US 9549095

I'll run targeted searches for this exact patent number and for any 2026 CAFC docket activity.

Let me check the specific litigation history and any 2026 appellate activity tied to this patent.

US Patent 9,549,095 — Analyst Summary

Bibliographic Data (verified)

Continuation chain: This patent is a continuation of 14/250,689 (now US 8,964,064), itself a continuation of 12/642,275 (now US 8,730,351), which claims priority to provisional 61/138,729. Related family members include US 9,936,157; US 10,419,714; US 10,778,936; and abandoned publication US 2020/0396412 A1.

Assignments: Assigned to Monument Peak Ventures, LLC on 2017-03-09 (from Intellectual Ventures Fund 83 LLC). A second record dated 2023-08-15 is a "Release by Secured Party." Note: uspto.report lists the grantee as Intellectual Ventures Fund 83 LLC, reflecting the assignee of record at grant — Monument Peak Ventures is the current owner.

Abstract (verbatim)

The present disclosure relates to a an electronic device such as a digital camera 300 that includes a deletion mode whereby a camera/electronic device user can delete captured images or data files that have already been transferred in order to make room in the electronic device or digital camera memory for capturing further images. In one embodiment a digital camera keep track of which images have already been transferred to an external storage device and presents those to the user as potential images to be deleted. In another embodiment, the user is presented with a "delete all transferred images" which when selected deletes all the captured images that have already been transferred. In still another embodiment, a deletion criteria is used to prioritize which images are deleted first.

Independent Claims — Plain-Language Overview

Claim 1 (method) — Three steps:

1. Communicate at least one of a plurality of captured images in an image capture device's memory to a remote storage device;
2. Store, in the image capture device itself, data indicating which of the plurality of captured images have been communicated to the remote storage device (i.e., a local transfer-tracking record);
3. Delete, from the memory, captured images that have been stored and previously transferred to the remote storage device — this deletion happening in response to receiving an indication that such already-transferred images are to be deleted.

The lynchpin is the device-maintained record of what left the device, used as a precondition/gate for deletion.

Claim 9 (system) — An image capture device comprising a memory, a user interface, and a processing system configured to perform the same three operations as claim 1 (communicate → store tracking data → delete already-transferred images upon receiving the indication).

Claim 15 (non-transitory computer-readable medium) — Instructions (software) that, when executed, carry out the same three operations: communicate captured images to a remote storage device, store the tracking data in the image capture device, and delete the previously-transferred images from memory upon receipt of the deletion indication.

Notable dependent claims: Claim 2/10/16 — indication received from the device's own user interface; Claim 3/11/17 — indication received from a remote device; Claim 4/12/18 — wireless connection; Claim 5/13/19 — wired connection; Claim 6/14/20 — deletion order governed by a deletion criterion; Claims 7 and 8 — "all messages" versus "selected messages" previously transferred are deleted (note: these two dependent claims use "messages," while the independent claims recite "images").

Specification Highlights (context for the claims)

• The disclosure is premised on the problem that wireless transfer is transparent to the user, so users don't know which images are safe to delete, and memory cards fill up (FIG. 6 and FIG. 7 deletion modes).
• States: "awaiting transfer" 402, "awaiting upload" 404, "transferred" 406, "transferred and uploaded" 408; transfer/upload status stored in an XML database (FIG. 5, with camera_upload_status values "awaiting_upload"/"uploaded").
• FIG. 6 describes an automatic deletion mode maintaining a minimum free-space buffer (e.g., room for three more pictures or 10 seconds of video); deletion order may be by age (oldest first) or size (largest first).
• FIG. 7 describes a delete menu offering "Delete All Transferred" images.
• The disclosure expressly extends beyond cameras to "electronic devices that store information such as memory cards, hard drives, electronic devices that load other types of data besides images."

Litigation / CAFC Check — Important Caveats

• I did not find any 2026 Federal Circuit docket entry tied to US 9,549,095. I cannot confirm 2026 CAFC activity for this patent, and I am stating that as a limitation of this search rather than a negative finding.
• The patent record itself lists two litigation links: a Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit case, 21-1052 (a 2021 docket, not 2026), and a California Central District Court case, 8:19-cv-02181. I was unable to retrieve and verify the substance or outcome of either in this session — treat these case numbers as reported-by-record only.
• Broader Monument Peak Ventures enforcement activity is ongoing (e.g., E.D. Tex. filings against OpenText, Arashi Vision/Insta360, Arnold & Richter, Vivotek), but my searches did not tie US 9,549,095 specifically to those suits. Do not assume this patent is among the asserted patents in those cases without docket-level confirmation.

Uncertainty Flags

• The claims use "communicated" and "transferred" interchangeably; claims 7–8 oddly recite "messages" instead of "images." I have quoted these literally and not auto-corrected them.
• Dates such as the 2017-03-09 and 2023-08-15 reassignment entries, and the "Expired – Fee Related" status, come from the patent record and are not a legal status determination.
• No PTAB/IPR proceeding specific to this patent number surfaced in my searches; absence here is not proof that none exists.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 9549095 using the sources you specified.

I found some leads. Let me dig into the specific cases mentioned in the patent record and verify which ones actually assert US 9549095.

Litigation Involving US Patent 9,549,095

Bottom line

The patent's own prosecution/assignment record (Google Patents, drawing on Unified Patents litigation data) flags two related U.S. matters for the family that includes US 9,549,095. Both trace to a single underlying dispute: Monument Peak Ventures, LLC v. Toshiba. I also identified a PTAB proceeding involving Monument Peak Ventures and Toshiba, but it challenges a different patent, so it is not litigation on the '095 patent. Important caveat below regarding family-level attribution.

Case 1 — District Court: Monument Peak Ventures, LLC v. Toshiba America Business Solutions, Inc., et al.

Sources:

• Google Patents litigation link: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/California%20Central%20District%20Court/case/8%3A19-cv-02181
• Case record: https://ai-lab-cl-prod.azurewebsites.net/case/dct/cacd/8:19-cv-02181/monument-peak-ventures-llc-v-toshiba-america-business-solutions-inc
• Docket documents: https://services.patexia.com/lawsuits/Monument-Peak-Ventures-LLC-et-al-v-Toshiba-America-Business-Solutions-Inc-et-al-id-[130305](/patent/130305)/documents

Case 2 — Appeal: Monument Peak Ventures, LLC v. Toshiba America Business Solutions, Inc., et al. (Fed. Cir.)

Sources:

• Google Patents litigation link: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Court%20of%20Appeals%20for%20the%20Federal%20Circuit/case/21-1052
• Docket: https://dockets.justia.com/docket/circuit-courts/cafc/21-1052
• Judgment text: https://www.cetient.com/case/monument-peak-ventures-llc-v-toshiba-america-business-[5306159](/patent/5306159)
• Notice of docketing (Fed. Cir. No. 2021-1052, originating case 8:19-cv-02181-DOC-DFM): https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2021-00330/Toshiba_America_Electronic_Components_Inc._v._MONUMENT_PEAK_VENTURES_LLC/12-21-2020-Petitioner/Exhibit-1015-Ex_1015_Notice_of_Docketing/

Not litigation on the '095 patent (do not conflate)

• IPR2021-00330, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. v. Monument Peak Ventures, LLC — This PTAB inter partes review arises out of the same Toshiba dispute but challenges U.S. Patent No. 7,583,294, not the '095 patent. It is relevant only as parallel activity. (See Patent Owner Preliminary Response: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2021-00330/...; the IPR itself is on the '294 patent.)
• MPV v. Xerox, Case No. 2:21-cv-0345-JRG-RSP (E.D. Tex.) — separate MPV campaign involving patents such as the '090 patent, not the '095 patent.
• Other MPV suits (e.g., v. Vivotek 6:24-cv-00361; v. TCL 5:24-cv-00011; v. Arashi Vision 2:25-cv-00956; v. Samsara 1:23-cv-05687; v. Open Text 2:25-cv-00521; v. Johnson Controls; v. Carl Zeiss) involve other patents in MPV's Kodak-derived portfolio and are not confirmed to assert US 9,549,095.

Important caveats (please read)

1. Family-level vs. patent-level attribution. The litigation links on the US 9,549,095 Google Patents page appear to be recorded against the patent family (Family ID 43867554), which also contains its continuations/siblings US 8,730,351; US 8,964,064; US 9,936,157; US 10,419,714; and US 10,778,936. Google Patents/Unified frequently map litigation to a family rather than to a single member. I was not able to confirm from the sources retrieved that the '095 patent itself was named as an asserted patent in the Toshiba complaint. It is possible the litigation was mapped to the family because a sibling patent was asserted.

2. Two identifiers verified exactly. The only patent number I treated as in-scope is 9,549,095 (and its forms "US9549095", "US9549095B2", "9,549,095"). The similar-looking number 9,549,059 that appeared in one incidental search snippet (an Indian customs bond number, not a patent) was not treated as this patent.

3. Grounds of the district court ruling not confirmed. I did not retrieve the district court's dispositive order, so I cannot state the precise basis (e.g., §101 eligibility, dismissal, or settlement) on which the C.D. Cal. action closed and was affirmed nonprecedentally. The Federal Circuit disposition is a per curiam affirmance; the opinion/judgment retrieved is nonprecedential.

4. Foreign family litigation. The patent page also carries a "First worldwide family litigation filed" note pointing to Darts-ip (family 43867554), indicating litigation somewhere in the worldwide family; this is a family-level flag and does not identify the '095 patent specifically.

Suggested next steps to confirm patent-level assertions

• Pull the complaint and infringement contentions in 8:19-cv-02181 (C.D. Cal.) to see the exact list of asserted patents.
• Check PACER for the C.D. Cal. docket to identify the terminal order and whether leave to amend/appeal mooted the '095 patent.
• Query Unified Patents litigation portal and Lex Machina / Docket Navigator filtered by patent number 9,549,095 (not family) for any post-2021 assertions (e.g., against camera/phone makers), which I could not exhaustively verify within the search budget.

Summary: The only litigation the record ties to this patent's family is Monument Peak Ventures v. Toshiba — C.D. Cal. No. 8:19-cv-02181-DOC-DFM (filed 11/11/2019; terminated 09/2020) and its Federal Circuit appeal No. 2021-1052 (filed 10/15/2020; affirmed 12/13/2021). Whether the '095 patent specifically (as opposed to a sibling) was asserted remains unconfirmed from the retrieved sources.

I'll verify the ODP default with targeted searches before writing anything.

Let me narrow the search to this patent's number and family.

Checking the patent's family members and the CAFC case, since IPRs sometimes target a sibling rather than this exact patent.

PTAB Proceedings on US 9,549,095 ("Method for deleting data files in an electronic device")

Verification note up front: The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent, and my independent web searches (Google Patents/PTAB-hosted petition documents, docket aggregators, Unified Patents litigation portal) surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming U.S. Patent No. 9,549,095 as the challenged patent. Both sources agree, so I report this as a high-confidence negative rather than a gap in coverage. Per your instruction not to invent proceeding numbers, I list zero proceedings below and do not manufacture placeholders.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 9,549,095: 0 — breakdown by status: 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution-denied.

Bottom-line defensive posture: the patent is UNTESTED at the PTAB — neither hardened nor killed. None of the 20 claims has ever been construed by a Board panel, none has been canceled, and none has been confirmed. Do not let anyone characterize this patent to you as "survived two IPRs and is hardened" — that description is factually wrong for 9,549,095 (and the near-miss proceedings that generate such narratives involve other Monument Peak Ventures patents). Equally, no defendant has handed you a free kill. The only validity record on the claims is the original 2009 examination, which is exactly the posture in which an IPR is most attractive — subject to the timing and estoppel caveats in the strategic summary below.

Proceedings on this patent

None. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings for US 9,549,095, and no FWD, institution decision, or termination has been located that names it as the challenged patent.

There is therefore no proceeding to report a type, filing date, panel, grounds, institution decision, FWD, settlement, or appeal for. Per your constraint against fabricating, I am leaving the per-proceeding template unfilled rather than populating it with adjacent-but-wrong matters.

Adjacent matters that do not cover 9,549,095 (context only — do not cite these as controlling)

Search results confirm Monument Peak Ventures, LLC ("MPV") is a frequent IPR target, but the petitions I located target different patents in its portfolio. I flag these strictly as pattern evidence about the patent owner, not as proceedings on your patent. My verification of claim-level outcomes in these matters is incomplete, and I have not confirmed any of them resolved on the merits.

Readers should verify each entry directly on PTAB E2E before relying on it: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/

District court and appellate activity touching this specific patent

This is the activity that actually exists on 9,549,095, and it is not PTAB activity:

• Monument Peak Ventures, LLC v. Toshiba America Business Solutions, Inc., et al., No. 8:19-cv-02181 (C.D. Cal.). Complaint dated 2019-11-11 per the exhibit index in a related petition. This is the assertion vehicle for the patent. Docket portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/California%20Central%20District%20Court/case/8%3A19-cv-02181
• Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, No. 21-1052. Google Patents lists this as a family litigation on the patent; the structured block identifies no PTAB origin, which is consistent with a district-court appeal rather than a PTAB appeal (a PTAB appeal would have a source proceeding, and none exists). Docket portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Court%20of%20Appeals%20for%20the%20Federal%20Circuit/case/21-1052
• I could not confirm from available sources which order the 21-1052 appeal was taken from, which claims were at issue, or the disposition. I am not going to guess at it. Pull the docket on CourtListener or PACER before relying on the appeal for anything.

Family status as listed: the patent is recorded as Expired - Fee Related, with an adjusted expiration of 2030-01-06; the parent 12/642,275 is listed as active to 2030-07-12; siblings US 8,730,351, US 8,964,064, US 9,936,157, US 10,419,714, and US 10,778,936 are all listed Expired - Fee Related, and US 2020/0396412 A1 is abandoned.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all 20 claims are UNTESTED at the PTAB. Nothing is canceled (claims 1-3, 5-8 and 10-20 have no adverse PTAB record; claims 4 and 9 have no adverse PTAB record either), nothing is sustained by a panel, and nothing has been construed under Phillips. If you are mapping a defense, the operative fact is that claim scope for terms like "communicated to the remote storage device," "stored and previously transferred," and the deletion criteria of claim 6 is entirely unlitigated at the Board. There is no institution decision to read for the panel's preliminary construction and no FWD to mine for a roadmap.

Two claim-drafting observations, offered as my own reading and not as any tribunal's holding, because they bear on exposure even without a PTAB proceeding: claims 7 and 8 shift from "captured images" to "all messages previously transferred" and "selected messages previously transferred," while every independent claim (1, 9, 15) is directed to captured images. That mismatch is a live claim-construction question in district court. Note also that indefiniteness and written-description theories are not available in an IPR at all (§ 311(b) limits IPR to § 102/§ 103 on patents and printed publications), so if the "messages" language is your best defense it belongs in a § 282 invalidity case or a Markman brief, not a petition.

Estoppel landscape. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel is currently a non-issue for the patent because no IPR has been instituted, so no petitioner has been estopped and every prior-art ground — § 102 and § 103, patents and printed publications — remains theoretically available to a new petitioner. Two timing cautions matter more than estoppel right now:

1. § 315(b) one-year bar. The C.D. Cal. complaint in 8:19-cv-02181 was filed 2019-11-11, and a served-defendant exhibit (Ex. 2001 in IPR2021-00330) records service on Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. on 2019-12-17. For those defendants, the § 315(b) window closed roughly 2020-12-17 by my arithmetic from the record — that is an inference, not a Board holding, so confirm the actual service dates before relying on it. Critically, the bar is party-specific: it does not prevent a different accused infringer, or a defensive aggregator, from filing today.
2. Time remaining. Interest is bounded by the recorded expiration of 2030-01-06. An IPR filed now would still have runway, but the useful past-damages window under § 286 is only six years back from any new complaint, so the economics of attacking this patent are already narrowing.

Pattern signals. MPV is a serial enforcer and is itself a serial IPR target — GE filed at least three petitions against three different MPV imaging patents in April 2019, and Toshiba filed against a fourth. That is a strong signal that MPV's portfolio is well-known to defense-side filers and that the absence of a petition on 9,549,095 is a substantive choice rather than an oversight. The likeliest explanations are the low per-assertion value of a camera image-deletion patent, the § 315(b) clock having run for the defendants who were actually sued, or the subject matter being amenable to a district-court § 101/§ 112 attack that no IPR can reach. I also see no evidence of a defensive aggregator such as Unified Patents filing on this patent; Unified appears in the record only as the source of the litigation-data portal. MPV's pursuit posture, by contrast, has been aggressive on the appellate side — the 21-1052 appeal is on file, though I could not confirm its disposition.

Recommended next steps

• Treat this as "no PTAB activity," and say so plainly. The absence of a proceeding on a patent asserted since at least 2019 is the signal. Well-asserted patents usually attract IPRs; this one did not, despite its owner being an IPR magnet. That argues against building a validity defense around a Board record that does not exist.
• If your demand letter or complaint cites claims 1-9, none of them is canceled. There is no FWD to link and no disposition to quote — I am not going to fabricate one. Your validity attack has to be built from scratch on the 2009 prosecution history, and the published file wrapper is the starting point.
• Check the § 315(b) posture of your client specifically against the 2019-11-11 complaint and the recorded 2019-12-17 service. If you were named and served in the C.D. Cal. action, IPR may be barred to you even though the patent has never been challenged. Confirm actual service dates on PACER rather than relying on my arithmetic.
• Pull the 21-1052 Federal Circuit docket. Whether the appeal affirmed or reversed anything relating to MPV's assertion of this patent is unknowable from what I could verify, and it may be dispositive of what your client is actually facing. Search: https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%2221-1052%22
• Factor in expiration. With the patent recorded as Expired - Fee Related and an adjusted expiration of 2030-01-06, confirm current maintenance-fee status on the USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/) before making any licensing decision. Lapsed maintenance-fee status is itself a decisive defense argument, and the Google Patents "Expired - Fee Related" label is an assumption, not a legal conclusion.
• Watch the siblings. US 8,730,351, US 8,964,064, US 9,936,157, US 10,419,714, and US 10,778,936 are all in the same family and all carry an overlapping priority date of 2008-12-18. If MPV re-asserts, it will most likely do so on the sibling with the longest remaining term rather than this one. Re-run the PTAB E2E search against each sibling number — my searches did not return AIA proceedings on any of them, but I could not verify each of them exhaustively within this review.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me dig into the specific assignment records and correspondents.

Good progress on the chain. Let me pin down the reel/frame numbers and correspondents.

Assignment Reconstruction — US 9,549,095

Verification caveat up front: I could not query USPTO Assignment Center live in this session, so I could not confirm reel/frame numbers, execution dates, or correspondents of record for most links. What follows distinguishes (a) records I found verbatim in primary documents, (b) records reported by the patent record itself, and (c) gaps I am explicitly not filling with invented data. The one assignment document I retrieved in full text is the 2017 IV → Monument Peak transfer.

Inventors

All three are Kodak-side inventors on a family that originated as Kodak application 12/642,275 (filed 2009-12-18). The specification is written entirely around Kodak's own architecture (Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Exif-JPEG, Kodak-mounted image sensor) and cites multiple commonly-assigned Kodak patents (U.S. 7,057,648; 6,784,924; 6,292,218; 3,971,065; 7,369,164; EP 1 339 214).

Pattern note: I did not find evidence that these inventors departed Kodak within 12 months of filing in a way that signals a pre-sale abandonment — the more relevant event here is Kodak's institutional collapse (Chapter 11), not individual inventor attrition. I cannot confirm individual departure dates; treat any such claim as unverified.

Original assignee

Eastman Kodak Company (New Jersey corporation; principal place of business 343 State Street, Rochester, NY 14650).

• Line of business: photographic equipment, film, and (historically) digital cameras — an operating company that shipped products in the relevant space. Kodak digital cameras embodied wireless-transfer and deletion workflows of the type claimed.
• Current status: Filed Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in January 2012. It emerged from bankruptcy in September 2013 as a restructured commercial-printing/document-imaging company. It no longer operates the consumer digital-camera business that produced this patent family.
• Significance: the patent's ownership left Kodak not through a negotiated sale of a going concern but through a bankruptcy-court-approved asset sale — the single most important fact for the NPE analysis below.

Assignment timeline

I must be explicit: I cannot state reel/frame numbers for these recordings — I did not retrieve them and will not invent them. What I can document follows.

• 2012-12-18 (executed) / recorded 2013 — Reel/frame [not verified]

  • Conveyance: Patent Sale Agreement / Assignment of Patent Rights
  • Assignor: Eastman Kodak Company (as debtor-in-possession)
  • Assignee: Intellectual Ventures Fund 83 LLC (Delaware LLC; 7251 W Lake Mead Blvd, Ste 300, Las Vegas, NV 89128)
  • Correspondent: [not verified]
  • Context: Bankruptcy fire-sale. Kodak sold ~1,100 digital-imaging patents/portfolios for $527 million to IV Fund 83, a vehicle organized by Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corporation with a licensee consortium (Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, FUJIFILM, Google, HTC, Huawei, Microsoft, RIM, Samsung, Shutterfly). Source: Kodak Form 8-K (SEC, filed 2012-12-21) and the Patent Sale Agreement between Eastman Kodak Company and Intellectual Ventures Fund 83 LLC dated as of December 18, 2012.

• 2017-02-15 (executed) / recorded 2017-03-09 — Reel/frame [not verified] (document text retrieved verbatim)

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Patent Rights (assignment of the patents plus all reissues, continuations, foreign counterparts, and "causes of action and enforcement rights ... for past, current and future infringement")
  • Assignor: Intellectual Ventures Fund 83 LLC
  • Assignee: Monument Peak Ventures, LLC (a Texas limited liability company; 1400 Preston Road, Suite 400, Plano, Texas 75093)
  • Correspondent: [not verified]
  • Context: Transfer to a licensing/assertion vehicle (IV affiliate). The express carving out of "past, current and future" causes of action is standard language used to make a clean standing record for assertion; it is not a mere internal reorg.

• 2023-08-15 (recorded) — Reel/frame [not verified]

  • Conveyance: Release by Secured Party (per the Google Patents legal-events record; "SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS")
  • Assignor: Intellectual Ventures Fund 83 LLC
  • Assignee: Monument Peak Ventures, LLC
  • Correspondent: [not verified]
  • Context: Securitization housekeeping. This is recorded as a secured-party release tied to IV Fund 83, indicating the portfolio carried a security interest (patent-backed financing) at some point. The Google Patents entry labels the "assignee" as Monument Peak Ventures, which is likely a rendering artifact — I could not retrieve the underlying document, so I flag the assignor/assignee orientation as unverified.

Not found / not claimed: I did not locate a separate recorded assignment from the inventors to Kodak (routine and near-certain to exist, but I did not retrieve it), nor any further downstream transfer of US 9,549,095 away from Monument Peak Ventures. As of the patent record, Monument Peak Ventures, LLC is the current owner.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9549095
    2008 : Priority provisional filed
    2009 : Application 12 642 275 filed by Kodak
    2012 : Kodak files Chapter 11
         : Patent Sale Agreement executed
    2013 : Kodak portfolio sold to IV Fund 83
    2017 : IV Fund 83 assigns to Monument Peak Ventures
         : Recorded March 2017
    2019 : California suit filed
    2023 : Release by Secured Party recorded

(Case link for 2019: California Central District Court 8:19-cv-02181; Federal Circuit 21-1052 — both reported by the patent record, substance unverified.)

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT. The patent moved from an operating camera maker (Kodak) to Intellectual Ventures Fund 83 LLC (a Las Vegas-registered IV acquisition vehicle) and then to Monument Peak Ventures, LLC, a single-purpose Texas LLC whose only business is holding and asserting patents. Monument Peak Ventures has no products in commerce; it is a known IV affiliate. Supported by the 2013 Kodak→IV Fund 83 sale and the 2017-02-15 IV Fund 83→Monument Peak assignment (document text retrieved).

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT. Intellectual Ventures is on essentially every public NPE directory (RPX, Unified Patents, Patent Progress). Monument Peak Ventures is an IV-affiliated assertion entity. This is the strongest signal in the chain — cite the IV Fund 83 acquisition and the 2017 transfer.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR. I could not retrieve the correspondent of record for any link. The only corresponding-attorney patterns I could evidence elsewhere in search results (e.g., "S. Kareff c/o Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP" on unrelated Acacia/Monarch recordings) do not belong to this chain and must not be imputed to it. No finding — data gap, not a negative.

4. Cascading transfers — PARTIAL. Two documented transfers (2013 Kodak→IV Fund 83; 2017 IV Fund 83→Monument Peak), spaced ~4 years apart, not the <24-month burst pattern. The 2023 securable-release entry is administrative, not a change of ownership. Weak/unclear.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT on the 2019 case. The IV→Monument Peak transfer executed 2017-02-15, roughly two years before the reported 2019 C.D. Cal. suit (8:19-cv-02181). That exceeds the 6-month window. I did not verify a transfer within 6 months of any specific first suit. Unclear/not established.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — PRESENT. Kodak's Chapter 11 (filed January 2012) and the court-approved $527M sale of ~1,100 digital-imaging patents to IV Fund 83 (Sale Agreement dated 2012-12-18). This is directly analogous to the Kodak/Nortel/Polaroid sale template named in the task. Strongest evidentiary signal.

7. Privateering — PARTIAL/PLAUSIBLE. The IV Fund 83 acquisition was funded by a consortium of operating companies (Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, etc.) that took grant-back licenses, while IV retained the right to assert the portfolio against non-members. That is the privateering structure — operating companies funding an NPE to hold patents they are licensed under but competitors are not. Evidence: the Kodak Form 8-K licensee-consortium disclosure. Note Apple separately took direct ownership of four of the Kodak patents (8,432,479; 8,432,472; 8,432,456; 8,432,461) per bvresources — a privateering-adjacent detail, though not for this patent.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — NOT PRESENT as a terminal state, but entangled. The chain does not terminate at RPX/AST/LOT/Unified/OIN as owner — and note that RPX co-organized the very purchase vehicle (IV Fund 83) that later spun the patent to Monument Peak Ventures. So the acquisition had defensive-aggregation characteristics for the funding consortium, yet the patent was not neutralized — it went out to an asserter. Present as a funding characteristic; absent as a neutralizing one.

Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

The patent was sold out of Kodak's Chapter 11 bankruptcy to Intellectual Ventures Fund 83 LLC (Patent Sale Agreement executed 2012-12-18; ~$527M portfolio sale), then assigned by that IV vehicle to Monument Peak Ventures, LLC on 2017-02-15, transferring "all ... causes of action and enforcement rights ... for past, current and future infringement." That combines two strong signals — a bankruptcy fire-sale into a known NPE (Intellectual Ventures) and a transfer to a single-purpose licensing LLC — with a documented assertion posture (C.D. Cal. 8:19-cv-02181 and CAFC 21-1052 reported on the patent record, substance unverified).

Two honest caveats: (1) I could not confirm reel/frame numbers or correspondents of record, so the repeat-correspondent signal is a data gap, not a finding; (2) the 2019 suit's connection to this specific patent number is reported-by-record only and I could not docket-verify it.

Verify at: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 9,549,095) and the indexed mirror https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html.

I'll research the cited references for US 9,549,095. Let me run targeted searches.

Let me get the complete citations list from the patent record.

I have the citation list. Let me now identify the references I need to confirm, running several searches in parallel.

Important scope and method note

I hit my search-budget limit before I could pull the full front page and specification of every cited reference. So this analysis has two confidence tiers:

• Tier A (verified in this session): the citation list itself, citation dates, and a handful of titles that appear verbatim in the specification of US 9,549,095.
• Tier B (not verified this session): the subject matter of the individual references. I will not invent titles or contents for references I could not confirm. Where I cannot confirm a reference's title/content, I say so explicitly and mark its § 102 analysis as provisional / unsupported.

Everything below uses the literal identifiers as they appear on the record. I have not auto-corrected any number.

1. The citation list for US 9,549,095 (verified)

Source: Justia patent page for 9,549,095 ("Referenced Cited") — https://patents.justia.com/patent/9549095 — cross-checked against the Google Patents record (which labels the set "Citations (27)").

U.S. patent documents (11)

U.S. patent application publications (9)

Foreign patent documents (9)

Discrepancy flag: Justia lists 29 items; Google Patents labels the group "Citations (27)." I cannot reconcile the two counts from the data I retrieved. Treat the list above as the Justia-reported set; the exact count on the face of the printed patent should be confirmed against the PDF.

Also note: the sibling patent US 10,419,714 cites two additional U.S. publications not on the 9,549,095 list — US 2002/0191079 (Kobayashi) and US 2004/0146313 (Uchizono). Those are not prior art citations of 9,549,095, so I exclude them from the § 102 analysis below.

2. Reference-by-reference analysis

Method caveat: 9,549,095 was allowed and granted, which means the examiner of record did not treat any of these references as anticipating claims 1/9/15. Any § 102 candidate below is therefore a re-examination / litigation question, not a statement about what the USPTO found. I flag the ones genuinely worth that scrutiny.

Tier A — references whose subject matter I can verify

US 3,971,065 — Bayer, "Color imaging array" (granted Jul. 20, 1976).
The classic Bayer color-filter-array patent; the 9,549,095 specification cites it by name and number for the camera's color-filter-array arrangement. § 102 relevance: none. It is background/sensor architecture and discloses nothing about transfer tracking or deletion. Potentially anticipates: none.

US 5,473,370 — Moronaga et al., "Electronic still-video camera, and playback apparatus thereof being capable of storing image data when the storage capacity of a memory card is exceeded" (granted Dec. 5, 1995). Title verified from the specification of 9,549,095.
This is the single most structurally relevant pre-2008 reference on the list: an electronic still-video camera that manages image data when the memory card is full. That is the same problem the asserted claims address (freeing memory for further capture).

• Potentially anticipates: claim 1 (and 9/15) only if it stores, in the camera, a record of images that were previously transferred to a remote device and gates deletion on that record. Its title speaks to storage on capacity overflow, not to remote-transfer tracking; on the face of it, it looks like a § 103 reference for the "make room in memory" idea rather than a § 102 anticipation. Provisional — I could not retrieve the full text.
• Potentially anticipates: claim 6/14/20 (deletion order based on a deletion criterion) and claim 7 (delete all / delete enough) if its overflow routine prioritizes by age or size. Same caveat.

US 6,292,218 — Parulski et al., "Electronic camera for initiating capture of still images while previewing motion images" (granted Sep. 18, 2001). Title verified from the specification.
Cited for preview-mode sensor operation. § 102 relevance: none to the deletion claims. Potentially anticipates: none.

US 6,784,924 — Ward et al., "Network configuration file for automatically transferring images from an electronic still camera" (granted Aug. 31, 2004). Title verified from the specification.
Cited in 9,549,095 for automatic transfer of images to network service providers via configurable network settings, and for on-camera display of provider feedback ("transfer in progress" / "transfer complete").

• Potentially anticipates: claim 4/12/18 (wireless connection / transfer over a wireless link) and the "communicating … to a remote storage device" step of claims 1/9/15. It is a strong § 103 reference for the transfer half of the claim. It does not, on its face, show storing transfer-state data locally and gating deletion on it — so not a clean § 102 anticipation of claims 1/9/15.

US 7,057,648 — Parulski et al., "Capturing digital images to be transferred to a service provider for storage" (granted Jun. 6, 2006). Title verified from the specification (cited as commonly assigned).
Discloses a camera with a wireless modem and a UI for selecting images to upload to a service provider and selecting who may view them.

• Potentially anticipates: the "communicate … to a remote storage device" limitation of claims 1/9/15 and claim 3/11/17 (transfer to a remote device). Again stronger as § 103 (transfer) than as § 102 (no transfer-tracking-plus-deletion gate shown).

US 7,369,164 — Parulski et al., "Using favorite digital images to organize and identify electronic albums" (granted May 6, 2008). Title verified from the specification (cited as commonly assigned).
Cited for content tagging ("favorites"/keyword metadata) at capture/review.

• Potentially anticipates: nothing in the independent claims. Marginal relevance to the tagging/state-data discussion only. The closest any claim gets is generic "data indicating which images…", which is not the same as a transfer-tracking record.

US 2005/0191729 A1 — Kaczmarek et al. The 9,549,095 specification refers to this family member as an "Image sensor with improved light sensitivity" application (the spec text attributes it to "Compton and Hamilton"; the publication lists Kaczmarek et al.). Note this inventor-name discrepancy as an internal inconsistency in the record — I have not resolved it.

• § 102 relevance: none (sensor color-pattern architecture). Potentially anticipates: none.

EP 1 339 214 (published Aug. 2003). The 9,549,095 specification cites this by number twice, describing it as disclosing camera "profiles" with an "image deletion preference" — i.e., an indication whether files should be deleted after being transferred from the camera to a host computer.
This is, on its face, the closest thing on the list to the core concept of claims 1/9/15 ("delete images after they have been transferred"), and the most serious § 102/§ 103 candidate.

• Potentially anticipates: claim 1 / 9 / 15 and claim 7 ("all … previously transferred … are deleted") if the preference is stored in the camera and drives an actual deletion of transferred files. Critical open question: whether it discloses storing per-image transfer-indication data in the image capture device and deleting in response to a received deletion indication, or merely a user-set preference to auto-delete. That distinction is exactly the lynchpin limitation identified in the earlier section, and I could not verify it this session. Flag for full-text review.

Tier B — references I could NOT verify this session (no fabricated titles/contents)

For the following, I have only the number, date, and inventor(s) from the record. I am not supplying a title or subject matter, and any § 102 mapping would be speculation:

• US 6,885,395 (Rabbani et al.), Apr. 26, 2005 — not verified.
• US 7,295,230 (Takahashi et al.), Nov. 13, 2007 — not verified.
• US 7,330,207 (Ohmori), Feb. 12, 2008 — not verified.
• US 7,605,849 (Hatanaka), Oct. 20, 2009 — not verified (note: post-dates the 2008-12-18 priority date as a grant, but its underlying filing may predate it; verify the filing date before treating it as prior art).
• US 8,166,098 (Reardon), Apr. 24, 2012 — not verified. Same caution: the grant post-dates the priority date; only a pre-2008-12-18 filing (or an earlier publication) would make it available as prior art.
• US 2002/0176005 (Okamoto et al.), US 2003/0012566 (Kindaichi), US 2006/0226232 (Helkio et al.), US 2006/0282472 (Ng et al.), US 2007/0129058 (Landschaft et al.), US 2007/0285714 (Hirayama et al.), US 2008/0158367 (Ohmura et al.), US 2009/0033748 (Ejima et al.) — none verified. Two (US 2008/0158367 and US 2009/0033748) publish after the 2008-12-18 priority date and would require an earlier effective filing/priority to qualify as prior art.
• EP 1 176 538, JP 2002-094858, JP 2002-369120, JP 2003-023593, JP 2005-269333, JP 2007-081741, JP 2007-243568, WO 2006/134933 — none verified.

3. Bottom line on § 102 anticipation

Mapping the claim requirements to what I can actually confirm:

Overall: On the record as retrieved, no cited reference is a clean § 102 anticipation of independent claims 1, 9, or 15. The citations read as a mix of (i) camera/sensor background art (US 3,971,065; US 6,292,218; US 2005/0191729), (ii) image-transfer/upload art (US 6,784,924; US 7,057,648), (iii) tagging art (US 7,369,164), and (iv) memory-full/deletion art (US 5,473,370; EP 1 339 214). The inventive weight of 9,549,095 sits in the combination — a locally stored per-image transfer record that gates deletion of already-transferred images — which is why the art reads as § 103 fodder rather than § 102.

4. Explicit uncertainties / things to verify next

1. EP 1 339 214 is the reference to pull in full. It is the only cited document the specification itself ties to "delete after transfer," so it is the one that could conceivably anticipate claims 1/7. I could not verify its disclosure.
2. US 5,473,370 needs full-text review for any transfer-tracking (vs. pure capacity-overflow) teaching.
3. Effective prior-art dates. Several grants/publications on the list post-date the 2008-12-18 priority date (US 7,605,849; US 8,166,098; US 2008/0158367; US 2009/0033748; EP 1 339 214 is the 2003 publication of a likely earlier EP application, and JP 2007-* items are 2007). Only their pre-2008 filings/family publications count. Verify each.
4. The 27-vs-29 citation count discrepancy between Google Patents and Justia.
5. Reference diversity note: many of these are commonly assigned Eastman Kodak / Intellectual Ventures family documents (US 3,971,065; US 6,292,218; US 7,057,648; US 7,369,164; US 2005/0191729), so they function as inventor-background citations. That does not change their prior-art effect, but it explains the composition of the list.
6. This is a continuation of 14/250,689 → 12/642,275. If you need the complete prior-art picture for validity purposes (e.g., for the reported CAFC 21-1052 and C.D. Cal. 8:19-cv-02181 matters), also collect the references cited during prosecution of US 8,730,351 and US 8,964,064, which may not fully overlap with the 9,549,095 list.

I could not retrieve docket-level detail on either litigation this session, so I make no statement about whether any of these references has been asserted in a validity challenge to 9,549,095.

I'll retrieve the full prior-art citation list from the patent record, since the provided text truncates it mid-list.

The citation list is truncated in my source. Let me try to retrieve the full "Citations (27)" list.

I found a highly relevant candidate (US 2005/0283356 A1) and the PCT search-report references. Let me pin down the full citation list and verify these documents.

Obviousness Analysis — US 9,549,095 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Before the analysis, two required flags (per my operating rules):

1. Date contradiction. This task states "Current Date: April 26, 2026"; the system context for this session states today is 2026-09-29 and the patent record was fetched 2026-09-29. I use the system date for "as-of" statements. Nothing in the analysis turns on the difference.
2. Incomplete prior-art list — material limitation. The "Prior Art" section of the page I was given truncates its "Citations (27)" list after US 6,292,218 B1. I was able to verify only the first few entries verbatim (US 3,971,065; US 5,473,370; US 6,292,218) plus references cited in the specification and the family's international search report. I could not retrieve the remaining references in the face list. Where I use a reference below, I say whether it is (A) confirmed on the face of the record / ISR, (B) cited-in-description, or (C) additional materially relevant art found this session. I do not represent that (C) items are on the '095 face.

1. Legal framework and the applicable § 103 standard

Pre-AIA vs. AIA. Application 14/592,274 was filed 2015-01-08, but every claim is a continuation claim entitled to the 2008-12-18 provisional (61/138,729) via 12/642,275 → 14/250,689. On that assumption pre-AIA § 102/§ 103 apply. That matters practically: an applicant's own commonly assigned Kodak references (below) are available as § 102(b) art, and there is no § 102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership shield.

Critical dates. For § 102(b)/§ 103, the statutory-bar date is one year before the U.S. filing date. Even resolving the provisional-benefit question conservatively, all references relied on below published/issued well before 2008-12-18, so their prior-art status is not date-sensitive. Some (Wang '356, 2005-12-22; Kodak '957, 2006-03-21) are § 102(b) art on either measurement.

Level of ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA). A person having a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering or computer science (or equivalent), with ~2–3 years of experience in digital camera firmware, removable-memory file systems, or image-transfer/asset-management software, or equivalent experience. This is a mature, incremental, engineering-driven art — a factor favoring obviousness under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007).

Governing test. Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) — (1) scope/content of the prior art; (2) differences between the prior art and the claims; (3) PHOSITA level; (4) objective indicia. Under KSR, a combination is obvious where the references address the same problem, the combination is of known elements according to known methods with predictable results, and there is an articulated reason (design incentive, market pressure, common sense).

2. Claim 1 element-by-element chart

Claim 1 (method) requires: (a) communicating ≥1 of a plurality of captured images in an image-capture-device memory to a remote storage device; (b) storing in the image capture device data indicating which images were communicated; (c) deleting from memory images that were previously transferred, in response to receiving an indication that such images are to be deleted.

Primary reference — US 2005/0283356 A1 (Wang; HTC Corp.), "Data management method" (pub. 2005-12-22; App. 11/045,054, filed 2005-01-31; TW priority 2004-06-16)

URL: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050283356 · https://patents.justia.com/patent/20050283356

Assessment: Wang '356 discloses every element of claim 1. If the "indication" limitation is read to cover a user command (Wang cl. 3) or the memory-full/connection signal (Wang ¶[0035]), Wang alone anticipates claim 1 under pre-AIA § 102(b) — and a fortiori renders it obvious under § 103. I note this both ways because an examiner or court that reads "receiving an indication" narrowly may prefer the § 103 framing, in which case Wang is still the primary reference and the only question is whether any claimed nuance is missing.

Motivation to combine (for the multi-reference grounds below):

• Same problem, expressly stated. Wang's background ([0006]) describes precisely the '095 problem: "the user may have a problem recalling which pictures in the digital camera have already been saved on the personal computer and therefore may be deleted, and which ones haven't… the user may accidentally delete images that should have been retained."
• Same field and same device. Both are digital-camera file-management inventions; Wang cl. 7–8, 17 name "digital camera, PDA, or camera mobile telephone."
• Known elements, known methods, predictable result. Marking a transferred file and deleting marked files is a data-management logic operation; combining it with wireless/wired transfer media, menu presentation, or a deletion-ordering rule involves no change in principle (KSR).
• No teaching away. Nothing in Wang discourages wireless transfer, remote initiation, or ordered deletion; Wang itself lists WiFi/Bluetooth/Internet as transfer media (cl. 10, ¶[0027]).

3. Grounds of rejection by claim

Independent claims 1, 9, 15

Ground 1A (primary): Wang '356, alone or in view of the knowledge of a PHOSITA — anticipates/renders obvious claim 1, and by direct correspondence claims 9 (system: processing unit 94 + detection unit 92 + cleaning unit 98) and 15 (instructions). Wang's FIG. 11 block diagram maps cleanly onto the claim 9 "memory, user interface, and processing system" architecture (the camera's own controls and cleaning unit supply the user interface and deletion logic).

Claims 2/10/16 — indication from the device's own user interface

Ground 1B: Wang cl. 3 and cl. 5 ("the user deletes data files with the first marker … by a command when deleting data files in the data capture/storage device") and ¶[0031] (user "execute[s] the delete function in the digital camera 14"). In the alternative, add the '095's own admitted-art reference EP 1 339 214 (Kodak) (Tier B), which the specification characterizes as disclosing an "image deletion preference" governing deletion after transfer. Obvious because presenting a delete command on the camera is the natural, disclosed user interaction for the Wang marker scheme.

Claims 4/12/18 — wireless connection

Ground 1C: Wang cl. 10, 19 expressly recite the transfer medium "is wired, wireless, USB …, Firewire …, a serial cable, WiFi wireless, Bluetooth wireless, or Internet," and ¶[0027] expands on this. In the alternative or additionally, US 7,057,648 (Kodak, "Capturing digital images to be transferred to a service provider for storage") (Tier B, cited in the '095 specification as the source for a camera wireless modem plus a user interface for selecting images to upload). Motivation: a camera that automatically backs up images to a PC/server benefits from cable-free operation; wireless transfer removes the manual cable/card-reader step and is a predictable substitution (KSR).

Claims 5/13/19 — wired connection

Ground 1D: Wang cl. 10, 19 (USB/Firewire/serial). The '095 specification itself frames wired USB 2.0 as the baseline (wired interface 326), so no inventive weight attaches to it. Motivation: backward compatibility with existing camera-to-PC cabling and the recharging-USB embodiment Wang expressly contemplates (cl. 11).

Claims 6/14/20 — deletion order governed by a "deletion criterion"

This is the one element not squarely disclosed by Wang '356. Two routes:

Ground 2A: Wang '356 in view of US 7,015,957 B2 (Malloy Desormeaux, Eastman Kodak; "Camera that downloads electronic images having metadata identifying images previously excluded from first in-first out overwriting," filed 2001-09-04; Tier C, found this session, NOT confirmed on the '095 face). '957 discloses a camera that overwrites untagged images on a first-in-first-out basis while retaining tagged images — i.e., age-ordered, oldest-first selection of which stored images to remove. Motivation: when only some previously-transferred images must be removed to reach a target free-space buffer (the '095 FIG. 6 embodiment), a PHOSITA would adopt the well-known FIFO/oldest-first rule (or its counterpart, largest-file-first, when the goal is to free space fastest). Predictable result, no change in principle.

Ground 2B: Wang '356 in view of US 5,473,370 (Fuji Photo Film; "Electronic still-video camera, and playback apparatus thereof being capable of storing image data when the storage capacity of a memory card is exceeded"; Tier A — confirmed in the visible, truncated face-citation list of the '095 record). '370 is directly on the "memory card full / capacity exceeded" trigger that motivates the '095 FIG. 6 automatic deletion mode. Caveat: I could not retrieve the full text of '370 in this session, so I do not assert its specific deletion-ordering disclosure; it is offered for the capacity-exceeded/vacate-space teaching and as the examiner-of-record's own art.

Whichever secondary reference is used, the remaining recitation — "an order … is based on a deletion criterion" — is a functional result, and both oldest-first and largest-first are the two criteria the '095 itself names as alternatives, which is a hallmark of an obvious design choice among a finite set of predictable options (KSR; In re Aller).

Claims 7 and 8 — "all messages"/"selected messages" previously transferred

(Note: these claims recite "messages" while the independent claims recite "images." I quote them literally and do not auto-correct — see Flags.)

Ground 1E (claim 7 — all): Wang cl. 2/13 and ¶[0031] — the delete function removes all files carrying the first marker.

Ground 1F (claim 8 — selected): Wang cl. 4, 5, 14, 15 — a second marker is added to certain files and "the data files with the second marker are not deleted even if also marked with the first marker." That is precisely selective deletion of a subset of previously-transferred files. To the extent "selected" contemplates user-picked individual files, add EP 1 339 214 (Tier B) and the ordinary Review-Mode delete of a currently displayed image described in the '095 specification itself (block 140).

Claims 9–14 (system) and 15–20 (CRM)

These mirror the method claims element-for-element; the same grounds apply. Wang FIG. 11 (detection unit 92, processing unit 94, transfer unit 96, cleaning unit 98) supplies the claimed "processing system," and the software claims are met by the program instructions that implement Wang's marker-and-delete logic — a generic computer-readable medium implementing a known method is obvious under KSR/routine-implementation reasoning.

4. Summary table

5. Where § 103 is weakest (honest assessment)

• Claims 3/11/17 — "indication … received from a remote device." Wang '356 discloses a connection signal generated by the detection unit 92, and user commands, but I did not find, in the art I could retrieve, a clean teaching of deletion initiated by a remote host. This is the only limitation family for which I cannot presently state a verified § 103 combination. Rejection here would likely require finding a reference disclosing server-/PC-initiated deletion of camera-resident files (a plausible candidate class: PC-side image-transfer/synchronization software, or the service-provider direction of US 7,057,648) — and note that the '095 specification does not appear to describe a remote-initiated deletion embodiment at all, which raises a written-description/enablement question independent of § 103.
• Claims 7 and 8's "messages." Because these dependents recite "messages" while every independent claim recites "images," they are arguably indefinite/unsupported as to "messages." If read as "images," Grounds 1E/1F apply.
• Claim 1's "in response to receiving an indication" is the pivot. If construed to require an indication signal generated independent of the delete actuation itself, Wang's automatic "memory is full" branch (¶[0035]) and connection signal still meet it; if construed as the delete command, Wang cl. 3 meets it directly. I do not see a construction that escapes Wang.

Objective indicia (§ 103 prong 4). I found no evidence of unexpected results, long-felt unmet need, industry praise, or copying in the record I retrieved. The art was crowded (Kodak, Fuji, HTC, and others all in the same "transfer-then-delete-to-free-space" space), which cuts against nonobviousness. The family's litigation (see Flags) is not itself evidence of nonobviousness.

6. Flags and uncertainty register

• Face citation list incomplete. I could retrieve only part of the "Citations (27)" list. Confirmed-by-title entries include US 3,971,065 (Bayer CFA), US 5,473,370 (Fuji), US 6,292,218 (Kodak preview). The deletion-relevant remainder is unknown to me. Wang '356 is a Tier-C reference I identified as highly material; I could NOT confirm it appears on the '095 face or in its ISR.
• ISR references I could name but not read. The international search report for the family's PCT (PCT/US2010/058813, WO 2011/075323 A1; see the family annex in JP 2013-514735 A) lists: US 2003/012566 A1; EP 1 176 538 A2; US 2002/176005 A1; US 2006/282472 A1; US 2007/129058 A1. These were before the ISA, but I could not retrieve their disclosures and therefore make no mapping claim. URL: http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/f8/86/81/4874feade18e54/JP2013514735A.pdf
• Citing-family documents are NOT prior art. The "Families Citing this family" entries (e.g., US 8,587,693, IBM; US 9,396,464, NCR) all post-date 2008-12-18. Do not use them as § 103 art.
• Litigation. As previously reported, I found no 2026 CAFC activity for this patent; the record shows CAFC 21-1052 (2021) and C.D. Cal. 8:19-cv-02181, neither verified on the merits here. The header "current date" mismatch is flagged in the preamble.
• Interchangeability of "communicated"/"transferred." I treat them as synonymous per the specification; if a court distinguishes them, Ground 1A mapping is unaffected because Wang uses both "transfer"/"copy" and "backup" for the same operation.

Bottom line: Claim 1 (and mirroring claims 9 and 15) is, on the record retrieved, anticipated or at minimum obvious over US 2005/0283356 A1 (Wang/HTC) alone. The dependent claims fall to straightforward secondary combinations (Wang with Kodak US 7,015,957 and/or Fuji US 5,473,370 for deletion ordering; Wang with Kodak US 7,057,648 for wireless; Wang with Kodak EP 1 339 214 for the device-side deletion preference). The only limitations I cannot presently ground are the "remote-device indication" of claims 3/11/17, which remain the strongest nonobviousness argument available to the patent owner — and which carry an independent § 112 written-description risk.