US 9875009

I'll research this specific patent across USPTO records and CAFC 2026 dockets.

US Patent 9,875,009 B2 — Analyst Summary

Sources consulted: the authoritative full text of US 9,875,009 B2 at patents.google.com; the USPTO/Google Patents PDF cover page (patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/…/US9875009.pdf); Unified Patents portal; the pre-grant publication US 2015/0220263 A1 (Justia); PACER/CourtListener docket aggregation.

1. Bibliographic data

Uncertainty note: the §154(b) adjustment (454 days) and the terminal disclaimer are both stated on the face of the patent, so the operative expiration is bounded by the terminal disclaimer and the parent's term rather than by the arithmetic of 20 years from 2015. Treat the 2030‑08‑09 date as Google's estimate, not an adjudicated legal conclusion.

2. Abstract (verbatim substance)

A computing system provides a graphical user interface having hierarchically-organized control galleries… The graphical user interface contains a document area and a control ribbon. The document area contains at least a portion of a document that a user is editing. The control ribbon includes a class control gallery. The class control gallery includes a plurality of class controls associated with different classes of related commands. The computing system displays a variation control gallery containing variation controls in a class associated with a selected one of the class controls. In response to a selection of a variation control in the variation control gallery, the computing system applies a command associated with the variation control to a document in the document area.

3. Plain-language overview of the independent claims

The patent has three independent claims, one per statutory category. I have verbatim claim text for claims 1–15 (from the Google Patents claim listing and the matching pre-grant publication text). Claim 20's exact wording is stated below at lower confidence, reconstructed from the third enumerated embodiment in the specification and from the corresponding claim in the related family publication.

Claim 1 — Method (two-tier "gallery" UI for slide transitions)

1. Display a GUI with a document area (showing part of a document being edited) and a control ribbon.
2. The ribbon has a first, horizontal control gallery of class controls. Each class control represents a different class of commands, has a class icon graphically describing that class, and each class is a subset of an overall command set.
3. Receive selection of a class control.
4. In response, display a preview of a default slide transition effect (STE) associated with that class control. (This preview-on-selection limitation, plus the horizontal/vertical geometry, is the notable delta over the parent patent's claims.)
5. Receive a class selection input while the first gallery is displayed.
6. After that, display a second, vertical control gallery containing variation controls, each tied to a different command within the selected class, each with a variation icon describing its command.
7. Receive selection of a variation control, and in response display a preview of a default STE associated with it.
8. Receive a variation selection input while the second gallery is displayed.
9. Modify the document in response.

Claim 1 is thus a two-level drill-down: pick a class of transition (e.g., "Wipe"), then pick a variation within that class (e.g., wipe left-to-right vs. top-to-bottom), with preview-on-selection at both levels.

Claim 15 — Electronic computing system (same architecture, in apparatus form)

An electronic system comprising a display device, a processing unit (≥1 integrated circuit) and a data storage system whose instructions cause the system to:

• Display the GUI (document area + control ribbon with a first horizontal control gallery of class controls, each with a class icon, each class a subset of related commands);
• Receive selection of a class control and, in response, display a preview of a default STE;
• Receive class selection input;
• Modify the document by executing a default command of the selected class — i.e., the class pick alone immediately applies something;
• Thereafter display a second vertical control gallery of variation controls for the selected class, and — importantly — not containing any variation controls from classes other than the selected class;
• Receive a variation-control selection and, in response, display a preview of a default STE for that variation;
• Receive a variation selection input while the second gallery is shown; and
• Modify the document in response.

Claim 15's distinguishing limitations include the "default command executes on class selection" step and the negative limitation that the second gallery contains no other classes' controls.

Claim 20 — Computer-readable data storage medium (transitions-tab implementation) — lower confidence on exact wording

A CRM storing instructions causing a system to display a GUI in which:

• The document area shows the current slide of a slideshow document stored as XML elements;
• The control ribbon has selectable tabs, including a Transitions tab containing (a) a class control gallery of class controls (each with a textual class title and a class icon, each class a subset of an overall command set, each command having a different target STE) and (b) an options control with a title and icon;
• On class selection input, a selection indicator is displayed around the selected class control;
• On options-control selection input, a popup frame is displayed containing a variation control gallery (each variation control with a title and an icon naming/describing a different command in the selected class);
• On variation selection input, the options-control icon is updated to graphically describe the target STE, and the slideshow document is modified to add a STE XML element as a child of the current slide's XML element — where that STE element identifies the selected class and carries attributes specifying parameters of the target STE; and
• A slideshow is then presented using the document as input.

The XML data-model point is the technical core here: all STEs within a class share one XML element type and are differentiated only by attributes, because the class's target STEs share a common set of primitives.

4. Dependent-claim themes (claims 2–14, 16–19)

• Popup-frame modality vs. ribbon-inline presentation of the second gallery (claims 3, 5).
• Options control enablement and dynamic icon updating (claims 2, 4).
• Slideshow/STE-specific mapping, including the shared-primitives-per-class limitation and the STE XML child-element mechanism (claims 6–8).
• Application to in-slide object animation effects rather than slide transitions (claim 9).
• Executing a default command upon class selection (claim 11).
• Persistent dual selection indicators — the variation indicator is shown without removing the class indicator (claim 12).
• Post-modification slideshow presentation (claim 13); textual names on controls (claim 14).

5. Litigation / docket check (as requested)

No CAFC 2026 docket, appeal, or Federal Circuit opinion citing or involving US 9,875,009 was located in the searches performed. Google Patents displays a "family has litigation" indicator via a Darts‑IP link (family 43069515), which reflects the broad international family (including EP 2 430 515, CN 102422255, KR 101686691/101733943, JP 5597698/5905541, etc.) rather than a confirmed US case. Practitioner commentary (Gibson Dunn's June 2026 Federal Circuit update and the 2026 Microsoft dockets surfaced in searching — QOMPLX, ParTec, MIT, Snowflake ITM, Semantic Engines, Dayal Family, GADMI, Algebraix) involves other patent numbers and does not implicate 9,875,009. Because PACER is paywalled and dockets lag, I cannot rule out an unlisted or sealed matter at high confidence — treat "no identified 2026 CAFC docket" as a search result, not a legal conclusion.

6. Notes on identifier handling

• The patent number was interpreted literally as 9,875,009 throughout; no similar-number substitutes (e.g., 9,046,983 — the parent — or 8,875,009) were treated as the subject patent.
• The related parent, US 9,046,983 B2 (App. 12/464,584), shares the title, inventors, and assignee but has a different issued claim set — it is a different patent, cited here only as the continuity reference.
• One OCR artifact in the classification block renders a CPC entry as "G06F 1/724"; the corresponding modern CPC in the same class family is G06F 40/166 (the reclassified successor to G06F 17/24). I flag this rather than silently correcting the printed string.

Confidence summary: bibliographic data, abstract, and claims 1–15 — high (drawn from the authoritative full text). Claim 20's precise wording — moderate; based on the specification's third embodiment and the corresponding family claim, not a verbatim read of the issued claim. Litigation status — high confidence that no 2026 CAFC matter was found, moderate confidence that none exists.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 9875009 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases and the specific patent family.

Let me search additional litigation-specific sources and check the family litigation indicator noted in the patent record.

Summary of Findings: Litigation Involving U.S. Patent No. 9,875,009

I was unable to identify any confirmed litigation specifically involving U.S. Patent No. 9,875,009 ("Hierarchically-organized control galleries," Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC).

What I searched

• General web searches for "US9875009" / "9,875,009" combined with litigation, lawsuit, patent infringement, courtlistener, and asserted.
• Unified Patents patent portal page for US‑9875009‑B2 (portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-9875009-B2).
• Searches for the assignee/plaintiff and subject matter (Microsoft Technology Licensing, slide transition effects, control galleries).
• The Google Patents family record (Family ID 43069515) and the Darts‑ip family link.

Result

No case — plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or status — could be verified from searchable sources. I found no PACER/CAFC docket, no Unified Patents litigation entry, and no district-court or PTAB proceeding naming the '009 patent. I cannot list any litigation without fabricating case details, so I will not.

One important caveat — the family litigation flag

The Google Patents record for this family carries an automated notation:

"Family has litigation / First worldwide family litigation filed"
linked to https://patents.darts-ip.com/?family=43069515...

This is a generic algorithmic flag on the patent family, and per Google's own disclaimer it is an assumption, not a legal conclusion. Critically, it does not necessarily refer to U.S. Patent 9,875,009 itself. The family (ID 43069515) includes multiple members — the parent U.S. Patent No. 9,046,983 (app. 12/464,584), US 2015/0220263 A1, and foreign counterparts such as EP 2430515, CN 102422255, KR 101686691 / 101733943, JP 5597698, CA 2758307, among others. The flagged litigation could pertain to any of these, and may be a foreign proceeding (e.g., an EP opposition or national action) rather than a U.S. lawsuit. I could not resolve the Darts‑ip entry to a specific case.

Note on false positives encountered

Several search hits containing similar numbers were not about this patent and should be disregarded:

• U.S. Patent 5,987,500 — SAP America, Inc. v. Pi-Net International, Inc., IPR2013-00195 (different patent entirely).
• A " '987 patent" referenced in ABS Global, Inc. v. Inguran, LLC (sperm-sorting patents) — unrelated.
• "9875009" appearing as an Edgar/SEC filing identifier for Ellington Financial Inc., and as a DICOM/Darts registry code — unrelated.

Bottom line

Based on the sources available to me, there is no known, verifiable litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 9,875,009. I state this with the express qualification that (a) a family-level litigation indicator exists on Google Patents/Darts‑ip that I could not resolve, and (b) absence of a result in the databases I could reach is not proof that no case exists. To confirm, the authoritative next steps would be to run the '009 patent (and the family) against PACER/RECAP (CourtListener), the Unified Patents litigation caselist, Darts‑ip family 43069515, and the USPTO PTAB proceeding search — none of which I was able to fully query within the limits of this session.

I'll start by checking the structured data default against what web sources show for this patent's PTAB history.

Initial searches surface no PTAB hits. Let me try more targeted queries to make sure I'm not missing an unindexed proceeding.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 9,875,009. The canonical USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) structured block returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceedings for this patent, and the web searches I ran surfaced no proceeding number naming US 9,875,009 or its parent, US 9,046,983 — no petitions, no institution decisions, no Final Written Decisions, no Federal Circuit appeals. Breakdown by status: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials.

Bottom line for a defendant: this patent has never been tested at the PTAB. It is not "hardened" — it is unexamined in the AIA-trial sense. That is a double-edged signal: the owner has no PTAB win to point to, but you also have no free-kill FWD to cite, and no estoppel has been generated that constrains anyone's invalidity case. Any challenge you bring would be a first impression on this specification and these claim terms before the Board.

Proceedings

None.

No qualifying proceeding exists to report. Per the constraints of this task, I will not manufacture a proceeding number, panel, or disposition. For completeness, the fields a defendant would normally expect are addressed below in the "why is this patent clean" analysis rather than filled with invented data.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all 20 claims UNTESTED. Claims 1–20 of US 9,875,009 have never been construed, instituted against, or adjudicated by the Board. Nothing has been canceled; nothing has been sustained through an FWD; everything is untested. The claim set is the ordinary 20-claim set of the '009 patent, with claim 1 as the principal independent method claim (reciting a first horizontal control gallery of class controls, a second vertical control gallery of variation controls, and cursor-hover previews of default STEs) and claims 10, 11, 12 layered below it as method/structural dependents. If a demand letter cites claim 1, that citation is not vulnerable to a "the claim is already dead" attack — but it is equally not backed by any Board validation of the claim's scope.

The patent's own posture. US 9,875,009 issued 2018-01-23 on application 14/665,112 (filed 2015-03-23) as a continuation of 12/464,584, now US 9,046,983, with a priority date of 2009-05-12. That is a pre-AIA priority chain. The '009 patent carries a statutory disclaimer notice and a 454-day PTA; Google Patents lists adjusted expiration 2030-08-09, assignee Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC. The Google Patents page for the family carries a "Family has litigation" flag and a Darts-IP link (family 43069515), which means the family has been litigated somewhere — but that is a district-court / foreign-court signal, not a PTAB signal, and the flag does not identify a US district case on the '009 patent itself. I could not verify the specific litigation from the sources I retrieved, so treat the litigation flag as a lead to run down, not an established fact.

Estoppel landscape: empty. Because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted, § 315(e)(2) estoppel has never attached to anyone on this patent. There is no petitioner, no privy, and no set of "grounds raised or reasonably could have been raised" that any defendant is barred from using in district court. Every § 102/§ 103 ground based on patents and printed publications is fully available to any defendant today. Conversely, if you file the first IPR, you will be the one who later wears the estoppel — so ground selection in a first petition carries unusual weight here, because you cannot rely on a prior petitioner's institution decision to have narrowed the field.

Pattern signals: none on this patent. No serial petitioner, no repeat filer, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents, RPX, or similar) in the chain for this patent number that I could surface. CBM is also foreclosed: the transitional covered-business-method program sunset for new petitions on 2020-09-16, so the "graphical user interface" subject matter of this patent is not a CBM candidate anymore. That leaves IPR (and, for any post-AIA continuation claims, PGR) as the only AIA-trial avenue.

Recommended next steps

1. Do not represent to a court or a client that this patent has been invalidated. It has not. Any argument built on a nonexistent FWD is sanction-risk.
2. Confirm the negative before filing anything. Re-check the Board's public docket directly: the PTAB End-to-End (PTAB E2E) system at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/ and the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board Decisions page, searching both US 9,875,009 and its parent US 9,046,983. A petition filed in the last ~60–90 days may not yet appear in the ODP ingest reflected in the structured block.
3. Run down the litigation flag. The Google Patents family page (https://patents.google.com/patent/US9875009/en) flags family litigation (Darts-IP family 43069515). Identify the actual US district case(s) and defendants — an adverse judgment there could independently generate § 315(e)(1) estoppel or an invalidity holding that is more useful to you than any FWD.
4. If you are a defendant considering the first IPR: map the specification's primitive-based taxonomy closely. The '009 patent describes its own classification scheme — STE commands grouped by the shared set of primitives used to implement their target effects, with the same family of STE commands represented in the document as a single XML element type differentiated by attributes (see the '009 written description re: adding a STE element as a child of the slide XML element). That admission-rich passage is the natural § 103 hook and the natural written-description/enablement attack surface. Sourcing prior art from the 2006–2009 Office-era ribbon-and-gallery UI art, and from the applicant's own admitted prior-art discussion, is the obvious first pass.
5. Trial-stage deadlines: not applicable — there is no instituted proceeding and therefore no § 316(a)(11) one-year FWD clock running against anyone.

Caveat on my verification. My web verification here was limited: I ran a first batch of four searches and a second batch of four, three of which were cut off before returning results. I found no PTAB activity, and I found no contrary evidence. But "no evidence of a proceeding in the searches I completed" is weaker than "the ODP confirms zero proceedings" — and the ODP confirmation is exactly what the structured block supplies. On the record before me, the correct answer is the default: no PTAB activity on file.

I'll research the assignment record and litigation history for US 9875009.

Let me dig into the litigation history and the Microsoft-to-MTL transfer specifics.

Let me look for the specific reel/frame records and any litigation involving this patent.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 9,875,009 B2

Coverage note up front: I was able to confirm the identity of the parties and dates of the recorded conveyances from Google Patents legal events, the printed patent front page, and the parent's file, but I was not able to retrieve the specific reel/frame numbers or the correspondent of record for the recorded assignments from the sources accessible in this session (the Assignment Center is an interactive search that I could not query directly, and the indexed results did not surface reel/frame or correspondent fields for this patent). I flag every place where a reel/frame citation would normally go; nothing below is fabricated. Treat reel/frame and correspondent as "not retrieved — verify at the Assignment Center," not as "absent."

Inventors

Four named inventors. For US 9,875,009 (application 14/665,112, filed 2015-03-23), the residence data on the face of the patent is:

Employer at time of filing: All four were Microsoft personnel working on the PowerPoint / Office ribbon-transitions feature set. This is not a guess from the subject matter alone — the recorded assignment chain has the inventors assigning to Microsoft Corporation (Google Patents legal event, 2015-03-24; originally for the 2009 parent as well), which is direct evidence of an employment/obligation-to-assign relationship with Microsoft at filing.

Unusual pattern — flagged:

• The inventors' residences drifted away from Microsoft's Redmond/Seattle hub between the 2009 parent filing and the 2015 continuation — most notably Jason Xiaobo Zhao moved to Lexington, KY and Julie Ann Guinn moved from Seattle to Mountain View, CA (Google, in Mountain View, is a natural pull for Office-adjacent UI talent). This looks like post-filing attrition from Microsoft, but I have no evidence (no 12-month-departure confirmation, no portfolio fire-sale) tying it to anything. It is a residence change on a continuation cover sheet, nothing more. I am explicitly not treating this as a troll signal — it is the classic false positive the instructions warn about.
• The 2015 filing is a continuation of 12/464,584 — a normal Microsoft re-filing practice to keep a family alive as claims were narrowed, not an assignment event in itself.

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent ('009): Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC (MTL), One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, as the (71) applicant / (73) assignee.
• Original assignee of the invention (2009): Microsoft Corporation — the parent, US 9,046,983, and the inventor assignments both trace to Microsoft Corporation.
• Product embodiment — yes, strongly. The claims read on the PowerPoint slide-transition / Effect Options gallery (hierarchical class gallery + variation gallery, FIG. 2–4; claims 1, 6, 8, 15–18). The specification names the Microsoft PowerPoint presentation graphics program directly. Microsoft's Office / PowerPoint product line ships functionality within the claim scope.
• Primary line of business: Microsoft is a diversified operating company (software, cloud, devices). MTL is its wholly-owned patent-holding and licensing subsidiary, formed in 2014 and headquartered at One Microsoft Way — not an arm's-length shell. It is Microsoft's patent monetization vehicle (the entity behind Microsoft's Android/OEM licensing program), but it employs staff and holds the entire Microsoft portfolio rather than a single harvested patent.
• Current status: Operating. No bankruptcy, dissolution, or acquisition event.

Assignment timeline

Chronological, from the legal events recorded against the '009 application (Google Patents) plus the parent-file context. Reel/frame and correspondent could not be retrieved — flagged in each entry.

• 2009-05-12 (executed)/ recorded c. 2009 — Parent US 9,046,983, application 12/464,584 filed; inventors assign to Microsoft Corporation.

  • Conveyance: Assignment (inventor → employer)
  • Assignor: Zhao, Guinn, Hill, Pearson
  • Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — verify.
  • Context: internal / standard employee assignment; establishes Microsoft's original title.

• 2015-03-24 (recorded) — Reel/Frame: not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: ZHAO, JASON XIAOBO; PEARSON, MARK; GUINN, JULIE ANN; HILL, RYAN CHARLES
  • Assignee: MICROSOFT CORPORATION
  • Correspondent: not retrieved. Note: other Microsoft filings in the same era used in-house Law & Corporate Affairs staff (e.g., a Wolfe-SBMC / Redmond-WA correspondent and Microsoft paralegals) — but I could NOT attribute a specific correspondent to this reel/frame, so this is context only, not a finding.
  • Context: internal / standard employee assignment for the 2015 continuation of the same family.

• 2015-03-24 (recorded) — Reel/Frame: not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment (entire right, title, interest)
  • Assignor: MICROSOFT CORPORATION
  • Assignee: MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: internal corporate reorg / intra-group transfer — Microsoft's 2014–2016 program of moving the portfolio into its wholly-owned licensing subsidiary. Not a sale to a third party; same corporate parent controls both sides.

That is the entire recorded chain: two intra-Microsoft links on 2015-03-24 (inventors → Microsoft Corp → MTL). There is no recorded assignment of the '009 patent to any outside party. If any further links exist they would appear as later reel/frame entries at the Assignment Center; I found none.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9875009
    2009 : Parent application filed
         : Inventors assign to Microsoft Corp
    2014 : Microsoft forms MTL subsidiary
    2015 : Continuation application filed
         : Inventors assign to Microsoft Corp
         : Microsoft Corp assigns to MTL
    2018 : Patent granted to MTL

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present.
   The move to Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC superficially trips the "Licensing/Holdings" naming heuristic, but the concrete evidence defeats the signal: the assignee's address is One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA (the parent's HQ), the entity is a wholly-owned Microsoft subsidiary controlled by the same corporate parent, and the patent reads on a shipped Microsoft product (PowerPoint). This is an intra-group reorg, not a licensing-only shell. Per the brief's own rule — naming alone is not a finding — this is a false positive.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present.
   Neither Microsoft Corporation nor Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC appears on any of the enumerated NPE lists (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg). No third-party asserter ever appears.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / not retrievable.
   The correspondent field for both 2015 links could not be retrieved, so I cannot test for recurrence either way. This is the one signal I genuinely cannot close out; it should be pulled directly from the two reel/frame PDFs at the Assignment Center.

4. Cascading transfers — not present.
   There are only two links, both on a single day (2015-03-24), both within the same corporate family. No chained independent LLCs, no shared-boilerplate registered-agent address, no <24-month crawl between unrelated owners.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present (and not applicable).
   No infringement suit naming US 9,875,009 was surfaced. The 2015 transfers are four years before grant (2018-01-23) and are the ordinary filing-and-reorg paperwork, not a venue/standing setup. Google Patents carries a family-level "litigation" flag, but I could not identify a case asserting this patent — treat that flag as unresolved rather than as an assertion of '009.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present.
   No Chapter 7/11 assignor anywhere in the chain. Microsoft has never filed.

7. Privateering — not present.
   Privateering requires transfer to a third-party NPE asserting on the originator's behalf. Nothing left the Microsoft corporate family.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present.
   The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified, or OIN. (Note: Microsoft is a LOT Network member, but membership is not an assignment and does not neutralize this patent's title.)

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

The entire recorded chain is two same-day, intra-Microsoft conveyances on 2015-03-24 — inventors → Microsoft Corporation → Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC — with the final assignee being Microsoft's wholly-owned HQ-resident licensing subsidiary, and the claims reading on shipped PowerPoint functionality. Every enumerated NPE signal is not present; the only unresolved item is the correspondent/reel-frame detail, which I could not retrieve and which, on this record, would not change the verdict. Caveat on the label: I did not find a lawsuit asserting '009, so "assertion" here means the assignee is an operating company whose products practice the claims — not that I have confirmed litigation.

Verify at the USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 9875009) and the legacy index at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — pull the two 2015-03-24 reel/frame PDFs to fill in the reel/frame and correspondent fields left blank above.
Google Patents legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9875009/en
Parent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9046983/en

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 9,875,009. Let me run targeted searches.

Let me dig into the specific citation records for this patent.

I need the actual "References Cited" list for this specific patent. Let me target those sources.

Prior-Art Citation Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 9,875,009 B2

1. Patent identification (verified against the authoritative full text)

I interpret this numeral literally as 9,875,009. It is not the same document as similarly numbered patents that surfaced in searching (see §5).

2. Status of the "patent citations" retrieval — an explicit gap I will not paper over

The task asks me to walk the front-page "References Cited" / patent-citation list for US 9,875,009 and analyze each reference. I was unable to retrieve that official citation list in this session, and the authoritative full text supplied to me does not contain it. The Google-Patents rendering I was given includes only the Abstract, Description, and Claims — it does not include the "Patent Citations" / "Cited By" tables that normally appear on the Google Patents front page.

What my searches did establish:

• The family citation network is large — Unified Patents indexes the document under "Patent Art (853)" (i.e., hundreds of cited/citing items), and the Google Patents "Prior art keywords" for this document are algorithmically generated as: class, control, variation, controls, document — these are keywords, not citations.
• My retrieval attempts hit a session step limit before I could extract the citation table from the FPO/Google Patents/USPTO records.

Therefore I cannot reproduce "each patent citation for 9875009" as an authoritative list without fabricating it. I decline to do that. Below I (a) give the documents I can ground as belonging to this document's own family/record, and (b) give analyst-identified candidate prior art from a subject-matter search, clearly labeled as unconfirmed candidates — not as verified front-page citations.

3. Documents I can ground as tied to the '009 record (family / related — NOT prior art)

These surfaced consistently and are part of the same Microsoft disclosure chain. None of them is § 102 prior art against '009, because they share the 2009-05-12 priority (or are the application itself):

(Dates above are as reported in the EP Global Patent Index family listing and the Unified Patents family view.)

A separate, co-pending sibling Microsoft application also appeared in the record: US 2010/0064222 A1, "Object-aware transitions" — a slide-binding on object-level transitions. I have not confirmed whether it is a front-page citation of '009; it is topically adjacent (see §4.3).

4. Analyst-identified candidate prior art (UNCONFIRMED as citations)

Critical filter applied first: Because '009 carries a 2009-05-12 priority date, only references dated before 2009-05-12 (or applications filed before that date and published later, under pre-AIA § 102(e) / AIA § 102(a)(2)) can be § 102 art. References that published after that date are excluded from § 102 in my analysis below, and I say so.

4.1 US 5,640,522 A — "Method and system for previewing transition effects between pairs of images"

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 5,640,522 A; assignee Microsoft Corporation.
• Dates: granted 1997-06-17 (well before priority).
• Description: Displays a sequence of images with transition-effect icons; a user assigns a transition effect to a pair of images and the system previews the assigned transition effect by substituting the source image and animating it (see FPO record, claims 9–17).
• § 102 mapping: This is the single most material candidate against the preview limitations that were added in '009's prosecution: claim 1 recites "displaying a preview of a default slide transition effect (STE) associated with" the selected class control, and again for the selected variation control. US 5,640,522 is strong § 102 art for the preview-a-transition-effect concept, but on its own it does not disclose the horizontal class gallery → vertical variation gallery hierarchy, so it would not anticipate claim 1 in its entirety. It is best characterized as § 103-combination material against claims 1 (preview steps); its standalone § 102 reach would be limited to any claim drawn to preview alone (none of claims 1–20 is so limited).

4.2 US 2003/0090506 A1 — "Method and apparatus for controlling the visual presentation of data"

• Dates: published 2003-05-15 (before priority).
• Description: Stores transition-effect matrices and lets a designer categorize transition sets — expressly by type ("cuts, fades, wipes, flying effects, etc.") or by aesthetic "feeling" (see the passage quoted from the Justia record, ¶¶[0058]–[0060]).
• § 102 mapping: Material to the "classes of related commands" concept underlying claim 1 (each class control = a different class of commands) and to the per-class "shared set of primitives" limitation of claim 7, because it groups structurally similar transition effects. However it does not disclose the two-dimensional gallery UI (horizontal class gallery + vertical variation gallery), so it does not anticipate claim 1; it is § 103 material against claims 1 and 7.

4.3 US 2010/0064222 A1 — "Object-aware transitions" (Microsoft)

• Dates: published 2010-03-11 — i.e., after the 2009-05-12 priority date.
• Description: Objects on a slide are individually identified and separately animated when transitioning on/off screen.
• § 102 mapping: Because it published after the '009 priority date, it is not § 102(a)/(b) art for '009 unless it has an effective filing date before 2009-05-12 (I could not verify its filing date). It is topically relevant to the in-slide-object animation subject matter of claim 9, but I flag that a § 102 date problem likely disqualifies it. Do not treat as anticipation art without date verification.

4.4 EP 2430515 / WO 2010/132376 family — not prior art

Listed here only to close the loop: these are the '009 own family members, so they are § 102 disqualified (same priority).

5. Similar-number false positives — do NOT attribute these to 9875009

Per the standing rule to interpret identifiers literally, the following are different patent numbers that repeatedly contaminate searches for "9875009" and must be excluded:

• US 8,975,009 B2 ("Track processing to remove organic films in directed self-assembly chemo-epitaxy applications") — a wholly unrelated patent that appeared in a Greek-Espacenet hit whose URL slug read NR=8975009B2. This is 8,975,009, not 9,875,009.
• US 5,987,500 (SAP America v. Pi-Net, IPR2013-00195) — unrelated (already flagged in the litigation section).
• The "'987 patent" in ABS Global v. Inguran — unrelated.
• "9875009" as an SEC/Edgar identifier and a DICOM registry code — unrelated.

This mirrors the recurring-numeral contamination noted earlier in the litigation section; I am not repeating that discussion, only cross-referencing it.

6. What is required to complete this task authoritatively

To produce the definitive per-citation § 102 mapping the task requires, the following must be pulled directly (my session could not reach them):

1. USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Full-Text (patft) record for 9,875,009 → "References Cited" (U.S. Patent Documents + Foreign Patent Documents + Non-Patent Literature).
2. Google Patents US9875009B2 → Patent Citations and Cited By tables (the front-page "References Cited" list).
3. FPO freepatentsonline.com/9875009.html → "References Cited."
4. For each retrieved reference, confirm its publication/filing date against the 2009-05-12 priority before making any § 102 assertion.

Bottom line / honesty statement: I could not retrieve the actual front-page citation list for US 9,875,009 B2 and therefore cannot truthfully enumerate "each patent citation for 9875009" with full citation dates and claim-by-claim § 102 mapping. I have not fabricated any citation. The three references in § 4 are candidate prior art surfaced by subject-matter search, not verified citations of record; of these, US 5,640,522 (transition preview) and US 2003/0090506 (categorized transition sets) are dated before the priority date and are the most material, while US 2010/0064222 is likely date-barred. I state the remaining uncertainty explicitly rather than fill the gap with invented references.

I'll start by retrieving the prior-art references associated with this patent, since the provided page text did not include an explicit "Prior Art"/"References Cited" section.

The provided page text lacks an explicit "References Cited"/"Prior Art" list, so let me retrieve it from the patent's front page and family documents.

Let me pull the front-page "References Cited" specifically for US 9,875,009 (as opposed to its parent), which is the authoritative prior-art list for this task.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 9,875,009 B2

"Hierarchically-organized control galleries" (Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC; priority 2009‑05‑12; granted 2018‑01‑23)
Framed under 35 U.S.C. § 103 and Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), with KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007).

0. Important record caveat (read first)

The full page text you supplied does not contain a "Prior Art" / "References Cited" section. The Google Patents extract provided to me jumps from the front-page bibliographic data to Classifications, Definitions, Abstract, Description, and Claims (claims 1–12 only; the text is truncated before claims 13–20). I attempted to retrieve the exact front-page reference list for the '009 patent directly and could not obtain a clean, verifiable "References Cited" list specific to US 9,875,009.

Accordingly, I am doing two things, and I flag them as such:

1. Grounding what I can. The references discussed below are ones I actually observed in search results as cited material in this patent's family / directly related Microsoft gallery-and-ribbon patents (sources: Justia's reference list for the parent, US 9,046,983 — https://patents.justia.com/patent/[9046983](/patent/9046983) ; FreePatentsOnline's reference list for related Microsoft patent US 9,690,450 — https://www.freepatentsonline.com/[9690450](/patent/9690450).html ; the EPO Global Patent Index family record for EP 2 430 515 — http://data.epo.org/gpi/EP2430515A4 ; and the Unified Patents portal record — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-9875009-B2).
2. Flagging what I cannot verify. I cannot confirm that every reference below appears on the face of the '009 patent itself (as opposed to the parent '983 or a sibling). Where I am relying on general knowledge or on the family record rather than a verified '009 citation, I say so explicitly. Do not treat the list below as the '009 patent's certified "References Cited."

A second caveat: the claims supplied to me stop at claim 12. Claims 13–20 (dependent method claims, the system claims, and the CRM claim — which, per the family publication US 2010/0293470 A1, include the XML/STE-element CRM claim) were not in the provided text. The analysis below therefore focuses on claims 1–12, and treats claims 13–20 only by reference to their published counterparts, with that caveat.

This is an analytical, adversarial-review document. It is not a legal opinion, and § 103 is ultimately decided on a fully-developed record (secondary considerations, prosecution history, claim construction) that I do not have.

1. The governing claim — what claim 1 actually requires

Claim 1 (as printed in the supplied text) is an ordered method with these elements:

Two observations that matter for § 103:

• The "class → variation" two-level gallery is the core concept; the limitations most likely added to secure allowance over the art are the two "preview" limitations (c, f) and the horizontal/vertical orientation limitations (b, e).
• Limitation (f) is drafted oddly: it requires a preview of "a default slide transition effect (STE) associated with the one of the plurality of variation controls." Variation controls are elsewhere tied to commands in the selected class, not to default STEs. This internal tension is a genuine construction problem (see § 7) — it likely reflects amendment-added language — and it cuts against a clean obviousness holding only in the sense that a court/PTAB might read (f) narrowly.

Claims 2–5 (options control, popup frame, icon update, in-ribbon second gallery), 6–8 (slideshow/STE, shared primitives, XML element), 9 (in-slide object animation), 10 (structural device claim), 11 (execute default command on class selection), and 12 (selection indicator) are all narrower or ancillary and are addressed element-by-element in § 5.

2. Level of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA)

For a 2009 priority date in "user-interface design for productivity/office software," a reasonable POSITA formulation is:

• a bachelor's degree in computer science, human–computer interaction, or equivalent, and
• about 2–4 years of experience designing/building GUI applications (or a master's degree plus 1–2 years), and
• working familiarity with the then-ubiquitous Microsoft Office "ribbon" paradigm, modal and modeless galleries/dropdowns, document-object models, and declarative document formats (OOXML/ECMA‑376, XML).

This is a mature, crowded, incremental art. That matters under KSR: "if a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious." KSR, 550 U.S. at 417.

3. The relevant prior-art landscape

The references below are the ones bearing on the claim elements. All have priority/publication dates well before 2009‑05‑12 unless noted.

3.1 Microsoft ribbon/gallery patent family (the closest art)

Sources surfaced in search: Justia reference list for US 9,046,983 (https://patents.justia.com/patent/9046983); FPO reference list for US 9,690,450 (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/9690450.html); Unified Patents portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-9875009-B2). Caveat: I verified these as family/related references; I could not confirm each appears on the '009's own face.

3.2 Slide-transition-effect art

• ECMA‑376 / ISO‑IEC 29500 "Office Open XML" (2006 and earlier) — Its presentation schema defines a slide-transition element that is a child of the slide element, with attributes specifying the transition type and parameters (e.g., the <p:transition>/<p:sld> structure and the family of transition types). This is practically dispositive art for claim 8 and strongly supports claims 6–7.
• Microsoft PowerPoint's "Slide Transition" task pane and the PowerPoint 2007 "Animations" tab "Transition to This Slide" gallery — long-standing product art showing slide transitions displayed as a thumbnail gallery and applied to the current slide, including auto-preview of the applied transition. (General-knowledge/product art; I did not locate a specific verifiable patent document for this within this session, so treat it as corroborating rather than as a lead reference. It should be verified against a product manual/printed publication before being relied upon.)

3.3 On the "vertical" gallery

The '009 claims "vertical" for the second gallery and "horizontal" for the first. Two cautions:

• A vertical ribbon reference — US 2011/0041092 A1 (Zhang), "Type of Graphical User Interface — vertical Ribbon" — was surfaced in search, but its apparent priority date (2009‑08‑16) is after the '009's 2009‑05‑12 priority date. It is therefore NOT available as prior art and should not be relied upon. (I flag this because it is easy to grab as an "on-point" reference and would be a § 102(a) trap.)
• Orientation instead is addressed through general knowledge / design-choice reasoning (see § 4.2).

4. § 103 combinations

4.1 Ground A (primary): Himberger (US 8,146,016) in view of Harris (US 8,255,828) and Satterfield (US 7,703,036)

What Himberger discloses. A software-object-editing UI in which selecting a higher-level gallery control opens a gallery of selectable options applicable to the selected object, and the system previews the effect of an option on the selected object. That maps to:

• claim 1(b) first gallery → Himberger's gallery control/grouping;
• claim 1(e) second gallery after a selection → Himberger's drop-down gallery that opens upon selecting the gallery control;
• claims 1(c)/(f) previews → Himberger's live preview of the effect.

What Harris/Satterfield add. The ribbon architecture (tabs → groups → controls, claim 1(a)) and the principle that the ribbon surfaces controls relevant to the selected object, providing the mechanism and rationale for filtering the second gallery to the selected class (claim 1(e): "each variation control … associated with a different command in the selected class").

Motivation to combine (KSR factors):

• Same field, same problem: all three are Microsoft productivity-UI references addressing "make hundreds of commands findable."
• Reasonable expectation of success: ribbon + gallery were proven, shipping technologies; combining them is not a leap.
• Explicit design incentive in the art itself: the '009 Background concedes the problem ("an office application may easily have hundreds of commands … important to organize the controls … menus can contain too many controls; toolbars occupy too much … screen area"). That is an admission of the problem and of the inadequacy of the prior solutions, which strengthens the motivation analysis.
• KSR: arranging a known gallery into a two-level hierarchy (a class gallery that opens a filtered variation gallery) is the predictable use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way.

Result: Claim 1's hierarchy + ribbon + selection→apply pipeline is established. The remaining questions are the two preview limitations and the orientation limitations.

4.2 Ground B: Ground A further in view of design-choice / general-knowledge evidence for orientation and previews

Orientation (horizontal vs. vertical). Nothing in the claims' technical effect depends on orientation. In a GUI, the choice between a horizontally-scrolling strip and a vertically-scrolling list is the quintessential design choice driven by screen geometry and item count — a vertical drop-down conserves horizontal ribbon space while showing many items, and vertical scrolling lists/dropdown menus were ubiquitous before 2009. Under KSR and the "design choice" line of authority, adding "horizontal" to the first gallery and "vertical" to the second is the predictable variation of a known element and cannot alone confer patentability. This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that both the '009 itself (Fig. 3 popup frame vs. Fig. 4 in-ribbon gallery) and the family treat the two orientations as interchangeable implementations — an applicant cannot claim both as inventive and as mere alternatives.

Previews. Live preview of a formatting/effect option on a selected object is squarely Himberger and is also reflected across the related Microsoft gallery patents. Previewing a slide transition on selection (so the user sees what the transition looks like before committing) is a straightforward application of the same known preview technique to the transition context. Motivation: previews reduce errors and clicks; the art already taught previewing the effect of a gallery item, and applying that known mechanism to slide transitions is a predictable combination. The "default" qualifier in claim 1(c) simply means the class's default (most-common) STE — the '009 specification says as much ("The default STE command for a class control may be the most commonly used STE command in the class"), which is a selection of a representative member, again a predictable choice.

Result: Ground B supplies the two limitations most likely added to obtain allowance.

4.3 Ground C: Giesen (US 7,853,877) + Harris (US 8,255,828) + Himberger (US 8,146,016), with OOXML (ECMA‑376) for the data format

This is the cleaner multi-reference attack for the system/CRM claims:

• Giesen → the "gallery control" with icon-bearing items (claims 1(b), 1(e) icons; claim 15 system gallery).
• Harris → ribbon with tabs/groups, enabling the "transitions tab" of claim 20's counterpart.
• Himberger → the second-level, filtered, previewable gallery (claims 3, 4).
• ECMA‑376 / OOXML → the STE XML element as a child of the slide XML element with parameter attributes (claim 8; and the CRM counterpart). This is a near-anticipatory disclosure for the data-representation limitation: OOXML already stored slide transitions as attributes/child elements of the slide element, and already used a shared family of transition types (supports claim 7's "shared set of primitives" concept at the document-model level).

Motivation: Once the UI applies a transition to the current slide (Ground A/B), persisting it in the document's native declarative format (OOXML) is not merely obvious — it is required for the file to be a valid, interoperable PowerPoint file. There is no alternative design; the motivation is the file-format specification itself.

4.4 Ground D: In-slide object animation (claim 9)

The '009 specification itself generalizes the technique from slide transitions to "in-slide object animation effects" and the "Animations" tab. The same Himberger/Giesen/Harris combination renders claim 9 obvious a fortiori: it merely substitutes "object animation effect" for "slide transition effect" in an otherwise identical two-level-gallery pipeline, plus an object-selection step, which is known from any contextual-object UI (Satterfield's "relevant to a selected object" is directly on point). Applying the same known gallery technique to a sibling command class (animations vs. transitions) is the KSR "improve similar devices in the same way" scenario.

5. Element-by-element map (claims 1–12)

Net assessment: Claims 1–8 and 10–12 appear vulnerable to a well-constructed § 103 combination along Ground A/B/C. Claim 9 is vulnerable via the substitution rationale. The strongest defenses for the patentee are (i) the ordered "after receiving the class selection input" sequencing, and (ii) the two preview limitations, which require careful mapping to Himberger (a formatting-options gallery) rather than a slide-transition gallery.

6. Motivation-to-combine narrative (usable KSR framing)

1. Known problem (admitted in the '009 Background): office applications have "hundreds of commands"; menus "contain too many controls"; toolbars "occupy too much" screen area; users must be helped to "find controls quickly."
2. Known solutions in the art: hierarchical/task-organized ribbons (Harris, Satterfield); galleries of visually depicted options (Giesen); galleries that open a second, filtered level with live preview (Himberger).
3. The claimed arrangement is the predictable assembly of (2) to solve (1): put a class gallery in the ribbon; when a class is chosen, show a filtered gallery of that class's variations; preview; apply.
4. Design choices: horizontal vs. vertical, popup vs. in-ribbon vs. task pane, and "default" = most common — all arbitrary presentation choices with no unexpected technical effect. KSR at 417 ("predictable variations"); design-choice doctrine.
5. Format limitation: OOXML mandated the XML representation — "obvious to try," indeed the only way to produce a valid PowerPoint file.
6. No unexpected results / no teaching away apparent in the record.

7. Weaknesses, counterarguments, and honesty about limits

A rigorous analysis must state where the § 103 case is weak and what could not be verified:

1. I could not verify the '009's actual "References Cited." The primary references above are Microsoft gallery/ribbon patents that appear in this family's reference landscape; the strongest (Himberger US 8,146,016; Giesen US 7,853,877; Harris US 8,255,828; Satterfield US 7,703,036) should be confirmed against the '009 front page and its prosecution history before being treated as-of-record. Verify:
   • US 9,875,009 & its parent US 9,046,983 "References Cited" and the file histories at USPTO PatentCenter (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov).
   • The EPO record for EP 2 430 515 (http://data.epo.org/gpi/EP2430515A4) for the search report's cited art, which may name the strongest transition-gallery prior art.
2. Claim 1(f) is internally inconsistent ("preview of a default STE associated with … variation controls"). This may (a) render the term indefinite under § 112(b), (b) require the preview to be of a default STE, which is odd for a variation control, or (c) be read as a drafting error. Whatever the outcome, the uncertainty itself complicates a crisp invalidity theory: claim construction should precede any final § 103 conclusion.
3. A transition-specific primary reference was not located in this session. Himberger is a formatting-options gallery. A petition/knowledge built only on Himberger must bridge from "formatting options" to "slide transitions." This is very doable given that the classification (G06F3/04847 — "interaction with sliders or parameter-setting controls"; G06F3/0484; G06F3/04842) confirms the field is generic parameter/option selection, but a transition-specific gallery reference (e.g., a PowerPoint-era publication or patent) would materially strengthen the case and should be located.
4. The "vertical" reference surfaced (US 2011/0041092 A1, Zhang) is post-priority (2009‑08‑16) and is NOT usable. I am flagging this specifically so it is not mistakenly cited as prior art.
5. Secondary considerations were not in the record I reviewed. If the patentee can show (i) a long-felt need, (ii) unexpected results, or (iii) commercial success / industry copying with a nexus to the claimed two-level gallery + previews, that could rebut a prima facie case — particularly because the ribbon/gallery era was a period of widespread industry adoption (OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony, Google Docs). But success must be tied to the claimed invention, not to the general ribbon concept, and the '009's claims are narrow (previews + orientation + sequencing), which weakens any broad nexus argument in the patentee's favor.
6. Claims 13–20 were not provided, so their analysis is necessarily dependent on the published counterparts (US 2010/0293470 A1's system/CRM claims). The claim-8-style CRM limitation appears closest to OOXML art and is likely the most vulnerable claim if a ground is formally filed — but I could not confirm the granted claim text.

8. Bottom line

• Most probable result under § 103: claims 1–8 and 10–12 are reasonably likely obvious over Himberger (US 8,146,016) in view of Harris (US 8,255,828) and Satterfield (US 7,703,036), with Giesen (US 7,853,877) supplying the icon-bearing gallery and ECMA‑376/OOXML supplying the XML representation (claim 8) — because the two-level (class → variation) gallery, the ribbon placement, the icon depiction, and the live preview are all individually known and their combination is the predictable, motivated assembly for the admitted problem of "too many commands."
• Claim 9 is obvious by substitution of a sibling command class (animations for transitions) plus known object-relevance logic (Satterfield).
• The weak points in a hypothetical challenge are the two preview limitations (mapped via Himberger but not from a transition-specific reference) and the ordered sequencing; the strong points are the orientation limitations (design choice) and the XML/STE representation (OOXML).
• Two hard limits on this opinion: (1) I could not verify the '009's certified prior-art list or the references' precise page/paragraph support for each limitation, and (2) claims 13–20 were not in the text I was given. Before any of this is relied upon, the '009 (and parent '983) file histories, the '009 front page references, and an EPO/EP search report should be pulled, and the claim-1(f) language construed.

If you can supply the '009's front-page "References Cited" list (or the file wrapper), I will map each limitation to specific passages/paragraph numbers and tighten this into a formal claim-chart-style obviousness ground.