) as joint petitioners, with Samsung Electronics America, Inc. an RPI)
• Status: Institution denied — no reasonable likelihood of prevailing on any challenged claim. (ODP block: not listed — stale.)
• Judge panel: Thomas L. Giannetti, Lynne H. Browne, and Charles J. Boudreau, APJs; Browne, Administrative Patent Judge, author.
• Petition grounds: Claims 1, 9, 11, 13–16, 19, and 20. Per the FreeWheel/PTACTS filings, the grounds were "different from those presented" in Meta's IPR2022-01436. (Specific references not confirmed in my retrievable sources.)
• Institution decision: Denied 2023-02-07 — "we determine that Petitioner does not demonstrate a reasonable likelihood of prevailing for any of the challenged claims" under 35 U.S.C. § 314(a). This was a merits-based denial (not a Fintiv discretionary denial).
• Final Written Decision: None.
• Settlement / termination: N/A.
• Appeal: None.
• Defensive value: A denial of institution is not a validity win for AlmondNet and creates no estoppel for Samsung/Microsoft. The same claim-11 family Samsung failed to get into trial was later canceled in Meta's IPR anyway. Claims 1 and 9 — the method-claim form actually asserted against Samsung (per Samsung's invalidity contentions listing asserted '582 claims 1, 9, 11, 13–16, 19, 20) — remain untested on the merits in any AIA trial. Denial decision (DocketAlarm): https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01260/Samsung_Electronics_Co._Ltd._v._AlmondNet_Inc/

IPR2022-01455 — Amazon.com, Inc., Amazon Web Services, Inc., and Amazon.com Services LLC v. AlmondNet, Inc.

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2022-08-31 (per Oracle joint status report)
• Status: Institution denied — no reasonable likelihood of prevailing on any challenged claim. (ODP block: not listed — stale.)
• Judge panel: Ken B. Barrett, Thomas L. Giannetti, and Lynne H. Browne, APJs; Browne, Administrative Patent Judge, author.
• Petition grounds: Claims 11, 13–16, 19, and 20 — the same claim-11 family Meta later invalidated, on grounds Amazon represented as "different from" Meta's (per PTACTS filings). Amazon filed a Sand Revolution-type stipulation and litigated the Fintiv factors in its Preliminary Reply (Papers 9–10), but the denial rested on the merits, not discretion.
• Institution decision: Denied 2023-04-06 — "we determine that Petitioner does not demonstrate a reasonable likelihood of prevailing for any of the challenged claims."
• Final Written Decision: None.
• Settlement / termination: N/A.
• Appeal: None.
• Defensive value: No estoppel attaches to a denied petition, and the claims Amazon targeted were in any event later canceled by Meta's IPR. The petition and its art remain publicly available and can be reused against the surviving claim-1 family by any non-privy defendant. Denial decision (DocketAlarm): https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01455/Amazon.com_Inc._v._AlmondNet_Inc/

Strategic summary

Claims CANCELED vs. SUSTAINED vs. UNTESTED. Canceled (IPR2022-01436 FWD 2024-03-13, aff'd 2026-04-13): claims 11, 13–16, 19, 20 — the entire storage-medium claim form. Statutorily disclaimed (circa 2017, stated in CBM2017-00052 prelim response): claims 2 and 12. Never finally adjudicated in any AIA trial: claims 1, 3–10, 17, 18. Of those, claims 17–18 depend from canceled claim 11, so they have no surviving independent parent even though the Board did not formally cancel them (they were not challenged in the IPR). The only potentially live claims are therefore method claims 1 and 3–10 — challenged only in CBM2017-00052 and IPR2022-01260, both denied at institution with no merits holding. No claim of this patent has ever been "sustained" by a merits FWD. Critically, the claims 1–18 that remain of record have been rejected in pending ex parte reexamination 90/015,285 (request filed 2023-09-27; ordered 2023-12-22; non-final rejection of claims 1–18; Patent Owner responded 2024-06-18; still pending as of the September 2024 Oracle status report — note the status report's "April 18, 2023" office-action date appears to be a transcription error, as the reexam was not ordered until December 2023). And the patent itself expired ~2020-06-14 for non-payment of maintenance fees, so even a surviving claim can only reach pre-expiration damages, further capped by the § 286 six-year lookback.

Estoppel landscape. Only IPR2022-01436 produced a FWD, so only Meta and its privies carry § 315(e)(2) estoppel — and only as to the claims it challenged (11, 13–16, 19, 20), which are canceled, making the estoppel practically moot. Samsung/Microsoft (IPR2022-01260), Amazon (IPR2022-01455), and Yahoo (CBM2017-00052) received denials — no FWD, no estoppel, and no merits preclusion; their art can be re-presented. A defendant who is not Meta's privy faces zero § 315(e) estoppel from any of these proceedings and can run any §§ 102/103 ground (including the art from the denied petitions and the reexam) plus § 101/§ 112 challenges, which were never adjudicated on the merits anywhere. Practical caveat for a new defendant: § 315(b)'s one-year IPR filing bar runs from service of the complaint, and the practical value of a fresh IPR is low given the patent's expiration and the pending reexam — district-court invalidity (especially § 101, which the CBM never reached on the merits) is the higher-leverage path.

Pattern signals. The 2022–2023 wave was a coordinated, multi-front defense by W.D. Tex. defendants: Samsung + Microsoft jointly (IPR2022-01260), Meta (IPR2022-01436), and Amazon (IPR2022-01455) all filed within weeks of each other against the claims then asserted in the consolidated AlmondNet litigations; an anonymous requester added ex parte reexam 90/015,285 in September 2023. The split outcome — Samsung/Microsoft and Amazon denied, Meta granted and victorious — reflects ground selection rather than claim strength: the claim-11 family Meta challenged fell in full, while the claim-1 family has so far only been rejected in the reexam, not in an AIA trial. AlmondNet's posture has been aggressive: it appealed the sole FWD to the CAFC (argued by Russ August & Kabat) and lost on a Rule 36 affirmance, and it has continued asserting the surviving claim-1 family in new district-court cases (e.g., against Oracle in 6:24-cv-00303) even with the reexam rejection outstanding. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) appears as a petitioner on this patent — Unified Patents appears in the records only as litigation-data source.

Recommended next steps

1. If the demand or complaint cites claims 11, 13–16, 19, or 20, move to dispose of them now. They are canceled. Quote the FWD's disposition directly — "we determine that Petitioner, Meta Platforms, Inc., has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that claims 11, 13–16, 19, and 20 (the 'challenged claims') of U.S. Patent No. 8,244,582 B2 ... are unpatentable" (IPR2022-01436, Paper 30, 2024-03-13) — and the CAFC's Rule 36 affirmance (2024-1834, entered 2026-04-13, https://cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/24-1834.RULE_36_JUDGMENT.4-13-2026_2674964.pdf). Confirm the certificate of cancellation on USPTO Patent Center / PTAB E2E docket IPR2022-01436.
2. If the demand cites the claim-1 family (claims 1, 3–10), or claims 17–18 (which depend on canceled claim 11), pull the current file of ex parte reexamination 90/015,285 — the non-final rejection of claims 1–18 is already on the public record, and its status (pending as of 2024-09-06) should be re-verified before you file anything. A defendant cannot "stand" on a third party's ex parte reexam, but the examiner's rejections and the requester's prior-art package are freely usable in district court, alongside the art from IPR2022-01260 and IPR2022-01455 (both public, both denied institution with no estoppel) and a fresh § 101 Alice challenge (never reached on the merits after CBM2017-00052's eligibility denial).
3. Run the damages/standing math before spending on merits work. The '582 expired ~2020-06-14 (fee-related), so no post-expiration conduct is actionable; § 286 caps any recovery at six years before the relevant complaint; and confirm whether the plaintiff can even identify pre-2020 acts within the asserted claims that survived the IPR (only the claim-1 family did).
4. Check privity before relying on estoppel. § 315(e)(2) binds only IPR2022-01436's petitioner (Meta) and its privies, and only as to claims 11, 13–16, 19, 20 — which are already gone. For a non-privy defendant, estoppel is a non-issue; do not let plaintiff's counsel suggest otherwise.
5. No active AIA proceeding exists, so there are no institution-decision deadlines, oral-hearing dates, or statutory one-year FWD deadlines to calendar. The only open USPTO matter is reexam 90/015,285, whose next office action is on the examiner's schedule — monitor Patent Center for it, because a final rejection (or allowance) of claims 1–18 will materially change the settlement posture of any remaining district-court case.

I'll research the assignment record for US Patent 8,244,582, starting with the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-referencing sources.

Let me dig deeper into the USPTO assignment records and related entities (AlmondNet, Intent IQ).

I have good context on the parties. Now let me find the specific USPTO assignment reel/frame records.

I've reached the research limit for this session. I have enough corroborated evidence from Google Patents legal events, litigation AO 120 filings, the Stanford NPE Litigation database, Unified Patents, and court dockets to reconstruct the chain — but I must flag one important gap up front: I could not pull the USPTO Assignment Center directly, so I do not have verified reel/frame numbers for this patent. The analysis below is grounded in the assignment event Google Patents records (2011-05-26 recordation) and consistent litigation disclosures naming the holder from 2021-2025, and it explicitly distinguishes confirmed facts from unverified ones.

Inventors

Unusual patterns: None. Shkedi is the sole named inventor. He did not depart AlmondNet after filing — he remains the controlling principal of AlmondNet, Inc. and its affiliates Intent IQ, LLC (which identifies AlmondNet as its corporate parent in Rule 7.1 disclosures, e.g., AlmondNet, Inc. v. Criteo Corp., D. Del. 1:25-cv-01266) and Datonics, LLC. There is no "inventors flee then portfolio fire-sale" pattern here.

Original assignee

AlmondNet, Inc. (Long Island City, NY) — the entity named as assignee on the issued patent and the holder listed on every litigation AO 120 form I reviewed (2021–2025).

• Product/service embodying the claims: Yes. AlmondNet is a behavioral-targeting ("BT") ad-tech company; its own patent literature describes "AlmondNet, Tacoda, RevenueScience, and other companies (herein 'BT companies')" specializing in ad targeting based on observed site-visitor behavior. Its affiliate Datonics, LLC operates a profile-collection/data business ("Providing Collected Profiles to Media Properties Having Specified Interests," US 2007/0294401, assigned to AlmondNet). The asserted claims of 8,244,582 — accumulating profile attributes with source attribution for third-party ad targeting — sit at the core of that business.
• Primary line of business: Behavioral profiling and targeted advertising; audience data.
• Current status: Operating. Privately held; still actively litigating as of 2025 (e.g., AlmondNet v. Ozone Project, W.D. Tex. 7:25-cv-00411, filed Sept. 5, 2025; AlmondNet v. Criteo, D. Del. 1:25-cv-01266, Oct. 17, 2025). Not acquired, not dissolved, no bankruptcy.

Assignment timeline

Important finding: I identified one recorded assignment for this patent — the original inventor-to-company assignment — and no recorded post-issuance transfers. Every litigation filing naming the holder of 8,244,582 (AO 120 forms in W.D. Tex. 6:21-cv-00897, 6:21-cv-00898, 6:24-cv-00303; D. Del. matters) lists ALMONDNET, INC. as the holder from 2021 through 2025, consistent with the patent never leaving the original assignee.

• 2011-05-25 (executed, on/after filing) / recorded 2011-05-26 — Reel/frame: not retrievable in this analysis (USPTO Assignment Center could not be queried directly; verify at the link in the Verdict section)

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors Interest (Google Patents legal event: "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS). Assignors: SHKEDI, ROY, MR."; assignee: ALMONDNET, INC.)
  • Assignor: Roy Shkedi (inventor)
  • Assignee: AlmondNet, Inc.
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable in this analysis — flagged as a data gap, not a finding.
  • Context: Standard inventor-to-employer/company assignment recorded one day after filing of application 13/115,949 (the continuation that issued as 8,244,582). Not an acquisition, fire-sale, or NPE transfer.

• No post-issuance assignments recorded (as far as this analysis could confirm). If the Assignment Center confirms no other records, that means AlmondNet, Inc. still owns the patent — consistent with the AO 120 filings.

Caveat: absent direct Assignment Center access, I cannot definitively rule out a later-recorded assignment that the secondary sources I could reach did not index. The instruction to stop after this section if no records exist does not apply literally — there IS one recorded assignment — but the post-issuance record appears empty.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 8244582
    1999 : Israel priority filing
    2000 : US application filed
    2011 : Assigned to AlmondNet Inc
    2012 : Patent issued
    2021 : First infringement suits filed
    2022 : Meta IPR instituted
    2026 : CAFC affirms invalidity

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. The patent stayed at AlmondNet, Inc., an operating ad-tech company, from the 2011 recordation through the 2021–2025 AO 120 filings. No transfer to an "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" LLC, no registered-agent address, no single-purpose LLC in the chain for this patent. (Note: sibling family patents such as 8,566,164 and 8,677,398 are held by Intent IQ, LLC — but that is a related operating affiliate of AlmondNet, disclosed in litigation as a corporate subsidiary, not an independent shell, and it does not hold 8,244,582.)

2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present as to the listed NPEs. Neither AlmondNet nor Intent IQ appears on the Acacia / Marathon / IV / IPNav / Wi-LAN / Mosaid / Vringo / Pendrell / Round Rock / Document Generation / Spangenberg rosters. Stanford's NPE Litigation database explicitly classifies both AlmondNet, Inc. and Intent IQ, LLC as "Practicing Entity" / "Product company" in the Meta litigation. Conflict to flag: Unified Patents labels the patent owner "NPE (Small Company)" in at least one related IPR (IPR2023-00384, a different family patent, US 9,830,615). The two directories disagree; on the totality of evidence (operating Datonics data business, practicing-entity classification, no shell chain), the NPE label is weak.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Unclear / insufficient data. I could not obtain the USPTO assignment correspondents for this patent, so I cannot test the recurrence signal. Related-file observation (not a finding): Louis J. Hoffman (Reg. No. 38918) is the prosecution attorney of record for AlmondNet/Intent IQ matters (filed the Nov. 9, 2020 change-of-correspondence-address for the related '398 patent to Intent IQ, LLC), and Reza Mirzaie of Russ August & Kabat is the repeat litigation counsel across the 2021–2025 suits. Both are prosecution/litigation counsel, not recorded assignment correspondents; no assignment-correspondent recurrence can be established from the data available.

4. Cascading transfers — Not present. No chain of consecutive LLC assignments exists for this patent; the chain is a single hop (Shkedi → AlmondNet, 2011) with no subsequent transfers.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present. First infringement suits naming 8,244,582 were filed August 2021 (W.D. Tex. 6:21-cv-00891/896/897/898 against Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft/Xandr, and Roku). There was no assignment within the prior six months — the patent had been at AlmondNet since 2011. Standing/venue was not manufactured via a last-minute transfer.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. AlmondNet, Inc. has not filed Chapter 7/11; no bankruptcy-court patent sale.

7. Privateering — Not present. AlmondNet and Intent IQ assert in their own names against ad-tech defendants (Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Roku, Meta, TikTok, Criteo, Ozone Project) — direct assertion, not a disguised operating-company-to-NPE channel. No SEC 10-K/8-K privateering arrangement was identified (both entities are private).

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — Not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN; it terminates at the original operating assignee.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

Justification: US 8,244,582 has remained with AlmondNet, Inc. — a practicing ad-tech company that operates the Datonics profile-data business — since the sole recorded assignment (Shkedi → AlmondNet, recorded 2011-05-26), and litigation disclosures from 2021 through 2025 consistently name ALMONDNET, INC. as holder. AlmondNet and its subsidiary Intent IQ assert this and sibling patents directly against actual ad-tech competitors (Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft/Xandr, Oracle, Roku, Meta, TikTok/ByteDance, Criteo, Ozone Project), and Stanford's NPE Litigation database classifies both plaintiffs as practicing entities — while none of the classic shell-transfer, cascading-transfer, pre-litigation-transfer, or bankruptcy-fire-sale signals is present.

Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search patent number 8244582 to confirm the recorded Shkedi→AlmondNet assignment and its reel/frame, and to definitively rule out any post-issuance records I could not access. The reel/frame numbers and the assignment correspondent remain unverified in this analysis and should be pulled from the Assignment Center before relying on this chain in any diligence or standing analysis.

Important methodological disclosure — USPTO reference-citation search could not be completed

Before presenting the prior-art analysis, I must be transparent about what I could and could not retrieve in this session:

1. I attempted to pull the face-page "References Cited" list for US 8244582 from USPTO/Google Patents sources via multiple web searches. Every search returned no retrievable results (empty result sets), and I then hit the session's step limit before I could query USPTO Patent Center, the Google Patents "Citations" tab, or the PTAB IPR2022-01436 Final Written Decision record directly.
2. The full patent text you supplied does not include the back-page citation section (references cited by the examiner and the applicant's IDS/PTO-1449 forms), so I cannot recite a verified, examiner-endorsed citation list for the '582.
3. Accordingly, I will not fabricate a face-page citation list. What I provide below is: (a) the §102 legal framework that governs the analysis; (b) the effective-filing-date analysis that determines which references can even qualify as §102 prior art; (c) a claim-element decomposition of the independent claims; and (d) the best-available candidate prior art (verified to exist as real patents in the behavioral-targeting field, with bibliographic details flagged where my confidence is moderate rather than high), mapped to claims. Where a reference's exact bibliographic data is unverified, I say so explicitly.

Verification path for a follow-up session: the authoritative citation sources for this patent are (i) USPTO Patent Center for the file wrapper's "Notice of References Cited" and applicant IDS forms; (ii) Google Patents' "Citations" tab for US8244582B2; and (iii) the PTAB Final Written Decision in IPR2022-01436 (Meta Platforms, Inc. v. AlmondNet, Inc.), which the Federal Circuit affirmed by Rule 36 judgment on April 13, 2026 (Appeal No. 24-1834) — that decision identifies the art the PTAB deemed most relevant, and is the single most probative source for "most relevant prior art" for this patent.

§ 102 framework and effective filing date

Critical date. The '582 claims priority through: 13/115,949 (filed May 25, 2011) → 12/186,918 (US 7,979,307) → 11/099,861 (US 7,428,493) → 09/593,993 (US 6,925,440, filed June 14, 2000) → Israel App. No. 133,489 (filed December 13, 1999). For a continuation chain with common disclosure, the claims may be entitled to the December 13, 1999 priority date. Consequently, under pre-AIA § 102 (the statute applicable to this application), a reference qualifies as anticipatory prior art only if it was published or publicly available before that effective filing date (or, at minimum, before June 14, 2000 if the foreign priority is not credited for a given claim). References published after December 13, 1999 are not § 102 anticipatory art against these claims (though they may be relevant under § 103 obviousness — which is exactly how IPR2022-01436 ultimately disposed of the challenged claims).

Anticipation standard. A single prior-art reference anticipates a claim under § 102 only if it discloses every claim element, arranged as in the claim, enabling a skilled artisan to make/use the claimed subject matter without undue experimentation. Because the '582's independent claims are method/medium claims combining (i) third-party profile collection triggered by URL redirection, (ii) merge into a maintained profile keyed to the same entity/computer, (iii) per-attribute source-record generation, and (iv) use of the enriched profile in ad targeting, no single reference is likely to be found to anticipate all four sub-systems unless it is a full behavioral-targeting "data-collection + ad-serving" platform with source accounting — which is precisely why the art most likely to matter is the late-1990s ad-network/behavioral-targeting patent corpus, and why the PTAB's unpatentability finding in IPR2022-01436 was (per the CAFC affirmance and contemporaneous reporting) an obviousness holding over combinations rather than a pure § 102 anticipation holding.

Claim-element decomposition (independent claims 1 and 11)

Both independent claims share these limitations; claim 11 is the identical method embodied as processor instructions on a tangible non-transitory medium:

Dependent claims add: payment allocation from the source record (2/12); same-user-computer matching (3/13); cookie reading for matching (4/14); source record of attributes used in ad targeting (5/15); detection of new attributes (6/16); credibility ratings (7/17, 8/18); source-based attribute selection (9/19); cookie read via URL redirection (10/20).

Candidate prior-art references and § 102 claim mapping

The references below are the best-available candidates — either canonical late-1990s behavioral-targeting systems that an examiner would most plausibly cite against these elements, or family-related art. None of these bibliographic entries should be treated as a verified face-page citation of 8244582, because I could not access the face page in this session. Where dates or details carry meaningful uncertainty, I flag it.

1. US 5,948,061 — Merriman et al. (DoubleClick, Inc.)

• Full citation: US 5,948,061, "Method of delivery, targeting, and measuring advertising over networks," inventors Dwight A. Merriman and Kevin O'Connor, assignee DoubleClick, Inc.
• Dates: Filed October 29, 1996 (with 1996 provisional priority); issued September 7, 1999. (High confidence it predates the Dec. 13, 1999 critical date; exact filing day moderate confidence.)
• Description: The foundational DoubleClick ad-server patent. It discloses an ad server reachable by URL references from affiliated publisher web pages; the server reads a cookie previously placed on the user's computer, accumulates a profile of the user across multiple affiliated sites, and selects/targets third-party advertisements to that user based on the accumulated profile — all over a global network.
• § 102 mapping: Strong against elements 1a (partial profile attributes received at a server, contributed from third-party publisher servers), 1b (delivery via redirects/URL references from portions of publisher pages), 1c (accumulating attributes into a per-user maintained profile), and 1e (use of the accumulated profile to target ads). Weak/absent on element 1d (an electronic record of which unaffiliated third party contributed which specific attribute for downstream accounting) — DoubleClick's model aggregated attributes into a central profile but did not, on the face of the patent, maintain per-attribute contributor records of the kind claim 1(d) and dependent claims 2/12 (payment allocation) recite. For that reason, expect anticipation to fail on 1d while obviousness combinations with a source-accounting reference succeed.

2. US 6,026,368 — Brown

• Full citation: US 6,026,368, "On-line interactive system and method for providing content and advertising information to a targeted set of viewers," inventor Stephen J. Brown.
• Dates: Filed mid-1990s (1996); issued February 15, 2000. (Predates the June 14, 2000 US filing; whether it predates the Dec. 13, 1999 foreign-priority date depends on the precise filing date, which I could not verify — flag.)
• Description: Discloses an online system in which users' behavioral and demographic data are captured during browsing and used to target advertising to a defined viewer set. It is part of the late-1990s "profile-driven targeted advertising" cluster.
• § 102 mapping: Potentially anticipatory of the broad profile-collection-and-targeting elements 1a, 1c, 1e; like Merriman, it does not clearly disclose the per-contributor source-record limitation 1d or the specific unaffiliated-third-party + URL-redirect mechanism of 1b as claimed.

3. US 5,717,923 — Dedrick

• Full citation: US 5,717,923, "Method and system for providing personalized internet services to users," inventor Rick Dedrick.
• Dates: Filed 1996; issued February 10, 1998. (High confidence it predates the critical date; exact dates moderate confidence.)
• Description: A personalized-Internet-services system in which a user profile is maintained and matched against advertiser campaign criteria, with advertisements and content delivered based on that profile. One of the earliest patent disclosures of profile-based ad matching on the Internet.
• § 102 mapping: Relevant to the profile-maintenance and ad-targeting elements 1c and 1e. It does not disclose multi-party, unaffiliated-third-party contribution with per-attribute source records (1a/1d) or URL-redirect-triggered collection (1b) with the specificity of the claims.

4. US 6,009,410 — LeMole et al. (NetGravity/CMG)

• Full citation: US 6,009,410, "Method and system for presenting customized advertising to a user on the world wide web," inventors (LeMole et al.), assignee in the NetGravity/CMG ad-serving lineage.
• Dates: Issued December 28, 1999. (Predates June 14, 2000; whether it predates Dec. 13, 1999 — I could not verify the exact issue date to the day in this session; if issued Dec. 28, 1999 it is AFTER the Dec. 13, 1999 priority date and thus NOT § 102 art against claims entitled to that date — flag for verification.)
• Description: A web advertising system that customizes ads to a user profile and serves ads through an ad network using page requests directed to an ad server.
• § 102 mapping: Same pattern as Merriman — elements 1a/1c/1e plausibly met; 1b/1d uncertain. Because of the possible post-critical-date issue date, this reference may be § 102-ineligible if the '582 claims are credited with the Dec. 13, 1999 priority date; it would then only support § 103.

5. US 5,794,210 — Goldhaber

• Full citation: US 5,794,210, "Attention brokerage," inventor Charles Goldhaber.
• Dates: Filed 1995–1996; issued August 11, 1998. (High confidence predates critical date.)
• Description: An "attention brokerage" system in which a user's attention is treated as a commodity that can be brokered between parties, with payment flows. It is the most relevant art to the mercantile/brokerage underpinnings of the original disclosure (the descriptive-profile mercantile method), though it does not disclose the specific cookie/URL-redirect profile-accumulation mechanics of the issued claims.
• § 102 mapping: Not anticipatory of the issued method claims 1/11 (different mechanism entirely). Relevant only to the specification's brokerage-model background and to any claim language about payment for attribute use — which the issued independent claims largely do not carry (payment allocation appears only in dependent claims 2/12).

6. Family-related "source-tracking / attribution" art

The element most likely to be the patentable point of novelty — 1d (electronic record of which unaffiliated third party contributed particular attributes) together with 2/12 (payment allocation from that record) — is the element an examiner would search hardest for. Candidate art in this space includes mid-to-late-1990s ad-network and affiliate-commission systems that track the originating site/publisher for each ad impression or click and allocate payments accordingly (publisher-affiliate accounting and "referrer-based" commission systems). I could not verify any specific reference in this session, and I will not name one as a face-page citation without verification. This is the single most important gap in the analysis.

Additional relevant procedural context (high confidence)

• *IPR2022-01436 (Meta Platforms, Inc. v. AlmondNet, Inc.)* — instituted; Final Written Decision finding challenged claims unpatentable; affirmed by the Federal Circuit (Rule 36) on April 13, 2026 in Appeal No. 24-1834 (Judges Lourie, Dyk, Taranto). Per Law360 reporting cited in the earlier sections, the PTAB's decision concerned challenged claims of this patent found obvious. The prior-art references applied in that Final Written Decision are the strongest available evidence of "most relevant prior art" — but I could not retrieve the FWD's art list in this session and will not guess at it.
• Not-instituted petitions: IPR2022-01260 (Samsung) and IPR2022-01455 (Amazon) were denied on the merits — meaning the PTAB was not persuaded that the art in those petitions established a reasonable likelihood of prevailing — while Meta's IPR2022-01436 succeeded. That divergence underscores that the specific combination in Meta's petition mattered, and reinforces that no single reference cleanly anticipates.

Bottom-line answer to the task as posed

• "Look at each patent citation for 8244582": I cannot truthfully enumerate the face-page citations of 8244582 because the citation list was not in the supplied text and my USPTO/web retrieval attempts returned no results before hitting the session limit. Any list I printed would be an invention, not a finding.
• Most relevant prior art, with high confidence as to relevance category: the late-1990s cookie/profile-based ad-serving and behavioral-targeting corpus — led by US 5,948,061 (Merriman/DoubleClick) — which maps onto claim elements 1a–1c and 1e but not cleanly onto 1d (per-attribute contributor source records) or the payment-allocation dependent claims 2/12.
• § 102 anticipation verdict on the available record: on the elements I can assess, no single identified reference appears to disclose every element of claims 1/11 — in particular the combination of unaffiliated-third-party contributions with per-attribute source-record generation (1d) is not shown by the DoubleClick-era art as I know it. That is consistent with the litigation outcome: the patent was not invalidated on anticipation grounds by a single reference, but rather found unpatentable for obviousness in IPR2022-01436, affirmed by the Federal Circuit on April 13, 2026.
• Required next step before this analysis is relied upon: retrieve (1) the PTO-1449/IDS and Notice of References Cited in the '582 file wrapper via USPTO Patent Center; (2) the Google Patents "Citations" tab for US8244582B2; and (3) the IPR2022-01436 Final Written Decision's prior-art findings. Those three sources will convert the candidate list above into a verified, claim-by-claim § 102/§ 103 chart.

Obviousness Analysis of US Patent 8,244,582 Under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Preliminary note on sources

The "Prior Art section of this page" was not included in the materials provided to me, so I cannot build directly on it. To fill that gap I pulled the prior-art record from (i) the references cited on the face of the patent, (ii) the PTAB record in IPR2022-01436 (Meta Platforms, Inc. v. AlmondNet, Inc.) — which is the definitive § 103 proceeding for this patent — and (iii) defendants' invalidity contentions in the parallel district-court litigation. All reference numbers below are read literally as written.

1. The claims at issue

The patent has two parallel independent claims that recite the same limitations in different statutory form:

• Claim 1 — automated method of collecting profiles of Internet-using entities.
• Claim 11 — tangible, non-transitory data storage medium storing instructions to perform the same method.

The five functional limitations common to both (using claim 11's wording) are:

Dependent claims add: payment computation from the source record (2/12); same-user-computer linkage (3/13); cookie-based linkage (4/14); maintaining a source record for targeting attributes (5/15); determining whether received attributes were not previously in the maintained profile (6/16); credibility ratings (7/17); price reflecting credibility (8/18); source-based attribute selection (9/19); and reading a previously stored cookie as a result of the URL redirection (10/20).

2. Level of ordinary skill in the art

A person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) at the relevant time (circa 1999–2000, but the continuation claims are assessed against art predating Dec. 13, 1999) would have had a computer-science or equivalent degree with roughly two to three years' experience building networked client-server systems on the World Wide Web — including HTTP, HTML (including frames), cookies/persistent client state, relational databases, and online advertising/profile-based ad targeting. This is consistent with the declarant Meta used in the IPR, Christopher M. Schmandt of the MIT Media Lab, whose testimony addressed the user-experience and systems-engineering judgment of such a person (IPR2022-01436, Ex. 1002; Pet. 12–15).

3. Primary reference: Rosenberg (US 6,073,241)

Rosenberg (filed Aug. 29, 1996; issued June 6, 2000; § 102(e) prior art predating the patent's earliest priority date) is the primary reference and teaches nearly the entire independent claim:

• Cross-domain tracking architecture. A client browser (22) accesses servers with distinct domain names — Server_A (24A) and Server_B (24B) — which are separate, independently operated sites. A first server assigns a unique identification code stored in a cookie; that code is conveyed to the second server, solving the browser-cookie domain restriction (Ex. 1003, Abstract; 1:5–10).
• Partial profiles contributed by multiple servers to a central database. A central "database server 25" collects "tracking information" from each individual server 24 about the user and stores it in per-user records. The database record is keyed by a Cookie ID # with separate data entries for tracking information received from Server_A 24A and from Server_B 24B — i.e., the database itself records which server contributed which attributes (this is the source-attribution limitation 11(d)).
• Automatic collection and merge. Rosenberg describes collection/storage by database server 25 occurring automatically "at scheduled intervals or when network traffic is light," with no user action needed to cause the add — mapping to 11(a) and 11(c).
• URL redirection from a portion of a page. Rosenberg's HTML <FRAME SRC> implementation redirects a portion of Server_A's page to Server_B's server, causing Server_B to log a timestamp ("Last Visit to Server_B") and page-content information and pass it to database server 25 — automatically, and as a result of the frame redirection — even where the user never interacts with the frame. This is the petition's mapping for 11(b) (Pet. 42–46; Ex. 1155, 5:66–6:9; 8:25–65).
• Profiles used to generate customized responses. Server_B fetches the accumulated profile from database server 25 (steps 112–116) and returns a customized page (step 118). Rosenberg states its purpose is to "allow editors and advertisers to tailor their content to users" and describes emphasizing product information based on the profile — the foundation for targeted advertising (11(e)). The Board credited that customized responses in the form of third-party advertisements were within Rosenberg's teaching or, at minimum, an obvious implementation.

4. Secondary references

Zeff & Aronson, Advertising on the Internet (2d ed. 1999) (Ex. 1004) and Sterne, World Wide Web Marketing (2d ed. 1999) (Ex. 1005) — both books describe the Firefly Passport system, an actual commercial profile-sharing service: a central profile server maintains visitor profiles; member websites redirect visitors to Firefly (URL redirection), Firefly reads/updates the profile and passes profile data back to member sites for use, including for targeting third-party advertisements to the visitor across the member network. These references supply exactly what Rosenberg underplays: (i) a plurality of unaffiliated third-party websites interoperating with one central profile server, (ii) receipt of the partial profile as a direct result of URL redirection, and (iii) use of accumulated shared profiles for targeting third-party ads.

Farber (US 5,978,791; filed Oct. 24, 1997; issued Nov. 2, 1999) — teaches detecting whether a newly received data item already exists in a system before storing it, using content-based unique identifiers ("True Name") computed by hashing, so duplicates are recognized and eliminated. This supplies the "determining whether the received partial profile contains any profile attributes … not previously contained in a maintained profile" limitation of claim 16.

Merriman (US 8,566,154, relied on via its earlier-filed application; Ex. 1008) — teaches an ad-server architecture in which user profile/activity information is transmitted to a central ad-selection server in real time, at the moment a webpage is requested, so that the most current profile is used to select the advertisement. This supplies the real-time version of limitation 11(b) — receipt of profile data immediately upon URL redirection rather than only on Rosenberg's periodic (end-of-day/low-traffic) schedule.

5. Element-by-element showing for claim 11

• 11(a): Rosenberg's database server 25 is a programmed computer system coupled to a global computer network. It electronically receives tracking information (a partial profile containing profile attributes such as pages visited, product interest, and demographics) from at least one of servers 24A/24B — separate entities answering to different domains, i.e., unaffiliated third parties — and automatically stores it in per-cookie-ID records.
• 11(b): Rosenberg's <FRAME SRC> implementation automatically redirects a portion of the page of the website the user's computer is accessing to Server_B's server; Server_B automatically logs and transmits profile information (timestamp, content of the redirected URL) to database server 25 as a result of that redirection, without intervening user action. To the extent the claims require near-instant receipt tied to the redirect, Merriman (Grounds 3–4) supplies real-time transmission at page-request time.
• 11(c): Database server 25 automatically adds the newly received tracking information to the existing per-user profile (identified by the shared cookie ID), i.e., a maintained profile believed related to the same entity/computer.
• 11(d): The database structure stores, within each user profile, separate data entries for the tracking information contributed by Server_A and by Server_B — an electronic record of which third party contributed which particular profile attributes.
• 11(e): The accumulated profile is passed back to cooperating servers, which use it to generate customized pages and targeted advertising; Zeff and Sterne's Firefly Passport description makes the use of such shared profiles for third-party ad targeting concrete.

Dependent claims in Ground 1:

• 13 (same user computer): Rosenberg links all contributions by the single Cookie ID placed on the user's computer.
• 14 (reading a cookie): Rosenberg's entire mechanism operates by reading/setting the cookie containing the unique ID.
• 15 (maintaining a record of which third party contributed the attributes used in targeting): Rosenberg's per-server data entries, read out at step 116 when the profile is delivered for customization, satisfy this.
• 19 (source-based attribute selection): because Rosenberg stores and retrieves profile attributes in server-tagged groups, selecting attributes by source is inherent/obvious.
• 20 (reading a previously stored cookie as a result of the URL redirection): when the frame redirects to Server_B, Server_B reads the cookie previously stored for it, per Rosenberg.

Ground 2 — claim 16: Farber's hash-based duplicate detection provides the obvious mechanism by which database server 25 determines, upon receiving new profile information, whether it contains attributes not already in the maintained profile — motivated by storage efficiency and avoiding overload from duplicate messages.

Grounds 3–4 (adding Merriman): For any residual dispute over whether profile receipt occurs "as a result of" the redirect (versus Rosenberg's periodic batch collection), Merriman teaches transmitting the profile information to the central server immediately at page-request time, which is the predictable, known alternative for real-time ad targeting.

6. Motivation to combine — why a POSITA would combine

The combination is a textbook KSR-style aggregation of known elements performing known functions to yield predictable results, and the IPR record developed four independent motivation rationales:

1. Same field, analogous art. Rosenberg, Zeff, Sterne, Farber, and Merriman all address Internet advertising, user profiling, cookies, and central profile databases. A POSITA would consult them together.
2. Design need / market pressure. Rosenberg's own stated goal — letting "editors and advertisers tailor their content to users" — requires the broadest possible base of contributing sites. Zeff and Sterne document that the market had already produced exactly that solution in Firefly Passport: a central profile server interoperating with any number of unaffiliated member websites through URL redirection, with profiles used for third-party ad targeting. The petition's motivation was that adding Firefly-style interoperation lets Rosenberg "offer its profile sharing services to a broad range of third-party websites" (Pet. 40).
3. Known technique applied to a device ready for improvement. Sending profile data to a central server at page-request time (Merriman) rather than only periodically (Rosenberg) is one of a finite number of predictable solutions for updating profiles; the Board accepted that a POSITA would choose the real-time option to improve ad-targeting accuracy with up-to-date information, and would have expected success because it is routine network/database engineering.
4. Improvement of storage efficiency with predictable results. Farber's hashing/duplicate detection applied to Rosenberg's accumulating database is a routine database-management technique whose benefit (no duplicate attributes, no overload after disrupted transmissions) is inherent and predictable.

The Board rejected AlmondNet's counterarguments — including that implementing Rosenberg with Firefly's two-server illustration would be "rather foolish" (Ex. 2003, Schmandt Tr. 13:9–12) and that the phrase "as a result of" URL redirection required more than Rosenberg's frame-redirect logging — and instituted on all challenged claims on all grounds (Institution Decision, Paper 9, Apr. 7, 2023).

7. Parity of claims 1–10

Claim 11 is a Beauregard-type medium claim reciting the same steps as method claim 1, and dependent claims 12–20 mirror claims 2–10 in substance. The IPR challenged only claims 11, 13–16, 19, and 20 (Meta did not challenge claims 1–10, 12, 17, or 18), but the identical limitation-by-limitation analysis applies to the method claims 1–10. In particular, the Rosenberg + Zeff + Sterne combination maps with equal force onto claim 1's identical limitations, and Farber/Merriman would supply claims 6 and 10's additional limitations in the same manner as claims 16 and 20. Note also that a separate, unverified district-court status report in AlmondNet v. Oracle (6:24-cv-00303, Dkt. 25) references a pending reexamination in which "all claims" had been rejected — I could not verify that proceeding's number or outcome, and it should not be relied on without confirmation.

8. Secondary considerations

The record does not show meaningful objective indicia of non-obviousness. AlmondNet is a practicing company (see Assignment History section) and pointed to no nexus-backed evidence of commercial success, long-felt need, industry skepticism, or copying that the Board credited. The claimed subject matter — accumulating third-party-contributed profile attributes with source tracking for ad targeting — was, as Zeff and Sterne's Firefly Passport description shows, already being commercially implemented in the prior art, which cuts strongly against any argument that the market had long needed but failed to produce the invention.

9. Dispositive procedural outcome (as of the current date, April 26, 2026)

This § 103 analysis is not merely academic:

• The PTAB instituted IPR2022-01436 on all challenged claims (Paper 9, April 7, 2023) and issued a Final Written Decision on March 13, 2024 (Paper 30), holding all challenged claims (11, 13–16, 19, 20) unpatentable as obvious over Rosenberg + Zeff + Sterne (Ground 1), Rosenberg + Zeff + Sterne + Farber (Ground 2), and in further view of Merriman (Grounds 3–4). See Oracle status report, 6:24-cv-00303 Dkt. 25 (confirming FWD date and outcome); FreeWheel mandatory notice (Apr. 5, 2024) (same).
• On April 13, 2026, the Federal Circuit in AlmondNet, Inc. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., Appeal No. 24-1834, entered a nonprecedential Rule 36 judgment AFFIRMING the Board (Judges Lourie, Dyk, and Taranto). CAFC Rule 36 judgment PDF (filed Apr. 13, 2026).

Accordingly, the operative legal reality as of today is that the challenged claims of US 8,244,582 have been finally adjudicated unpatentable under § 103, and the combination of Rosenberg (US 6,073,241) with the Firefly Passport disclosures of Zeff and Sterne — optionally augmented with Farber (US 5,978,791) and/or Merriman (US 8,566,154) — is the combination that carried that result, with the motivation analysis set out above (market demand for broad profile sharing, real-time profile transmission, and duplicate-free storage) being the one the Board and the Federal Circuit accepted.

Key sources

• IPR2022-01436 Petition (Docket Alarm, Aug. 19, 2022) — grounds and claim mapping: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01436/Meta_Platforms_Inc/docs/08-19-2022-Petitioner/
• Institution Decision, Paper 9 (Apr. 7, 2023): https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01436/Meta_Platforms_Inc._v._AlmondNet_Inc/docs/04-07-2023-Board/
• Updated Exhibit List (identifying Rosenberg Ex. 1003; Zeff Ex. 1004; Sterne Ex. 1005; Farber = US 5,978,791 Ex. 1007; Merriman = US 8,566,154 Ex. 1008): https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01436/Meta_Platforms_Inc._v._AlmondNet_Inc/docs/12-26-2023-Petitioner/
• Patent Owner's Response (Paper 17) and Schmandt declaration (Ex. 1002/2003) — the arguments the Board rejected
• CAFC Rule 36 judgment, Appeal 24-1834 (Apr. 13, 2026): https://cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/24-1834.RULE_36_JUDGMENT.4-13-2026_2674964.pdf
• Rosenberg, US 6,073,241, full text: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/73/d2/9b/98cbef481861e9/US6073241.pdf
• Face-of-patent citations (from the Oath complaint exhibit of the issued patent): https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/Delaware_District_Court/1--19-cv-00247/AlmondNet_Inc._et_al_v._Oath_Holdings_Inc/docs/1/11.pdf
• Defendants' state-of-the-art charts (Meta Exhibit G listing ~500 references including Rosenberg, Merriman, Gerace, Dedrick, Herz, Montulli, et al.): https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01262/Meta_Platforms_Inc._v._AlmondNet_Inc/docs/11-08-2022-Patent_Owner/Exhibit-2012-Exhibit_2012.pdf

Caveats: I could not retrieve the Final Written Decision's full text itself, so details of the Board's claim-by-claim reasoning beyond the institution decision and the parties' briefs rest on the secondary sources cited; the "reexamination rejecting all claims" reference in the Oracle status report is unverified; and the exact prior-art dates relied on for the 1999 Zeff/Sterne books were not independently confirmed here but were necessarily resolved in Meta's favor by the Board without disturbance on appeal.