US 8380611

I'll run a few targeted searches to check for litigation/PTAB records and any 2026 appellate activity, then summarize the patent itself.

One more round to check for any 2026 appellate activity and the effect of the 2019 post-grant review certificate.

US 8,380,611 B2 — Summary

Bibliographic data (as recorded)

Priority chain (literal, per the patent's own priority statement): Ser. No. 12/756,489 is a continuation of Ser. No. 11/465,060 (filed 2006-08-16, issued as US 7,696,997), which claims priority from Ser. No. 10/306,996 (filed 2002-11-27, issued as US 7,113,190). Google Patents lists the priority date as 2002-11-27.

Abstract (verbatim)

"On a display terminal of an electronic trading system, a graph is displayed having a first axis and a second axis, wherein the graph includes a curve corresponding to a range of values of a financial instrument. A user is allowed to select a portion of the graph. In response to the user selection of the portion of the graph, a trading dialog box is displayed on the display of the workstation, the dialog box being automatically populated with values for trading, the values based on the values of the selected portion of the graph."

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 (method). Three steps performed on an electronic trading system's display terminal:

1. Display a two-axis graph containing a curve that corresponds to a range of values of a financial instrument.
2. Let the user select a portion of the graph (the specification describes selecting a region/point, a point on the fair-value curve, or a plotted bid/offer symbol).
3. In response, display a trading dialog box that is automatically populated with trading values, where those values are derived from the values of the selected portion of the graph (e.g., pre-filled price/size fields).

The distinguishing limitation relative to the parent patents in the family is the automatic population of the trading dialog box from the graphical selection.

Claim 12 (apparatus). The same three functions recast as a processor with a program causing a computer of the electronic trading system to display the graph, allow the selection, and display the automatically populated trading dialog box. Claim 12 is essentially the apparatus counterpart of claim 1.

Dependent-claim context (claims 2–11; 13–22 mirror them): the first axis may be maturity date; the dialog box may be auto-populated with a maturity date, a price, or a yield; the curve may be a fair-value curve; the user may select a portion of the curve; and the graph may include first symbols (bids) and second symbols (offers), with the dialog box populated from a selected bid symbol, a selected offer symbol, or both.

Note on claim text as issued: claims 7 and 18 contain the literal duplication "wherein the wherein the graph includes…" — I am reproducing that as it appears rather than correcting it.

Illustrative disclosure (context, not claim language)

The specification describes: a "U.S. Agency and Treasury Curve" graph with maturity date on the first axis and yield on the second; zooming into a date range (selectable date-range overlay, FIG. 4); a spread graph whose second axis shows the Agency/Treasury spread, with diamonds = bids and squares = offers around a "fair value" curve (FIG. 5); a hover overlay showing issue, coupon, maturity, exact market spread, and size (FIG. 6); a trading dialog box overlay with price/size fields and bid/offer/buy/sell buttons (FIG. 7); one-axis "singularity" graphs for a single maturity (FIG. 8); a multi-curve comparison graph (FIG. 9) leading to a dual buy/sell dialog box (FIG. 10) for an anomalous pricing situation; and real-time curve updating.

Family and enforcement history (relevant context)

• Family/continuations: US 9,875,507 B2 (from 13/768,466, filed 2013-02-15); US 10,789,645 B2 (from 15/876,925, filed 2018-01-22); US 2021/0012422 A1 (from 17/032,925, filed 2020-09-25, abandoned).
• PTAB: Interactive Brokers LLC v. Chart Trading Development, LLC, CBM2016-00039 (petition filed 2016-02-19; instituted 2016-08-23; Final Written Decision 2017-08-18). Petitioners included Interactive Brokers, TradeStation entities, CQG, and NinjaTrader entities. Grounds included § 101 and § 103. Patent Owner's motion to amend was denied; the Board's own Docket Alarm entry lists the FWD as the termination event. A post-grant review certificate (kind code J1) issued 2019-12-09 for the FWD in CBM2016-00039.
• Federal Circuit: Nos. 2018-1102, 2018-1104 — Chart Trading Development, LLC v. Interactive Brokers LLC et al. affirmed under Fed. Cir. R. 36 (Rule 36 summary affirmance), judgment entered December 17, 2018 (panel: Newman, Plager, Moore). Nonprecedential.
• District court: Texas Eastern District cases cited by Google Patents: 6:15-cv-01133, 6:15-cv-01134, 6:15-cv-01135, 6:15-cv-01136.
• Status/expiry: Google Patents' header lists "Expired – Fee Related, expires 2023-04-14," but the Legal Events show a lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees, with the lapse effective 2025-02-19 and the "patent expired for failure to pay maintenance fees" entry dated 2025-03-24.

CAFC 2026 docket check — result

I searched for 2026 appellate activity specifically tied to number 8380611 and returned no results (the query produced an empty result set). I therefore have no authoritative indication of any 2026 CAFC docket activity for this patent. The most recent appellate record I could locate is the 2018-12-17 Rule 36 affirmance (Nos. 2018-1102/1104) and the resulting PGR certificate in 2019.

Explicit uncertainties / caveats

1. Claims-invalidated detail: One source (Patexia's case summary) displays "Claims Challenged in the Petition: 1, 2, 3, … 22" but its "Claims Instituted" and "Claims Invalidated" fields did not render in my search result. Given (a) the FWD of 2017-08-18, (b) denial of the motion to amend, (c) Rule 36 affirmance, and (d) issuance of a post-grant review certificate (J1) on 2019-12-09, cancellation of the challenged claims is the strongly indicated outcome — but I could not independently read the certificate's claim-by-claim cancellation list, so treat the exact scope of cancellation as the one item I cannot fully verify from the retrieved records.
2. Assignee field: Google Patents labels Chart Trading Development, LLC as "Current Assignee" while cautioning that listed assignees "may be inaccurate." The USPTO assignment record (Reel/Frame 037133/0731) corroborates the 2015 conveyance from BGC Partners, Inc.
3. Expiry discrepancy: the "2023-04-14 adjusted expiration" (PTA-related) and the "expires 2023-04-14" label in the page header conflict with the recorded non-payment lapse effective 2025-02-19. I am reporting both as they literally appear rather than reconciling them.
4. No ruling, settlement, or other 2026 event concerning 8380611 was found in the searches performed.

I'll research the litigation history for US 8,380,611 (which I'll interpret literally as "8380611"). Let me search multiple sources.

Let me search for the Federal Circuit appeal, Supreme Court activity, and final disposition of the district court cases.

Litigation Involving U.S. Patent No. 8,380,611 ("the '611 patent")

Patent: U.S. 8,380,611 B2 — "Graphical order entry user interface for trading system" (claims 1–22)
Owner/plaintiff: Chart Trading Development, LLC ("CTD") — a patent-assertion entity affiliated with the BGC Partners/eSpeed family; the patent was assigned by BGC Partners to Chart Trading Development, LLC effective Nov. 23, 2015 (Reel 037133/0731).
Current legal status: Expired — lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees (effective 2025-02-19; recorded 2025-03-24). Note also the post-grant review certificate issued Dec. 9, 2019 (see Part C).

I identified two distinct forums in which the '611 patent was at issue: the four consolidated district-court actions in the Eastern District of Texas, and one PTAB covered-business-method review, which was appealed to the Federal Circuit. Both are detailed below.

A. District Court Litigation — E.D. Texas, Tyler Division

All four complaints were filed December 3, 2015, by the same plaintiff, asserting the '611 patent together with related patents (7,113,190; 7,890,416; 8,041,626; 8,060,435 — not all five asserted in every case). The four cases were consolidated on February 4, 2016 into the lead action, No. 6:15-cv-1136.

Asserted claims of the '611 patent: claims 1, 3, 7, 12, 14, and 18. Accused instrumentalities included the NinjaTrader 6/7 platform, the TradeStation 9.5 platform, and the Interactive Brokers Trader WorkStation (with its "Chart Trader" feature).

Stay and outcome: On March 29, 2016, Magistrate Judge John D. Love (JDL) entered a Memorandum Opinion and Order staying the consolidated actions (6:15-cv-1133 through -1136) pending the PTAB's CBM review. In so ruling, the court noted that the defendants had agreed to be bound by AIA § 18 estoppel, and that the '611 and '190 patents were the subject of CBM petitions CBM2016-00039 and CBM2016-00038. Because the PTAB subsequently cancelled all claims of the '611 patent (see Part C), the district-court actions could not proceed on that patent.

⚠️ Limitation on my confidence: Public docket records I retrieved show the case as "Closed" (Docket Alarm) with the last substantive captured entries being the March 2016 stay; a Unicourt snapshot still showed "Pending" as of June 2016 (a stale capture). I was unable to retrieve the actual final dismissal/termination order for the consolidated district-court action in the sources searched, and I did not reach the Court's later docket entries. I therefore cannot state with certainty the precise date or form of the final disposition (e.g., dismissal with prejudice vs. without), and I flag that as a genuine gap rather than asserting an outcome I did not verify.

B. PTAB Covered Business Method Review

Case: Interactive Brokers LLC v. Chart Trading Development, LLC, CBM2016-00039 (P.T.A.B.)

• Petition filed: February 19, 2016
• Institution decision: August 23, 2016 (review instituted on claims 1–22)
• Termination (per USPTO CBM trial data): August 8, 2017, termination type "FWD"
• Final Written Decision: August 18, 2017 (Paper 51)
• Panel: Administrative Patent Judges Brian J. McNamara (writing), Frances L. Ippolito, and Kevin W. Cherry
• Petitioners: Interactive Brokers LLC; CQG, Inc.; CQG, LLC (f/k/a CQGT, LLC); NinjaTrader Group, LLC; NinjaTrader, LLC; TradeStation Group, Inc.; TradeStation Securities, Inc.; and TradeStation Technologies, Inc.
• Petitioner's counsel: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (Michael T. Rosato)
• Patent Owner's counsel: Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner (Timothy P. McAnulty, James R. Barney)
• Result: The Board held claims 1–22 unpatentable — (i) ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101, and (ii) obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) (over Friesen, Jones, and other references). The Patent Owner's Contingent Motion to Amend was denied.

Source: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/CBM2016-00039/Covered_Business_Method_Patent_Review_of_U.S._Pat._8380611/docs/08-18-2017-Board/Final_Decision-51-Final_Written_Decision.pdf

C. Federal Circuit Appeal

Chart Trading Development, LLC v. Interactive Brokers LLC, Nos. 2018-1102 and 2018-1104 (Fed. Cir.)

• The two appeal numbers correspond to the consolidated appeals from CBM2016-00038 (the '190 patent) and CBM2016-00039 (the '611 patent).
• Argued by: James R. Barney (Finnegan) for Appellant CTD; Danielle J. Healey (Fish & Richardson) for the appellees.
• Panel: Circuit Judges Newman, Plager, and Moore.
• Decision: December 17, 2018 — AFFIRMED under Fed. Cir. R. 36 (summary affirmance, no opinion). The petition for review raised alleged due-process and Administrative Procedure Act violations by the PTAB (claim-construction shift in the final written decision, and burden-of-proof issues), but the court declined to address them on the merits.
• Mandate: issued 2019 (CAFC mandate recorded at the PTAB Apr. 22, 2019).

Sources: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[4573933](/patent/4573933)/chart-trading-development-llc-v-interactive-brokers-llc/ ; https://ipwatchdog.com/2018/12/18/due-process-apa-violations-ptab-rule-36ed-cafc/

D. Resulting Cancellation of the '611 Claims

Following the Federal Circuit's affirmance, the USPTO issued a Post-Grant Review Certificate in CBM2016-00039 (kind code J1), issued December 9, 2019, cancelling the challenged claims of the '611 patent. The certificate is reflected in the patent's file wrapper / legal events.

Summary

Known matters involving U.S. 8,380,611:

1. Chart Trading Development, LLC v. CQG, Inc. et al., No. 6:15-cv-01133-JRG-JDL (E.D. Tex., filed 12/03/2015) — consolidated, stayed 03/29/2016.
2. Chart Trading Development, LLC v. NinjaTrader Group, LLC et al., No. 6:15-cv-01134-JRG-JDL (E.D. Tex., filed 12/03/2015) — consolidated, stayed 03/29/2016.
3. Chart Trading Development, LLC v. Interactive Brokers, LLC et al., No. 6:15-cv-01135-JRG-JDL (E.D. Tex., filed 12/03/2015) — consolidated, stayed 03/29/2016.
4. Chart Trading Development, LLC v. TradeStation Group, Inc. et al., No. 6:15-cv-01136-JRG-JDL (E.D. Tex., filed 12/03/2015) — lead case, stayed 03/29/2016.
5. Interactive Brokers LLC v. Chart Trading Development, LLC, CBM2016-00039 (P.T.A.B., petition filed 02/19/2016; instituted 08/23/2016; Final Written Decision 08/18/2017) — all claims 1–22 held unpatentable under §§ 101 and 103.
6. Chart Trading Development, LLC v. Interactive Brokers LLC, Nos. 2018-1102 & 2018-1104 (Fed. Cir., decided 12/17/2018) — Rule 36 summary affirmance of the PTAB decisions.

Bottom line: The '611 patent is no longer enforceable — its claims were cancelled by the PTAB's final written decision (affirmed by the Federal Circuit), memorialized in a post-grant review certificate issued December 9, 2019, and the patent has since lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees. The only district-court assertion of the '611 patent was the 2015 E.D. Tex. campaign against roughly three dozen futures/securities brokerage defendants, which was stayed and did not reach judgment because the claims were invalidated at the PTAB.

Caveats / limits on this answer:

• I could not verify the specific termination order that closed the consolidated E.D. Tex. action. Given that the '611 (and '190) claims were cancelled, the practical outcome was that the patent-based claims could not succeed, but I am not asserting a specific dismissal date or form that I did not confirm in a primary docket.
• The Federal Circuit's Rule 36 disposition is a one-word affirmance with no reasoning, so the court's rationale (if any) is not publicly stated.
• I limited this to the literal identifier "8380611" / "'611 patent" and did not substitute any similar number. Related-family patents (e.g., 7,113,190 / CBM2016-00038; 7,890,416; 8,041,626; 8,060,435) appear in the same campaign but are distinct patents and are not the subject of this report.

I'll research the PTAB proceedings on this patent, starting with the CBM referenced in the patent text.

Let me dig into the Final Written Decision and the motion to amend.

Let me look at the IPWatchdog article and the FWD itself.

PTAB Activity on US 8,380,611 ("Graphical order entry user interface for trading system")

Data-integrity flag up front. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied in this prompt states that the USPTO ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent. That is wrong. US 8,380,611 was the subject of a fully-litigated Covered Business Method review, CBM2016-00039, which ran to a Final Written Decision, was appealed to the Federal Circuit, and produced a Post-Grant Review Certificate issued 2019-12-09. The ODP gap is itself notable and worth flagging to whoever maintains that feed. The proceeding below is sourced from the patent's own prosecution/legal-events record plus public PTAB and CAFC reporting.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA proceedings on US 8,380,611: 1 — a single CBM review, CBM2016-00039, instituted 2016-08-23, decided on the merits by Final Written Decision 2017-08-18, affirmed on appeal by the Federal Circuit on 2018-12-17, and closed out by a Post-Grant Review Certificate issued 2019-12-09. Breakdown: claims invalidated 1 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0 / active 0. The bottom line for a defendant today: this is not a "survived two IPRs and is hardened" patent — the opposite. Petitioners (Interactive Brokers, TradeStation, NinjaTrader and others) took the patent down in a CBM, the Patent Owner's appeal was summarily affirmed under Fed. Cir. R. 36, and the Office issued a certificate canceling claims. Any demand letter that still asserts 8,380,611 is citing a patent whose asserted claims have already been held unpatentable.

(Context, not counted above: the same petitioner group simultaneously attacked the parent, CBM2016-00038 on US 7,113,190, decided the same day, and the CAFC consolidated the two appeals as Nos. 2018-1102 / 2018-1104. CBM2016-00046 (CQG) is a separate CTD patent case and is not a proceeding on the '611 patent.)

CBM2016-00039 — Interactive Brokers LLC et al. v. Chart Trading Development, LLC

• Type: Covered Business Method review (AIA § 18 / 35 U.S.C. §§ 321–329; CBM2016-00039)
• Patent: US 8,380,611 B2
• Filed: 2016-02-19
• Status: Final Written Decision (structured PTAB data) — case terminated; Post-Grant Review Certificate issued 2019-12-09
• Judge panel: Brian J. McNamara (writing), Frances L. Ippolito, and Kevin W. Cherry. (PTAB docket mirror; Unified Patents PTAB portal)
• Petitioners / real parties: Interactive Brokers LLC; NinjaTrader Group, LLC and NinjaTrader, LLC; TradeStation Group, Inc., TradeStation Securities, Inc., and TradeStation Technologies, Inc. (CQG also appears in the petitioner chain / related filings). Patent Owner: Chart Trading Development, LLC (an NPE/PAE per Unified Patents' classification), which acquired the patent from BGC Partners, Inc. in 2015.
• Petition grounds: all claims 1–22 challenged. Trial was instituted on both a 35 U.S.C. § 101 (patent-ineligible subject matter) ground and a 35 U.S.C. § 103 obviousness ground. The § 103 ground rested on WO 01/16852 to Friesen et al., US 2002/0120551 to Jones, III, and WO 01/46841 to Kirwin et al. — confirmed in the consolidated oral-hearing record: "[B]oth cases have a 101 ground on which trial was instituted and a 103 ground on which trial was instituted. The 103 grounds are similarly based on the Friesen, Jones, and Kirwin references." (Record of Oral Hearing, CBM2016-00038 Paper 45 / CBM2016-00039 Paper 50.)
• Institution decision: Instituted 2016-08-23 (Paper 14, same date as the parallel '190 case). I have not independently retrieved the full institution text in this session, so I will not characterize the panel's reasoning beyond the fact that both a § 101 and a § 103 ground were carried into trial.
• Final Written Decision: 2017-08-18 (Paper 51). The FWD found the challenged claims unpatentable; Chart Trading's appeal characterized the decision as invalidating "patent claims owned by Chart Trading in covered business method (CBM) proceedings," and the CAFC affirmed that invalidation. Caveat on granularity: I could not retrieve the pending/claim-by-claim disposition table of Paper 51 verbatim in this session, so I am deliberately not asserting a specific per-claim breakdown (e.g., "claims 1–22 canceled, none sustained") beyond the fact that the asserted claims were held unpatentable and were canceled by certificate (below). Anyone needing the exact wording should pull Paper 51 directly from PTAB E2E: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/
• Motion to Amend: Patent Owner filed a Contingent Motion to Amend (Paper 27, 2016-12-06). On appeal, CTD's counsel argued that "the amended claims in the '611 patent included a number of limitations that weren't at issue in the '190 patent," i.e., that the Board improperly imported its '190 analysis into the '611 substitute claims. The Board did not grant CTD relief on those claims — the Federal Circuit affirmed. I have not verified verbatim whether the motion was denied outright or denied-in-part; treat the disposition as adverse to the Patent Owner, and verify against Paper 51 before quoting.
• Settlement / termination: None. This case was tried to an FWD, not settled (contrast the heavily-settled CBM docket; here the FWD issued on schedule).
• Appeal: Yes. CTD filed its Notice of Appeal 2017-10-20 (Paper 52). The Federal Circuit consolidated the '611 appeal with the '190 appeal as Nos. 2018-1102 and 2018-1104. Argument was heard by a panel of Judges Newman, Plager, and Moore; the court affirmed on 2018-12-17 by Fed. Cir. R. 36 (summary affirmance, no opinion). The Board entered the CAFC judgment on 2019-03-21 (Paper 53). The disputed appellate issue — per IPWatchdog's coverage — was an alleged APA / due-process violation from the PTAB changing its construction of a key claim term between institution and the FWD (the SAS v. ComplementSoft line of argument). The panel declined to reach it. (Docket Alarm CAFC judgment mirror; IPWatchdog coverage)
• Certificate: Post-Grant Review Certificate (kind code J1) issued 2019-12-09 for Patent 8,380,611 (Trial No. CBM2016-00039), entered on the record twice (2019-12-17 and 2020-12-15 legal-event entries). A § 328(b) certificate issues to cancel claims; that certificate is the operative, judicially-reviewable record of what no longer exists.
• Defensive value: Very high. The claims that CTD asserted in the E.D. Tex. campaign (6:15-cv-01133/-01134/-01135/-01136) have been held unpatentable by the PTAB and the cancellation has been certified. A defendant facing a fresh assertion of this patent should lead with the FWD + certificate, and should also note that the Patent Owner's own appellate counsel conceded on the record that the '611 amended claims carried limitations absent from the '190 patent — an admission that the panel's analysis was not cleanly transferable, yet the invalidation still stood.

Strategic summary

Which claims of 8,380,611 survive. The proceeding was all-claims (1–22). The Final Written Decision held the challenged claims unpatentable, the R. 36 affirmance left that undisturbed, and the Office issued a Post-Grant Review Certificate on 2019-12-09 — the § 328(b) instrument that exists to cancel claims. Practically, there is no surviving claim set of 8,380,611 to assert. If you are being asked to license or defend against 8,380,611, the first question is which claim the other side believes survives; the answer, on the public record, is none. (I am explicitly declining to state a per-claim table I could not verify verbatim — pull Paper 51 from PTAB E2E to nail the exact claim numbers and quoted language. Do not take a demand-letter claim list at face value here.)

Estoppel landscape — and the trap for a fresh defendant. This was a CBM under AIA § 18, so the estoppel that attached is AIA § 18(a)(1)(D), which bars a petitioner from later asserting in a civil action any ground it "raised" — raised, not "reasonably could have been raised" (the broader IPR standard of § 315(e)(2)). See the CBM mechanism table in the K&L Gates PTAB seminar materials ("CBM … Raised only (not could have raised)"). Two consequences: (1) co-petitioners Interactive Brokers, TradeStation, NinjaTrader (and privies) are estopped as to the § 101 and Friesen/Jones/Kirwin § 103 grounds they actually litigated; (2) a new defendant is not bound by any of it, and — critically — because the CBM program sunset on 2020-09-16, no new CBM can be filed. So an IPR under §§ 311–319 remains the only PTAB vehicle, and the § 315(e)(2) "could have raised" estoppel would bind a new petitioner going forward. Given the certified cancellation, however, the more efficient play is not a new IPR at all — it is to put the certificate in front of the court and, if the patent owner disagrees, force them to articulate a live claim.

Pattern signals. This was a coordinated, multi-defendant, multi-patent defense: CTD filed four E.D. Tex. suits (2015), and the defendants filed CBM petitions against all five asserted patents (the '611 among them) and jointly moved to stay, offering to be bound by AIA estoppel — a textbook defense-group play. The petitioner set is a crowd of co-petitioners, not a single party. No defensive aggregator (e.g., Unified Patents) filed here — Unified appears only as a database for this case, not a petitioner. The Patent Owner did appeal aggressively (two consolidated appeals, plus due-process/APA arguments), but the appeal was disposed of by Rule 36 summary affirmance without opinion — the Federal Circuit did not bless or reject the Board's mid-stream claim-construction change, leaving that issue open.

Recommended next steps

1. If you are a defendant now being asserted against: the FWD + Post-Grant Review Certificate are your dispositive documents — not the claims as printed on the face of the patent. Retrieve CBM2016-00039 Paper 51 (FWD, 2017-08-18) from PTAB E2E at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ and the J1 certificate (issued 2019-12-09) from Patent Center, then quote the disposition verbatim in any Rule 12 motion or invalidity contention. The CAFC judgment (Nos. 2018-1102 / 2018-1104, affirmed 2018-12-17, R.36) forecloses any "the FWD might still be reversed" argument.
2. Confirm no live continuation coverage. CTD's family continued past the '611 (US 9,875,507 from 13/768,466; US 10,789,645 from 15/876,925), and both are themselves shown as expired. If the other side pivots to a family member, run a fresh PTAB/litigation check against that patent number — do not assume the '611 result mechanically carries over.
3. If a new IPR is being contemplated anyway (e.g., against a different family patent, or if some '611 claim were argued to survive): remember the CBM sunset and that IPR estoppel under § 315(e)(2) is the broader "raised or reasonably could have raised" standard. Any art you choose not to plead is art you lose.
4. No active proceedings → no trial-stage milestones to track. There is nothing pending on 8,380,611. The absence of any new filing since 2016 is itself the signal: once claims are canceled and certified, the patent stops attracting challenges because there is nothing left to challenge.

Confidence notes: The existence, type, parties, panel, dates, grounds (Friesen/Jones/Kirwin + § 101), institution date, FWD date, motion-to-amend, appeal numbers, R. 36 affirmance, and the J1 certificate are all corroborated across the patent's own legal-events record, the PTAB docket, the oral-hearing transcript, the Unified Patents portal, and IPWatchdog. The exact verbatim claim-level disposition of Paper 51 and the precise disposition of the Contingent Motion to Amend are the two items I could not verify word-for-word in this session, and I have flagged rather than filled those gaps.

I'll research the assignment chain, correspondents, and NPE signals for US 8380611.

Good data. Let me pin down the correspondents of record and additional context.

I hit the tool-step limit before I could fully retrieve the USPTO correspondence fields. Below is the reconstructed chain using the Google Patents legal events (which mirror the USPTO Assignment records) plus the plainSite mirror of the assignment document, with explicit flags on what I could not verify.

Ownership Reconstruction — US 8,380,611 B2

Verification entry point: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search "8380611") and https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/. Mirrors used below: Google Patents legal events (authoritative text supplied), plainSite assignment record 37133/731 (https://www.plainsite.org/patents/assignment.html?id=[8011087](/patent/8011087)).

Inventors

• Timothy H. Heaton — sole named inventor on the '611 patent. Employer at filing: eSpeed, Inc. (New York). The inventor→company assignment was executed 2002-11-26 (effective date per the recorded cover sheet), i.e., the day before the 2002-11-27 priority filing of Ser. No. 10/306,996, and it runs to eSpeed, Inc., confirming Heaton was an eSpeed employee at conception/filing.

Pattern note: No "all inventors departing" tell applies — this is a single-inventor patent. The one anomaly worth recording is procedural: the inventor→eSpeed assignment and the eSpeed→BGC name change were both recorded only on 2010-04-08, the same day BGC filed the continuation that became the '611 patent. That is housekeeping timed to a new family filing, not a departure event. (In the related CBM the petitioners obtained Heaton's personal CV from a public Google Sites page — Exhibit 1025 — but I found no evidence in these records about his subsequent employment.)

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: BGC Partners, Inc. (as successor by change of name to eSpeed, Inc.; original assignee on the face of the patent and in Google Patents is listed as BGC Partners Inc).
• Line of business: eSpeed operated an electronic fixed-income trading platform (the "eSpeed" system) — i.e., an operating company that built and shipped the very software the claims describe (graphical order entry over live Treasury/Agency curves). The patent specification itself names the "eSpeed™ trading platform" and "a server powered by eSpeed, Inc."
• Status: eSpeed, Inc. was a Cantor Fitzgerald-affiliated public company; it was reorganized/renamed BGC Partners, Inc. (change of name effective 2008-04-01, recorded 2010-04-08). BGC Partners later reorganized as BGC Group, Inc. (public, NASDAQ: BGC), still operating. (Reported context, not independently verified in this pass under the step limit: BGC sold the eSpeed electronic-trading platform business to Nasdaq in 2013, while the patents were retained and later moved to Chart Trading Development, LLC in 2015.)

Assignment timeline

Method note / limitation: The USPTO correspondent-of-record (filing attorney) fields were not captured in the sources I could retrieve. plainSite's mirror of Reel 037133/0731 renders assignor, assignee and address but not the correspondent block; the two 2010 records (Reel 024206) correspondents likewise did not render. I am therefore not reporting correspondent names for any link, rather than inferring them. The Finnegan Henderson attorneys (Timothy P. McAnulty, James R. Barney) visible in the CBM filings are litigation counsel before the PTAB, not the recording correspondent, and are noted separately.

1. 2002-11-26 (executed) / recorded 2010-04-08 — Reel 024206/0125

• Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors Interest
• Assignor: Timothy H. Heaton
• Assignee: eSpeed, Inc., New York
• Correspondent: not captured (see method note)
• Context: Inventor employment assignment to the original operating company, executed the day before the 2002-11-27 priority filing.

2. recorded 2010-04-08 (effective 2008-04-01) — Reel 024206/0152

• Conveyance: Change of Name
• Assignor: eSpeed, Inc.
• Assignee: BGC Partners, Inc., New York
• Correspondent: not captured (see method note)
• Context: Internal corporate reorg/name change only — no change in beneficial ownership.

3. 2015-11-23 (executed) / recorded 2015-11-24 — Reel 037133/0731

• Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors Interest
• Assignor: BGC Partners, Inc.
• Assignee: Chart Trading Development, LLC, 100 East Ferguson, Suite 609, Tyler, TX 75702
• Correspondent: not captured (see method note)
• Context: Transfer to a licensing/assertion vehicle — one asset package covering US 8,380,611, US 7,696,997, US 7,113,190 and US 9,875,507 (app. 13/768,466) — executed 10 days before the first infringement suits were filed (2015-12-03).

Corroborating non-assignment records:

• 2015-12-03 — four complaints filed, Chart Trading Development, LLC v. CQG, Inc., Nos. 6:15-cv-01133; v. NinjaTrader, 6:15-cv-01134; v. Interactive Brokers, 6:15-cv-01135; v. TradeStation, 6:15-cv-01136 (E.D. Tex.).
• 2016-01-06 — CTD's FRCP 7.1 Corporate Disclosure Statement: "Chart Trading Development, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of its parent company, BGC Partners, L.P."
• 2016-02-19 / 2016-03-18 — CBMs filed (incl. CBM2016-00039 on the '611). Mandatory notice lists real parties-in-interest: Chart Trading Development, LLC; BGC Partners, L.P.; BGC Partners, Inc.; Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P.
• 2019-12-09 — Post-grant review certificate (kind code J1) for CBM2016-00039.
• 2025-02-19 / 2025-03-24 — Patent expired for failure to pay maintenance fees.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 8380611
    2002 : Heaton assigns invention to eSpeed Inc
    2008 : eSpeed renamed BGC Partners Inc
    2010 : Chain of title recorded at USPTO
         : Continuation application filed
    2013 : Patent US 8380611 issues
    2015 : BGC transfers patent to Chart Trading Development
         : Four infringement suits filed in EDTX
    2016 : CBMs filed against the patent family
    2017 : PTAB invalidates claims in CBM2016-00039
    2018 : Federal Circuit affirms on Rule 36
    2025 : Patent expires for unpaid maintenance fees

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT. Reel 037133/0731 moves the patent from the operating company BGC Partners, Inc. to Chart Trading Development, LLC, a "Development/Licensing-style" litigation vehicle at 100 East Ferguson, Suite 609, Tyler, TX 75702 — a Tyler address inside the Eastern District of Texas. It holds no product line; its own Rule 7.1 statement (2016-01-06) describes it purely as a subsidiary holding vehicle.

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT. The Unified Patents PTAB portal classifies the owner of the '611 family as "Chart Trading Development LLC — NPE (Patent Assertion Entity)" (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/ptab/caselist?petitioners=CQG+Inc). RPX also indexes the CTD campaign (insight.rpxcorp.com).

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR / not verifiable. The correspondent fields did not render in the retrievable records (see method note). What is documented: CTD's PTAB litigation counsel was Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner LLP (Timothy P. McAnulty, James R. Barney) across the CBM family — but litigation counsel is not the assignment correspondent, so I am not scoring this signal either way.

4. Cascading transfers — PARTIAL. Only one NPE-to-LLC hop, but a whole portfolio (four patents: 8,380,611 / 7,696,997 / 7,113,190 / 9,875,507) was transferred into CTD in a single instrument and asserted within days — consistent with a pre-arranged assertion package rather than a chained-LLC cascade.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — PRESENT. Assignment executed 2015-11-23, recorded 2015-11-24 (Reel 037133/0731); the four complaints were filed 2015-12-03 — 10 days after execution. Textbook arrangement of the chain to establish a clean standing/venue record in EDTX.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. No bankruptcy; the assignor (BGC) was and remains a solvent public operating company.

7. Privateering — PRESENT. BGC Partners, Inc. (operating company and eSpeed successor) conveyed the patents to its own wholly owned subsidiary, CTD, which then sued BGC/eSpeed's direct competitors in electronic trading — Interactive Brokers, CQG, TradeStation, NinjaTrader, Rosenthal Collins, R.J. O'Brien and others. The PTAB real-party-in-interest listing (CTD; BGC Partners, L.P.; BGC Partners, Inc.; Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P.) ties the asserting LLC directly back to the operating parent.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT. The chain never reaches RPX, AST, LOT, Unified, or OIN; it terminates at an asserting LLC.

Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

The chain runs straight from the operating company BGC Partners, Inc. to its wholly owned assertion vehicle Chart Trading Development, LLC via Reel 037133/0731 (executed 2015-11-23, recorded 2015-11-24), and that assignment precedes by ten days the 2015-12-03 EDTX complaints against eSpeed/BGC's direct competitors — a classic privateering configuration confirmed by CTD's own corporate disclosure statement (parent = BGC Partners, L.P.) and the PTAB real-party-in-interest listing (CTD / BGC Partners, L.P. / BGC Partners, Inc. / Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P.). Two independent sources (Unified Patents owner classification "NPE (Patent Assertion Entity)" and the shell-LLC Tyler, TX holding address) corroborate the designation.

Caveats: (i) the correspondent-of-record fields could not be retrieved within this pass, so signal #3 is unresolved; (ii) the exact per-claim cancellation outcome of CBM2016-00039 is carried forward from the earlier summary as unverified; (iii) the 2013 eSpeed-platform sale to Nasdaq is reported context I did not independently confirm here.

I'll verify the citation record via targeted searches, then analyze each reference for § 102 relevance.

Let me pull details on the remaining cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 8,380,611 B2

1. Confirmation of the patent searched

The USPTO-mirroring record (Google Patents, fetched 2026-10-01, and the authoritative full text you supplied) resolves the number 8380611 to a single, unambiguous document:

No similar-numbered patent was substituted. I could not open the USPTO PatentCenter full-text view directly, so the citation set below is drawn from the authoritative patent text you provided (which matches Google Patents' USPTO-mirrored citation data).

Critical framework note on § 102. Because US 8,380,611 is a continuation whose claims recite a specific added limitation — the trading dialog box "being automatically populated with values … based on the values of the selected portion of the graph" — the effective prior-art cutoff depends on whether that limitation is supported by the 2002-11-27 priority document. If it is, the § 102 cutoff is 2002-11-27; if not, the cutoff shifts forward (to 2006-08-16 or 2010-04-08). This materially changes which of the cited references qualify as § 102 art, and I flag it at each reference below. (Reconciliation note: my earlier summary listed the cited-reference count only as "11 (8)"; the two Google sub-lists, de-duplicated, yield 11 unique references, which are analyzed individually here.)

2. The 11 cited references (de-duplicated from the "Citations" and "Patent Citations" tables)

Group A — Same-family / self references (NOT prior art)

(1) US 7,113,190 B2 — "Systems and methods for providing an interactive graphical representation of a market for an electronic trading system"

• Inventor: Heaton; Assignee: eSpeed, Inc.; Filed 2002-11-27; Issued 2006-09-26.
• Description: the grandparent application in the same family; discloses the two-axis market graph, bid/offer symbols, and a trading dialog box.
• § 102 relevance: None. This is the priority document itself, not prior art to the family. It is disqualified as the family's own originating disclosure (and, as a commonly-owned family member, would not be § 102(a)(1) art against later continuations in any event).

(2) US 7,696,997 B2 — "Interactive graphical representation of a market for an electronic trading system"

• Inventor: Heaton; Assignee: BGC Partners, Inc.; Filed 2006-08-16; Issued 2010-04-13.
• Description: the direct parent (Ser. No. 11/465,060) of the 12/756,489 application; discloses the graph, symbols, information overlay, and trading dialog box overlays (FIGS. 5–10).
• § 102 relevance: None. Direct parent/family member, not prior art. (It also postdates 2002-11-27, so it could not be § 102 art even if unrelated.)

(3) US 2011/0251940 A1 — "Graphical order entry user interface for trading system"

• Inventor: Heaton; Published 2011-10-13; Priority 2002-11-27.
• Description: the applicant's own pre-grant publication of the application that matured into US 8,380,611.
• § 102 relevance: None. Same-application publication; not prior art.

Group B — Prequel-to-2002 references (both § 102(a)(1)/(a)(2) and § 103 candidates)

(4) US 6,418,419 B1 — "Automated system for conditional order transactions in securities or other items in commerce"

• Inventors: Nieboer, Balcarce, Zhidov, Eldred; Assignee: 5th Market, Inc.; Filed 1999-07-23; Issued 2002-07-09 (43 claims).
• Description: an anonymous system for conditional/spread order entry. Notably it discloses representing an order "as a line in two dimensional space with constraints having the price of one security as one axis and the price of another security as its other axis," trader workstations with display devices showing buy/sell orders in ranked sequence, and automatic contingent matching/execution. (This patent was itself the subject of PTAB CBM2013-00027.)
• § 102 relevance: Potential § 102(b) art but does not anticipate claims 1/12. It discloses the two-axis representation of a financial instrument and the display of bid/offer orders, which map to the preamble/graph elements of claims 1 and 12 (and to the "first axis/second axis" concepts of claims 2–4). However, it does not disclose (a) a user selection of a portion of the graph that (b) triggers (c) a trading dialog box automatically populated from the selected portion; its execution is automated, not dialog-mediated. Best use: § 103 combination reference; possible § 102 anticipation of an isolated dependent-claim concept only.

(5) US 7,000,181 B2 — "Dynamic data display having slide drawer windowing"

• Assignee: International Business Machines Corp.; Filed 2001-06-21; Issued 2006-02-14.
• Description: a data-display structure with a main "drawer" and additional movable drawers that overlay the screen and open/close; expressly applied to a live feed of stock bids and offers (Time, Symbol, Bid, Offer, Bid Vol, Offer Vol columns).
• § 102 relevance: Prior art by date (2001 < 2002), but does not anticipate claims 1/12. It discloses the "displaying a dialog box/overlay on the display" element (the sliding drawer/overlay window) and real-time display of quote data, but it lacks the two-axis curve graph, the selection of a portion of the graph, and automatic population of trading values from that selection. Best use: § 103 as evidence of overlay-window/order-entry display technology.

(6) US 7,680,715 B2 — "Systems and methods for providing anonymous requests for quotes for financial instruments"

• Assignee: Pipeline Financial Group, Inc.; Priority 2000-06-01; Issued 2010-03-16.
• Description: an anonymous RFQ matching system. Quotes are "displayed to the market participant by means of a graphic interface"; the participant can modify price and the system auto-executes; two-sided quotes are received from capital providers; conditional/quotation display logic is described.
• § 102 relevance: Prior art by date (priority 2000-06-01), but does not anticipate claims 1/12. Its GUI "graphic interface" for displaying quotes and modifying orders could support an obviousness argument regarding the trading-dialog concept, but it does not disclose a two-axis graph with a financial-instrument curve, nor selection-of-graph-portion → auto-populated dialog. Best use: § 103.

(7) US 2010/0153304 A1 — "Systems and methods for providing anonymous requests for quotes for financial instruments"

• Assignee: Pipeline Financial Group, Inc.; Priority 2000-06-01; Published 2010-06-17.
• Description: the published counterpart/sibling of US 7,680,715 (same Pipeline RFQ disclosure and GUI-based quote display).
• § 102 relevance: Same analysis as (6). Prior art by priority date, but non-anticipatory; § 103 reference only. (If treated strictly per publication date 2010 it would fall outside a 2002 cutoff, but its 2000 priority preserves it as § 102(a)(2)/(e)-type art.)

(8) US 8,055,574 B2 — "Securities market and market maker activity tracking system and method"

• Inventor: Stephen Cutler; Priority 2001-07-24 (Ser. No. 09/911,772; PCT/US02/23403 filed 2002-07-23); Issued 2011-11-08.
• Description: analyzes Level 1/Level 2 market data to derive market-maker activity statistics and price-pressure indicators, displayed "in at least one of a table or a chart for each corresponding symbol."
• § 102 relevance: Prior art by date (priority 2001-07-24 < 2002-11-27), but does not anticipate claims 1/12. It discloses displaying market data graphically (charting statistics) and handling bid/ask data, which touches the "graph" and "symbols" concepts, but it contains no trading dialog box, no user selection of a graph portion driving order values, and no financial-instrument curve over a two-axis plot as claimed. Best use: § 103.

Group C — References postdating the 2002 priority (NOT § 102 art unless the "auto-populated" limitation loses the 2002 date)

(9) US 7,882,013 B2 — "Drag-and-drop graphical control interface for algorithmic trading engine"

• Assignee: Pipeline Financial Group, Inc.; Priority 2006-04-28; Issued 2011-02-01.
• Description: a graphical order-entry/control interface for an algorithmic trading engine using drag-and-drop controls.
• § 102 relevance: Not prior art to claims entitled to the 2002-11-27 date (priority 2006 postdates it). However, if the "automatically populated" limitation is not supported by the 2002 specification and the claims instead take a 2006-08-16 or 2010-04-08 effective date, this reference becomes § 102(a)(2)/(a)(1) art and is highly pertinent to the graphical-order-entry concept. I note this as the most direction-changing citation in the list.
  (I was unable to retrieve the full text of this document in the allotted searches; the characterization above rests on the cited title/assignee/date record and should be verified against the document before being relied on.)

(10) US 2008/0183639 A1 — "System and Method for Securities Liquidity Flow Tracking, Display and Trading"

• Inventor: Disalvo, Dean F.; Priority 2005-04-14; Published 2008-07-31.
• Description: tracking, displaying, and trading on securities liquidity flow.
• § 102 relevance: Not prior art to 2002-dated claims (priority 2005 postdates 2002-11-27). Becomes relevant only if the effective date moves forward. (Full text not retrieved; characterization rests on the title/date record and should be verified.)

(11) US 2011/0029423 A1 — "Securities market and market maker activity tracking system and method"

• Inventor: Stephen Cutler; Listed priority 2004-02-20; Published 2011-02-03.
• Description: a Cutler-family continuation/publication directed to Level 1/Level 2 market-maker activity tracking and chart/table display.
• § 102 relevance: As listed, not prior art to 2002-dated claims. (Caveat: the Cutler family as a whole originates with the 2001-07-24 filing that produced US 8,055,574; if this publication shares that earlier priority rather than the listed 2004-02-20 date, it would qualify as art under the same non-anticipatory § 103 analysis as (8). The 2004-02-20 date is reported literally as it appears in the source record.)

3. Bottom line

No cited reference anticipates independent claim 1 or claim 12 under § 102. Anticipation requires a single reference disclosing every limitation as arranged in the claim, and the keystone limitation — a trading dialog box automatically populated with trading values based on the user-selected portion of a two-axis graph bearing a financial-instrument curve — is not shown in any one of the cited references. The references split that combination:

• the two-axis graph / curve / order symbols concepts are suggested by US 6,418,419 (two-dimensional order space), US 8,055,574 and US 2011/0029423 (charting market-maker statistics), and the Pipeline references (GUI quote display); while
• the overlay dialog-box concept is suggested by US 7,000,181 (slide-drawer overlays over a live bid/offer feed).

The Examiner therefore appears to have cited these primarily as § 103 obviousness references against the graph/display/genus features, not as § 102 anticipants.

The single most consequential open issue is the priority/effective-date question: five of the nine outside-family references (7,882,013; 2011/0029423; 2008/0183639; and, for the publication dates, both Pipeline/2010 items) were published after 2002-11-27. If the "automatically populated" limitation added in the 2010 continuation is not supported by the 2002 priority disclosure, a large portion of this citation set converts from non-art into genuine § 102(a)(2)/§ 103 prior art — which is consistent with the claim-scope narrowing that this continuation appears designed to capture.

Verification caveats (stated explicitly): I obtained full descriptive text for US 6,418,419, US 7,000,181, US 7,680,715, and US 8,055,574, but could not retrieve the full text of US 7,882,013 (Pipeline drag-and-drop) or US 2008/0183639 (Disalvo) within the allotted searches; their descriptions rest on the citation records only and should be confirmed against the documents. All dates above are reproduced literally from the patent's citation tables and Google Patents' USPTO-mirrored records.

I'll check the PTAB record for the actual § 103 grounds relied on, then build the obviousness analysis from the prior-art listing on the page.

Confirmed the actual grounds. Let me identify the three references the Board relied on.

Confirmed the exact § 103 combination. Let me pin down the three references' content.

Obviousness Analysis — US 8,380,611 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Update to the prior section, and two flags

Resolves the earlier caveat. The prior section flagged that I could not verify the scope of claim cancellation in CBM2016-00039. I retrieved the Final Written Decision's conclusion, which states verbatim: "we conclude that claims 1–22 recite subject matter that is ineligible for patent protection under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and that claims 1-22 are unpatentable as obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a). We further deny Patent Owner's Motion to Amend." (Paper 51, Aug. 18, 2017 — link). So all 22 claims fell on § 103(a) grounds, independently of the § 101 holding. The earlier "uncertainty" item can be closed. I note I retrieved only the decision's concluding paragraph, not its claim-by-claim § 103 charts.

Flag 1 — a source-boundary discrepancy. The three references the Board actually relied on for § 103 do not all appear in the page's "Prior Art" section. Two of them do (Friesen and Jones, in the Family Cites Families list). The third (Kirwin) does not appear anywhere in the page's citation lists. I am therefore splitting this analysis into (a) combinations built strictly from the page's prior-art listing, and (b) the Board's actual combination, sourced from the PTAB record. I have labeled each accordingly rather than silently blending them.

Flag 2 — the § 103 holding is per curiam and non-precedential. The Federal Circuit affirmed under Fed. Cir. R. 36 (Dec. 17, 2018, Nos. 2018-1102/1104). Appellant's principal appellate complaint, per IPWatchdog's report of the argument, was that the Board "lifted" its § 103 analysis of the parent '190 patent into the '611 claims without addressing the '611's added limitations. That is directly relevant here: the crux of the '611 § 103 case is a single added limitation — "the dialog box being automatically populated with values for trading, the values based on the values of the selected portion of the graph." My analysis below is organized to address that limitation head-on.

1. Legal framework and the prior-art window

• Governing statute: pre-AIA § 103(a) (the Board applied § 103(a); the application was filed April 8, 2010 and claims pre-AIA priority).
• Effective date of the challenged claims: November 27, 2002. Every reference must therefore have a § 102 date before that date.

This is where most of the page's citation list drops out. Working through the Family Cites Families list literally:

Excluded entirely: US 7,113,190 and US 7,696,997. These are the '611's own parents (same inventor, sole chain of priority). They are not § 103 prior art against claims entitled to the 2002-11-27 date — a point worth stating because the page's Similar Documents and Citations sections invite the opposite inference.

PHOSITA (as of Nov 2002): a person with a bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or finance (or equivalent), plus roughly 2–5 years' experience designing or using graphical trading front-ends for electronic markets, or a fixed-income trader/developer hybrid familiar with market-data display conventions. Petitioners supported this with the Declaration of Bernard S. Donefer (Ex. 1002, CBM2016-00039) — I have not read it and do not vouch for its content.

2. The Board's actual § 103 combination (from the PTAB record)

At the oral hearing, Petitioners' counsel stated: "The 103 grounds are similarly based on the Friesen, Jones, and Kirwin references." (transcript). The petition exhibit list confirms the three:

Claim chart — claim 1 (method)

Motivation to combine, articulated per KSR: (i) all three references are in the same field and address the identical problem — fast, accurate, error-resistant order entry from a graphical market display; (ii) Kirwin identifies the very deficiency the '611 claim remedies (pointer travel from indicator to command-entry point), supplying a rational underpinning; (iii) the combination is a mere "combination of familiar elements according to known methods" yielding predictable results — no functional interaction between the graph and the auto-populated dialog is asserted in claim 1 beyond the pre-existing selection mechanism; (iv) Friesen and Kirwin share a common technical lineage (Epit/Trading Technologies and CFPH/eSpeed respectively), and Kirwin's family matured into BGC Partners, Inc. — the same company that owned the '611 (US 7,890,416 B2, Kirwin et al., assignee BGC Partners — PDF). Same-company knowledge of one's own prior interface is about as strong a motivation as a § 103 record can show.

Note on § 103(c) (common ownership): Kirwin's WO 01/46841 is § 102(b) art (published 2001-06-28, more than one year before 2002-11-27), so the pre-AIA § 103(c) common-ownership carve-out — which applies only to art qualifying solely under § 102(e), (f), or (g) — does not disqualify it even if CFPH/eSpeed and the '611's owner were commonly owned. Friesen (pub. 2001-03-08) and Jones (pub. 2002-08-29) qualify at least under § 102(a), and Jones additionally under § 102(e); their common ownership is not implicated (Epit, Inc. and Jones are third parties). This is a structural reason the Board's combination was clean.

Claim chart — claim 12 (apparatus)

Identical mapping. Claim 12 recites "a processor with a program to cause a computer … to" perform the same three functions. Programming a general-purpose computer to render a plotted market display and a conditional dialog is the routine implementation of claim 1's steps; the page's own citation to US 6,906,717 B2 (Microsoft, multiple chart user interface) and EP 1 191 466 A1 (ByteWorx, configurable interactive chart application) confirms that client-side chart/dialog rendering was conventional. Claim 12 adds no separate inventive weight.

Dependent claims 2–11; 13–22

3. Alternative combinations drawn strictly from the page's "Prior Art" section

Because the page's own citation list omits Kirwin, here are combinations that a challenger could plead using only page-listed references. These are back-ups; the page listing alone lacks a reference as expressly on point as Kirwin for the "auto-populated dialog" element, which is why the Board went outside it.

Combination A — Friesen + Jones + US 7,000,181 (IBM, slide-drawer windowing). Friesen/Jones supply the trading graph and selectable instrument representations; IBM '181 supplies the generic mechanism of presenting a further window/panel in response to a user action on displayed data. Motivation: conserving screen space and reducing navigation steps is the stated purpose of '181; combining a pop-up order-entry panel with a chart is the predictable use of a known GUI technique. Weakness: '181 is a general GUI reference; a patent owner would argue it says nothing about populating fields from a selected data point.

Combination B — Friesen + Jones + US 2003/0009411 (Ram, interactive grid-based graphical trading) — or + US 2003/0233309 (Matus) or + US 2005/0075966 (Duka). Ram's grid interface is expressly interactive and graphical for real-time security trading, teaching direct order entry from the displayed market representation. Motivation: the shared object of eliminating the click-issue → click-button → type-price sequence.

Combination C — a charting primary + a trading-dialog secondary. Primary: EP 1 191 466 A1 (ByteWorx, configurable interactive chart application), US 6,906,717 B2 (Microsoft, multiple chart UI), or US 2003/0110120 A1 (Salehi, displaying price charts). Secondary: US 6,016,463 (Minton), US 5,689,651 (Lozman), or US 5,809,483 (Broka) for the trading/order-entry context. Motivation: the '611's own specification concedes the goal — "an individual is better suited to determine a pattern on a graph than in a table of information" — establishing a recognized design need to migrate tabular trading data into charts. This combination best supports the curve and bid/offer symbol limitations but is weaker on the auto-population element.

Combination D — Trading Technologies cluster. US 7,212,999 / US 7,389,268 (Trading tools for electronic trading) as primary, + US 7,783,556 B1 (displaying order information in relation to a derivative of price) + Kirwin (or IBM '181). The TT references teach order information displayed against price/value parameters with direct order entry from the display — a strong showing on the graph/axis/symbol limitations.

Cannot be used: US 7,882,013 (Pipeline) and US 2008/0183639 (Disalvo) — both have post-2002-11-27 effective dates and cannot be § 103 art against these claims. I flag this because they are the two page-listed references whose titles most superficially resemble the claimed subject matter, and a careless analysis would reach for them.

4. Secondary considerations

I found no evidence of objective indicia carrying the day, and the Board's denial of the contingent motion to amend is consistent with that.

• No nexus. Any commercial success of the eSpeed/BGC trading platforms would be attributable to unclaimed features (matching engine, network architecture, credit screening), and additionally to features already present in the commonly-owned Kirwin system. Under Richdel v. Sunspool / ArcelorMittal, no nexus exists where the merits relied upon were "readily available in the prior art."
• Long-felt need cuts the other way. Kirwin's background section identifies and solves the same need (eliminating pointer travel and keyboard entry between indicator and command entry). A need recognized and addressed in the prior art supports obviousness, not patentability.
• Copying / industry praise: nothing in the record I retrieved supports these.

5. Conclusions

1. The claims are, on this record, properly held obvious under § 103(a). Friesen supplies a two-axis graphical market display with plot-positioned bid and offer tokens/icons; Jones supplies interactive, visual order entry from the displayed representation; Kirwin supplies the missing and decisive limitation — a trading dialog presented in response to a user selection, with fields automatically posted from the selected bid/offer — and expressly states the motivation for doing so. All three predate November 27, 2002, and Kirwin is clean § 102(b) art.
2. The "automatic population" limitation is the whole ballgame, and it is the one limitation whose § 103 treatment the appellant attacked on appeal. My independent mapping places it squarely in Kirwin's disclosure. The Rule 36 affirmance means we have no reasoned appellate endorsement — I cannot tell you why the panel agreed, only that it did.
3. Weakest links in the chain, candidly stated: (a) the "curve" limitation in claim 1 is only loosely met by Friesen and is better carried by the page-listed charting references (ByteWorx, Microsoft, Salehi); (b) claim 5's "fair value curve" and claims 10–11's dual-symbol population depend on secondary references and depend on how narrowly "curve" and "based on the values of the selected portion" are construed; (c) claims 2–4's "automatically populated with a maturity date / price / yield" are trivially met only if one accepts that the dialog inherits the coordinate values of the selected point.

6. Explicit uncertainties

1. Source mixing, disclosed. Kirwin (WO 01/46841) is not in the page's "Prior Art" section. It comes from the CBM2016-00039 petition exhibit list (Ex. 1018) and the oral-hearing transcript. If this analysis must be confined to the page's own citation list, then Combinations A–D in § 3 are the only available routes — and none is as strong as the Board's actual combination.
2. I did not read the FWD's § 103 claim charts. I retrieved the decision's concluding paragraph and the exhibit list. The element-by-element mapping above is my independent reconstruction from the references' disclosures, not a reproduction of the Board's reasoning. The Board's specific findings — and its construction of "graph" and of the auto-population language — may differ.
3. Jones characterization. My description of US 2002/0120551 A1 is drawn from its title, filing/publication data, and its role in the CBM, not from reading the document. Treat it as provisional.
4. Friesen identity. The CBM used WO 01/16852 A2 (Ex. 1016). The page lists the same document as WO2001016852A2 (Epit, Inc.). Friesen's later US 7,212,999 B2 / US 7,412,416 B2 (Trading Technologies) share substantially the same specification; I have cited them only as corroboration of disclosure content, not as separate prior art.
5. Status. Per the page's Legal Events, the '611 lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees (effective 2025-02-19), which conflicts with the header's "expires 2023-04-14" label — I report both literally, as before. Any § 103 conclusion here is therefore retrospective.