US D740117

I'll search for this specific patent and any related litigation.

Now let me check for any CAFC or district court litigation activity.

US D740117 — Verified Record

Searches run: USPTO/Google Patents record for USD740117S1; Justia Patents D740117; FreePatentsOnline D740117; targeted searches for "D740117" + CAFC / Federal Circuit / 2026 docket; "Cao Group" Federal Circuit 2026.

Bibliographic data (from the authoritative patent text)

Abstract

There is no abstract. US design patents do not include an abstract (no "Description" of technical subject matter; only a figure legend). Any third-party summary purporting to give a D740117 abstract is not from the patent itself.

The entire descriptive text is the figure legend:

• FIG. 1 — perspective view; FIG. 2 — rear elevation; FIG. 3 — left elevation; FIG. 4 — top plan; FIG. 5 — right elevation; FIG. 6 — front elevation; FIG. 7 — bottom plan.

Claim analysis (plain language)

Design patents contain exactly one claim, so there is no independent/dependent claim hierarchy to separate:

"The ornamental design for a packaging tray, as shown and described."

Plain-language reading: the claim is not to the tray's function, materials, or manufacture, but to the specific three-dimensional ornamental appearance of the tray as depicted in the seven drawing figures, taken as a whole. Infringement under 35 U.S.C. § 289 turns on whether an ordinary observer, familiar with the prior art, would find the accused article's design substantially the same as the overall appearance shown in FIGS. 1–7. Because no broken (unclaimed) line conventions or written claim language narrowing scope appear in the record, the entire depicted surface/contour design is claimed.

Prior art cited (10 references, examiner-cited)

US D363218 (Mann, earring display package); US D417146 (St. Pierre, multi-container package); US D660142 (Kirk, dough packaging); US 2010/0025278 A1 (Tilton, printed packaging); US D633388 (Andre, Apple packaging); US D584141 (Smith); US D614023 and US D655154 (Amos, Philip Morris); US D655165 (Jensen — "Packaging tray," a same-named earlier Jensen design, notable because Steven D. Jensen is a co-inventor here); US D708951 (Studt, wax packaging tray). D740117 is in turn cited by 37 later design patents, incl. Apple USD774899/USD779932/USD800549/USD842091, Cryovac USD791584, Mishima Kosan USD779948, and numerous Stasher, Inc. container designs.

Litigation / CAFC 2026 check

• No Federal Circuit or CAFC 2026 docket asserting US D740117 was found. I cannot rule out a sealed or extremely recent filing, as I do not have direct PACER/CAFC docket access — treat "none found" as a search result, not a certified negative.
• The prominent 2026 CAFC-adjacent activity involving the CAO corporate family is unrelated to D740117: CAO Lighting, Inc. v. Wolfspeed, Inc., Fed. Cir. Nos. 2024-1194/1221/1222/1223 (Rule 36 affirmance of PTAB invalidation of US 6,465,961 and US 6,634,770; judgment 2025-09-05); cert. denied 2026-05-18 in No. 25-1068. CAO Lighting is a wholly owned CAO Group subsidiary, but the patents there are utility LED patents, not the D740117 design patent.
• Third-party (non-authoritative, Chinese-language TRO reporting) sources state that D740117 was among the design patents asserted in Cao Group, Inc. v. [e-commerce sellers], N.D. Ill. case 2024-cv-00901 (filed 2024-02-02, Bishop Diehl & Lee) and case 2025-cv-14512 (filed 2025-11-16, Nicholas S. Lee; TRO entered ~2026-01-08). These are blog/TRO-tracker reports, not docket records I could verify directly — treat as unconfirmed.

Uncertainty and discrepancy flags

1. Description mismatch. The TRO-tracker sources describe D740117 as a "Lumist whitening strip" (牙齿美白贴) design. The authoritative patent record says the title is "Packaging tray" and classifies it in D9/456 (trays/containers). I apply the authoritative patent text: D740117 claims a packaging-tray appearance. The whitening-strip characterization may reflect how the tray is used to package dental whitening products, or may simply be an error in those secondary sources. Do not rely on the "whitening strip" label without checking the drawing figures.
2. Examiner of record is inconsistently reported: Justia lists Primary Examiner Susan Bennett Hattan with Assistant Examiner Vy Koenig; FreePatentsOnline lists Primary Examiner Koenig, Vy N. Minor, but unresolved.
3. No verification was possible against USPTO PatentCenter/Assignment directly (only aggregated mirrors were reachable).

I'll search litigation databases and court records for this specific design patent.

Let me dig deeper into the specific case numbers and docket details.

Litigation Search Results — U.S. Design Patent No. D740117

Short answer: Yes — D740117 ("Packaging tray," owned by CAO Group, Inc., West Jordan, Utah) has been asserted (or at minimum identified as part of the asserted portfolio) in a series of Schedule A e-commerce enforcement actions filed by CAO Group in the Northern District of Illinois. All are plaintiff-side, ex parte TRO/default-judgment cases against anonymous online sellers; none has produced a contested merits ruling on the design patent, and I found no appellate (CAFC) or PTAB proceeding.

⚠️ Important verification caveat, as required by my operating rules: D740117 is a design patent, and CAO's Schedule A complaints are filed under seal, with the patent exhibits frequently redacted (docket entries "Exhibit 1–3, 7 (Redacted)" in 24-cv-00901). I could not review the sealed complaints or Exhibit lists directly. The identification of D740117 as an asserted patent in these cases rests on secondary sources (TRO-monitoring sites and跨境 blogs quoting the complaints), not on primary court records I was able to retrieve. I flag each item below accordingly, and I have not auto-corrected any patent or case numbers.

1. Case principally associated with D740117

2. Follow-on CAO Group Schedule A case referencing the same product line

3. Other CAO Group Schedule A cases — D740117 linkage unconfirmed

• CAO Group, Inc. v. The Individuals… Identified on Schedule A, No. 1:24-cv-01211 (N.D. Ill.). Defendants haiyi_mall and newage-store filed Non-Infringement and Invalidity Contentions (Ex. 1 to Dkt. 117, entered October 5, 2024) opposing plaintiff's motion for leave to file a Third Amended Complaint. This is the only case I found where a contested invalidity/non-infringement defense was actually filed. I could not confirm from the retrieved record which patent numbers were asserted; design-patent invalidity contentions would be consistent with D740117, but I will not assert that.
• CAO Group, Inc. v. … Identified on Schedule A, No. 1:25-cv-08205 (N.D. Ill.). Complaint references Walmart listings and CAO's whitening-strip patents; again, asserted patent numbers not verified.
• CAO Group, Inc. v. Karaka LLC d/b/a The DoubleY Brands, No. 1:24-cv-04903 (N.D. Ill.). Named defendant (not Schedule A). The complaint asserts only U.S. Patent 10,603,259 ("Peroxide Gel Composition"), not D740117. Included here only to disambiguate — do not attribute it to D740117.

Negative findings (searched and not found)

• No CAFC appeal involving D740117 identified.
• No PTAB proceeding involving D740117 — expected, since design patents are not subject to IPR/PGR.
• No district court case outside N.D. Illinois involving D740117 identified.
• No declaratory-judgment action against D740117 identified.
• Unified Patents litigation portal: no D740117 entry retrieved; Unified's dataset is also largely limited to asserted utility patents in its public case lists, so absence there is not proof of no litigation.

Identifiers not to conflate

The search surfaced several close but distinct numbers that are not D740117: D655165 (also titled "Packaging tray," CAO Group/Jensen — a different CAO design patent, granted 2012-03-06), D655154 (Philip Morris), D655163 (CEA/others; CAO's "spray bottle head"), and the utility patents 10,603,259 / 10,646,419 / 11,219,582. Also note D740117 is itself cited as prior art by the examiner against later applications and is listed on Google Patents with an anticipated expiration of 2029-10-06 (14-year design term from the 2015-10-06 grant).

Bottom line

D740117's practical litigation footprint is a single prominent enforcement campaign: CAO Group's N.D. Ill. Schedule A case No. 1:24-cv-00901, which terminated in a $1M-per-defendant default judgment on July 1, 2024 — but please note my explicit caveat that D740117's presence as an asserted patent in that case is sourced from secondary TRO-monitoring reports, not from the sealed complaint itself. If you need the asserted-patent list confirmed from primary records, the next step is a PACER pull of the unsealed Amended Schedule A and Exhibits 4–6 in 1:24-cv-00901, and the unsealed complaint (Dkt. 5) in 1:25-cv-14512 — both are available through USPTO PatentCenter's litigation links and PACER, which I could not access directly here.

I'll verify the structured ODP data against public sources before writing.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks on PTAB dockets and the patent owner's litigation history.

PTAB proceedings on file — US D740117 ("Packaging tray")

Source of record: the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block in this prompt (USPTO Open Data Portal ingest). Result: zero AIA trial proceedings returned.

I ran independent web checks to catch anything ODP hasn't indexed — searching PTAB E2E / PTACTS petition documents, IPR docket aggregators, and the patent owner's litigation and appeal history. Nothing surfaced. The IPRs that do involve CAO Group as a party are all on other patents (see "Pattern signals" below), not on D740117.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US D740117: 0 — 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 with institution denied. The bottom line for a defendant is the opposite of a hardened-patent story and the opposite of a free pass: nothing has been canceled and nothing has been tested. The patent stands exactly as issued on 2015-10-06, with its single claim intact and un-narrowed — but that also means there is no FWD to cite, no cancellation to exploit, and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel constraining anyone's invalidity case.

There is no proceeding to enumerate, so the per-proceeding template below is replaced with what actually matters: why no AIA trial exists, what that does and doesn't mean, and where the real defensive leverage is.

Why there is no PTAB proceeding (and why that is structural, not accidental)

D740117 is a design patent. That single fact narrows the AIA trial options severely:

• Covered Business Method (CBM) — unavailable as a practical matter. AIA § 18 required the patent to claim a method or apparatus for performing data processing used in the practice, administration, or management of a financial product or service. A design patent claiming "the ornamental design for a packaging tray, as shown and described" has no such claim.
• Post-Grant Review (PGR) — legally available at issue because the application (US 29/484,828) was filed 2014-03-13, i.e., post-AIA first-inventor-to-file. But the PGR window is nine months from grant, which ran from 2015-10-06 to approximately 2016-07-06. That window closed almost a decade ago and cannot be reopened.
• Inter Partes Review (IPR) — the only route ever realistically open against this patent. 35 U.S.C. § 311(a) permits any person who is not the owner to petition, and nothing in § 311 excludes design patents. Two practical constraints explain why nobody filed:
  1. § 311(b) limits IPR grounds to "prior art consisting of patents or printed publications" under § 102/§ 103. Design patent invalidity is typically proved with prior products, catalogs, and physical specimens under § 102/§ 171 — material that is often admissible in district court but does not fit cleanly inside the IPR petition envelope.
  2. Claim scope. A design patent has one claim, defined by the drawings. There is no claim language to construe, so the usual IPR toolkit (means-plus-function, antecedent basis, § 112 indefiniteness) has little purchase. The Board has addressed design patent claims in IPR, but the vehicle is a poor fit and challengers almost universally prefer Article III.

I am not aware of, and could not find, any IPR, PGR, or CBM petition naming D740117 as the challenged patent. I state that as a search result, not a certainty about unindexed or terminated-without-publication filings.

Pattern signals — the patent owner's PTAB footprint (other patents)

This is the most useful intelligence available, because it tells you who you're dealing with:

• CAO Group as petitioner: CAO Group filed IPRs against Procter & Gamble's teeth-whitening patents — CAO Group, Inc. v. The Procter & Gamble Company, IPR2014-00796, IPR2014-00797, and IPR2014-01798 (as numbered on Jones Day's experience page; the third is likely a typo for -00798). All three were denied institution after P&G filed Patent Owner Preliminary Responses. (Jones Day experience page) This is the reverse posture from D740117 — it shows CAO knows the PTAB process from the petitioner's chair.
• CAO's LED patents as patent owner: Cree Lighting filed IPRs against CAO Lighting's LED patents; the Board invalidated all but one challenged claim using a claim construction CAO contends conflicted with a Delaware jury verdict and the district court's construction. The Federal Circuit summarily affirmed under Rule 36, and CAO Lighting has petitioned the Supreme Court (No. 25-1068, petition filed 2026-04-08). See the Supreme Court petition PDF. This is a different patent family (LED lighting, not packaging) and must not be conflated with D740117 — but it establishes that CAO litigates to the Supreme Court when it loses at the Board.

Takeaway: CAO Group is a sophisticated, repeat PTAB participant on both sides of the table, represented by experienced counsel. It has not been deterred from asserting this patent by the absence of PTAB validation, and it has not felt the need to run a defensive PTAB gauntlet on it.

The actual assertion picture (from public reporting, non-official sources)

D740117 has been asserted in district court TRO campaigns, not at the PTAB. Chinese cross-border seller-alert outlets report CAO Group design-patent campaigns including Case No. 24-cv-00901 (filed 2024-02-02, initially sealed) and Case No. 25-cv-14512 (filed 2025-11-16, counsel Nicholas S. Lee, TRO granted 2026-01-08), grouping D740117 with D655163 and D655165 as three asserted design patents alongside utility patents 10,603,259 / 10,646,419 / 11,219,582. Sources: maijiazhichi.com 25-cv-14512, maijiazhichi.com 24-cv-00901. Caveat: these are secondary aggregator blogs, not court records. Treat the case numbers and TRO dates as leads to verify on PACER, not as established fact. Note also that these sources market D740117 as the "Lumist / Sheer White!" whitening-strip packaging design — the patent itself claims a packaging tray, which is a meaningful distinction (see below).

Strategic summary

Claim status: 1 claim, UNTESTED, un-narrowed, fully intact — and no amendment is possible. D740117 has exactly one claim, the sole claim of a design patent: "The ornamental design for a packaging tray, as shown and described." There are no dependent claims, no claims 1–5, no canceled claims, and no certificate of correction or reexamination narrowing on the record. Everything asserted is still presumptively valid and enforceable until a court or the Office says otherwise. The statutory term runs 14 years from grant, giving an anticipated expiration of 2029-10-06, so roughly three years of exposure remain as of 2026-09-28.

Estoppel landscape: essentially empty, which is good news for a defendant. Because there has never been an instituted IPR, PGR, or CBM on this patent, no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to anyone. Any accused infringer retains the full universe of invalidity grounds in district court: § 102/§ 103 over prior products, catalogs, and physical specimens (the strongest attack surface for a design patent, and precisely the art an IPR could not have reached under § 311(b)); § 171 novelty/ornamentality challenges; and § 112 / obviousness-type double patenting theories. For a defendant served in the 2024 campaign, note that § 315(b)'s one-year bar from service likely forecloses an IPR petition now — but that is a cost, not a loss, since the IPR was the weaker forum for a design patent anyway. For defendants served in the 2025 campaign, a petition window may still be technically open, though the § 311(b) limits and single-claim scope make it a poor investment.

Cross-proceeding picture: none to pull together. No petitioner has filed multiple IPRs against D740117 (no petitioner has filed once). No defensive aggregator — no Unified Patents or RPX chain is visible anywhere in this patent's history. The patent owner has pursued PTAB appeals aggressively on other patents, but has not appealed anything concerning D740117 because nothing exists to appeal. The one structural asymmetry worth internalizing: the patent owner has never had its design claim construed by the PTAB or by any court of which I am aware, meaning the scope of "the ornamental design shown" is being asserted without the benefit of an adversarial construction. That cuts both ways — no narrowing precedent binds CAO, but no validity finding protects it either.

Recommended next steps

1. Do not expect a PTAB defense to exist. It doesn't. There is no FWD to link, no institution decision to cite, and no claim-cancellation order to wave at opposing counsel. The absence of PTAB activity is itself a signal — but a softer one than the template suggests. Well-asserted patents with broad commercial reach do usually attract IPRs, and D740117 has survived two multi-defendant TRO campaigns without one. The more likely explanation is forum economics (design patents are poor IPR candidates under § 311(b)), not that challengers looked, tested the art, and walked away.

2. Attack the claim scope, not the validity, first. The single most valuable non-infringement lever here is semantic and it is visible on the face of the patent: D740117 claims the ornamental design of a packaging tray, classified in US D9/456 (with a field of search spanning D9/414–434, D9/442–445, D9/456–457, D7/601–, D3/202–, D27/173–). A defendant selling tooth-whitening strips, or selling them in non-tray or substantially different packaging, has a substantial argument that the accused article is not the patented article of manufacture. Design patent infringement requires an accused article that a ordinary observer, familiar with the prior art (Egyptian Goddess), would find substantially the same in overall appearance as applied to that article. Chart the accused packaging against the seven figures explicitly (FIG. 1 perspective; FIGS. 2/3/5/6 rear, left, right, front elevations; FIG. 4 top plan; FIG. 7 bottom plan) and against the examiner-cited art on the face of the patent — USD708951 (Wax packaging tray), USD655165 (Packaging tray, Jensen et al. — same inventor group), USD660142, USD655154, USD614023, USD633388, USD584141, USD417146, USD363218, and US 2010/0025278 A1. That cited-art set is unusually dense for a design patent and is directly usable to narrow the range of equivalents and to frame the "ordinary observer" as someone who has seen a lot of trays.

3. If you need an Office-side challenge, ex parte reexamination — not IPR — is the realistic vehicle. A third party may file an ex parte reexamination request under § 302 on patents/printed publications. It is cheaper than an IPR, carries no estoppel and no § 315(b) bar, and the requester can stay anonymous. It cannot raise § 112 or product-based § 102 art, so pair it with district court invalidity contentions rather than relying on it alone.

4. Price the § 289 exposure correctly. Design patent remedies are disgorgement of the infringer's total profits on the infringing article under 35 U.S.C. § 289, not a reasonable royalty. In a TRO/e-commerce context where the accused article is a low-cost packaged consumer product, this changes the settlement calculus dramatically and is the single most commonly under-modeled risk in design-patent defense. Confirm with your damages expert whether the "article of manufacture" is the whole package or the tray alone (see Samsung v. Apple, 580 U.S. 53 (2016)) — that is a live and potentially case-dispositive question here.

5. Verify the litigation record on PACER before relying on the blog-sourced case numbers. I have not independently confirmed 24-cv-00901 or 25-cv-14512 on a court docket, and I do not know the district, the named defendants, or whether any prior defendant has already run an invalidity or non-infringement defense to judgment. If a defendant has already litigated D740117 to a claim construction or invalidity ruling, that is far more valuable than anything the PTAB docket can offer — and PTAB E2E will never show it.

6. Calendar the term. 2029-10-06 — anticipated expiration, 14 years from the 2015-10-06 grant. No PTAB proceeding can extend or shorten it.

I'll start by verifying what the assignment record actually contains and checking the assignee's corporate history.

Let me dig into the litigation record and check for any post-issuance assignment activity.

Let me check the asserter directories and confirm whether any post-issuance transfer exists.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US D740117 S1 ("Packaging tray")

Scope note up front: The only assignment records I can verify for this patent are the two inventor→company confirmatory assignments recorded 2015-06-02. The Google Patents legal-events ledger in the authoritative full text shows these two "reassignment" entries but does not expose reel/frame numbers, and I was unable to retrieve the Patent Assignment Center detail pages for this patent. I am therefore not reporting reel/frame values — none are available to me, and I will not invent them. Everything below is grounded in the record I could actually see.

Inventors

Pattern check — no fire-sale precursor. The red flag you asked about (all inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing) is not present. Three of four inventors are still affiliated with CAO Group more than a decade later:

• Cao and Jensen are co-inventors on US 2023/0363877 A1 ("Curing light and therapeutic laser systems"), assigned to CAO Group, Inc. — i.e., still filing for CAO in 2023.
• Larsen was still CAO's named regulatory contact on the Monet Curing Laser 510(k) received 2020-07-09.
• The inventor group is the same family that produced D655165 (2012) and D655163 — a stable, long-tenured in-house inventive team, not a transient group assembled for an asset sale.

One discrepancy worth flagging for the file: Chinese-language e-commerce TRO reporting labels D740117 the "Lumist 美白贴 / whitening strip" patent. The patent itself claims a packaging tray design (D9/456), not a whitening strip. The tray is evidently the retail packaging for the whitening product; the label in secondary sources is a convenience, not a claim characterization.

Original assignee

CAO Group, Inc., 4628 West Skyhawk Drive, West Jordan, UT 84084 (also listed as 4628 W. Skyhawk Dr. / 4628 Skyhawk Drive).

• Line of business: Privately held manufacturer of dental and medical diode laser systems and consumables — dental lasers, LED curing lights, teeth-whitening products, digital x-ray sensors, forensic/veterinary/lighting divisions. FDA-registered, ISO-certified 60,000 sq ft facility; ~103 employees (PitchBook); founded 2000 by Dr. Densen Cao. Source: caogroup.com/pages/about-cao-group.
• Did they ship a product embodying the design? Yes. The claimed article is the retail packaging tray for CAO's whitening-strip line (marketed as Lumist and Sheer White!). CAO actively sells dental lasers (Picasso, Monet) and whitening products; CAO's own materials state it operates a 60,000 sq ft FDA-registered manufacturing facility.
• Current status: Operating. Not dissolved, not in bankruptcy, no SEC filings (private company). As of 2024-03-01 CAO consolidated its dental product lines under its wholly owned subsidiary AMD Lasers, Inc., while "CAO Group, Inc." remains the parent (merger announcement, 2024-02-20). The design rights were not moved to AMD in any recorded assignment I could find.

Assignment timeline

The Assignment Center records for D740117 consist of two recorded assignments, both to the same assignee, both bearing the USPTO recording date 2015-06-02 (roughly four months before the 2015-10-06 grant). No reel/frame was retrievable.

• Execution date not shown on the face of the available record / recorded 2015-06-02 — Reel not available

  • Conveyance: Assignment (Assignment of Assignors' Interest)
  • Assignor: Steven D. Jensen
  • Assignee: CAO Group, Inc.
  • Correspondent: Not determinable from the record available to me. (Do not treat this as a finding — I have no correspondent data, not absent-correspondent data.) Note that related CAO prosecution correspondence ran through in-house addresses kelly.preece@caogroup.com and jim.farmer@caogroup.com, but those are prosecution contacts, not recorded-assignment correspondents.
  • Context: Confirmatory inventor-to-original-assignee assignment — standard belt-and-suspenders paperwork filed so the design registers in the company name (Jensen filed separately from the other three).

• Execution date not shown / recorded 2015-06-02 — Reel not available

  • Conveyance: Assignment (Assignment of Assignors' Interest)
  • Assignor: Densen Cao; Robert K. Larsen; Jack R. Nichols
  • Assignee: CAO Group, Inc.
  • Correspondent: Not determinable from the record available to me.
  • Context: Same confirmatory batch as above — three inventors grouped on one instrument.

No other assignments exist. There is no change of name, no security agreement, no merger recording, no license recordation, no release, and no post-issuance transfer of any kind. Since the 2015-06-02 filings, CAO Group, Inc. has continuously owned D740117 for over ten years. That absence is itself the central finding: the ownership chain is one link long.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US D740117
    2014 : Filed 13 Mar by CAO Group inventors
    2015 : Inventor assignments recorded 2 Jun
         : Patent granted 6 Oct
    2024 : CAO dental lines consolidated into AMD Lasers
         : CAO sues in N D Ill on D740117
    2025 : CAO sues GuruNanda in C D Cal

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT. There is no transfer to any entity at all. The assignee on the face of the patent (CAO Group, Inc., West Jordan UT) is the assignee in the only two recorded assignments, and it is a 103-employee FDA-registered manufacturer at a fixed corporate address — not a registered-agent service address, not a Delaware/Texas single-member LLC. No "IP / Holdings / Ventures / Licensing" suffix appears anywhere in the chain.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT. Neither assignor nor assignee matches any entity on the lists you supplied (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities). Independent corroboration: the Stanford NPE Litigation Database classifies CAO Group Inc as asserter category "8 Product company" — i.e., expressly not an NPE — in CAO Group, Inc. v. [Schedule A defendants], 1:24-cv-01211 (N.D. Ill., filed 2024-02-12). See npe.law.stanford.edu. The same database tags CAO's earlier offensive cases (e.g., CAO Group v. Acteon Group, 2:13-cv-00284, D. Utah) as product-company assertions.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR / NOT DETERMINABLE. With a single-link chain and no correspondent data retrievable, there is no recurrence to measure. One attorney name does recur across CAO's assertion campaign — Bishop Diehl & Lee, Ltd. (the firm of record in 24-cv-00901 and 24-cv-01211) — but that is litigation counsel, not an assignment-record correspondent, and it recurs because CAO is a repeat plaintiff, which is a different signal. Under your precision rule, a single correspondent/firm appearance is not a finding; I am not scoring this as one.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT. Zero consecutive assignments, let alone multiple LLC hops in <24 months. The entire recorded history is two instruments filed on the same day to the same parent.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT. The first infringement suit naming this patent was filed 2024-02-01/02 (24-cv-00901, N.D. Ill.). The only assignments were recorded 2015-06-02 — approximately 8 years 8 months earlier. There is no timing correlation between any transfer and any suit, because there has been no transfer.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. No Chapter 7/11 event found for CAO Group; the company is privately held and reporting normal operations, with a 2024 subsidiary consolidation and 2024–2025 product launches. Note the PitchBook record shows a 2020-04-09 PPP loan of ~$677K and a 2015 debt refinancing — financing events, not insolvency, and neither has a corresponding patent security or transfer record.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT. CAO asserts in its own name against third-party sellers and a competitor, and takes its own damages. There is no NPE intermediary asserting on CAO's behalf and no evidence of a royalty-back arrangement. The chain does not route through a licensing vehicle.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates where it started, at the operating manufacturer.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

CAO Group, Inc. is the assignee of record on the face of D740117 and the sole assignee in the only two recorded assignments, both dated 2015-06-02 — an inventor→company confirmatory filing with no subsequent transfer in more than ten years. CAO is a 103-employee, FDA-registered dental device manufacturer that sells the packaged product embodying the claimed tray design, and it has asserted D740117 directly in its own name in 24-cv-00901 and 24-cv-01211 (N.D. Ill., 2024) and 25-cv-14512 (2025), plus CAO Group v. GuruNanda, LLC, 8:25-cv-02074 (C.D. Cal., filed 2025-09-12) — the last being a suit against a competing product company, which is the classic operating-company-vs-competitor posture. Stanford's NPE Litigation Database independently tags CAO as a "Product company," and no shell-entity, known-asserter, cascading-transfer, fire-sale, privateering, or defensive-aggregator signal is present.

Caveat for the file (does not change the verdict). The tactic in 24-cv-00901 is NPE-flavored even though the party is not: CAO filed a sealed Schedule A complaint against 76 named defendants, obtained an ex parte TRO with an asset freeze and electronic service, and on 2024-07-01 won a default judgment of $1,003,846.15 per defaulting defendant against 13 non-appearing sellers (comprising a $500,000 reasonable royalty, $3,846.15 transaction costs, $500,000 in enhanced damages, plus $28,708.08 fees). Defense counsel in the parallel 24-cv-01211 attacked the asset freeze as "extortive settlement leverage." That profile — anonymous-defendant mass joinder, asset restraint, statutory-damages style default awards — matches troll methodology, but the ownership chain and the identity of the asserter match an operating company, and ownership-chain analysis is what this report scores.

Verify at:

• USPTO Patent Assignment Search — assignmentcenter.uspto.gov (search patent number D740117); index mirror: assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events — patents.google.com/patent/USD740117/en
• Stanford NPE Litigation Database — npe.law.stanford.edu

Open item for a follow-up pass: I could not pull the raw Assignment Center frames, so reel/frame numbers and the recorded correspondent for the two 2015-06-02 instruments remain unverified. Given the chain is complete at one link, that gap is unlikely to change the verdict, but it should be closed before this analysis is relied on.

I'll research this systematically. Let me start with the target patent and its cited references.

Good — I have the core record confirmed. Now let me pull details on the remaining cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis: US D740117 S1 ("Packaging tray")

Note on method: I could not issue a direct query to USPTO PatentCenter/PAIR with the tools available. I verified the record through the authoritative patent text (Google Patents, USPTO-sourced), cross-checked against Justia Patents and FreePatentsOnline, and ran targeted searches on each cited reference. The full patent text provided in the task is treated as authoritative where it conflicts with secondary sources.

1. Target Patent — Verified Identification

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD740117/en (full authoritative text supplied), https://patents.justia.com/patent/D740117, https://www.freepatentsonline.com/D740117.html

Important drafting point: D740117 is a design patent with exactly one claim. Every anticipation question therefore resolves to the same target: Claim 1 — the ornamental design as shown in FIGS. 1–7.

2. Legal Framework (critical threshold issue)

The application was filed 2014-03-13, i.e., after the March 16, 2013 effective date of the America Invents Act's first-inventor-to-file provisions. Therefore AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102 governs, not the pre-AIA § 102(a)/(b)/(e) scheme. The operative subsections are:

• § 102(a)(1) — design "patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date."
• § 102(a)(2) — U.S. patents/published applications "effectively filed" before the effective filing date of the claimed design.

Design anticipation is judged by the ordinary-observer / substantial-similarity test (Gorham Co. v. White, 81 U.S. 511 (1871); In re Bartlett), and a single reference must be identical in all material respects to the claimed design — not merely analogous. This is why every reference below is potentially anticipatory only; the examiner cited them but still allowed the single claim, which is strong evidence none was found to anticipate.

3. Cited References — Full Analysis

The examiner-cited art comprises 10 references in the Google Patents citation table (all marked as cited by examiner), plus a possible 11th in the FPO "U.S. Patent References" list. All are analyzed against Claim 1 (the sole claim).

* D152555 appears only in the FreePatentsOnline reference list, not in the Google Patents citation table. Title shown as "N/A" in FPO. Flagging this as a source inconsistency; I have low confidence in its bibliographic detail.

Per-reference notes

1. US D363218 S (Mann / Inverness, granted 1995-10-17). Earring display package; class D9/428. Different field of goods (jewelry display vs. tray-type packaging). Cited as general background art for multi-recess display trays. § 102(a)(1) art (patented long before 2014). Potential anticipation of Claim 1: very unlikely — different article and different ornamental appearance.

2. US D417146 S (St. Pierre et al. / Kraft Canada, granted 1999-11-30). "Multi-container package," class D9/732. Relevant concept: multiple adjacent compartments in a single package. § 102(a)(1). Potential anticipation: low — the overall visual impression of a multi-container package differs from the D740117 shallow tray.

3. US 2010/0025278 A1 (Tilton / One Source Industries, published 2010-02-04). A utility publication, not a design. "Printed packaging." As a printed publication it is § 102(a)(1) art. For a design claim, this reference can only anticipate if its drawings alone disclose the same ornamental appearance to the ordinary observer — a strict and rarely met standard. Potential anticipation of Claim 1: low; its function is more naturally § 103-type evidentiary background (though § 103 is not the question here).

4. US D584141 S1 (Smith et al. / Philip Morris USA, granted 2009-01-06). A cigarette-"Package" design. § 102(a)(1). Also the parent family member of the D655154/D614023 Philip Morris cluster (see Google Patents related-application data at https://patents.google.com/patent/USD655154S1). Potential anticipation: low — rectangular carton-style package, visually distinct.

5. US D614023 S1 (Amos et al. / Philip Morris USA, granted 2010-04-20). "Package," same Philip Morris family as D655154/D584141. § 102(a)(1). Potential anticipation: low–moderate — same general "sealed package" category but a different article of ornamentation.

6. US D633388 S1 (Andre et al. / Apple Inc., granted 2011-03-01). "Packaging," class D9/456 — the same class as D740117. Filed 2010-06-09 as app. 29/363,500; related to US 7,878,326 and to D701,757 (continuation). § 102(a)(1). This is the most pertinent class-mates citation after D655165 and D708951. Its figure set is an 8-view box/packaging design (top/bottom perspective, front, rear, sides, top and bottom plan) — the same seven-plus-view convention, but a closed packaging box rather than an open multi-well tray. Potential anticipation: moderate at most; the ordinary observer would not confuse a solid packaging box with the open tray configuration of D740117. Source: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/16/5c/22/6f783b1e7fa1c5/USD633388.pdf

7. US D655165 S1 (Jensen, Steven D. & Nichols, Jack Ronald — "Packaging tray," app. 29/396,528, filed 2011-06-30, granted 2012-03-06; class D9/456). This is the single most relevant reference and the one to scrutinize hardest:

• Identical title ("Packaging tray") to D740117.
• Identical primary class (D9/456) and identical seven-figure description convention (FIGS. 1–7: perspective, rear elevation, left elevation, top plan, right elevation, front elevation, bottom plan) — literally the same figure caption set as D740117.
• Overlapping inventive entity: Jensen and Nichols are named on D655165 and are two of the four named inventors on D740117 (the others being Cao and Larsen).
• Common commercial origin: both traced to Cao Group, Inc. (West Jordan, UT). Note, however, that the published assignee field for D655165 reads "JENSEN STEVEN D.; NICHOLS JACK RONALD," while Google Patents lists current assignee as Cao Group Inc.
• Prior-art status: granted 2012-03-06, i.e., patented more than two years before D740117's 2014-03-13 filing → clean § 102(a)(1) art.
• Two caveats to flag: (i) Because the inventive entities are not identical (D655165 has only Jensen + Nichols; D740117 has Nichols + Cao + Larsen + Jensen), D655165 is not automatically disqualified as § 102 art on "same inventive entity" grounds. (ii) The AIA § 102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership exception could be argued if both were under a common assignment obligation to Cao Group at the relevant time, but § 102(b)(2) exceptions apply only to § 102(a)(2) art — and D655165 qualifies under § 102(a)(1) as a patent granted before the filing date, where the common-ownership exception does not reach.
• Anticipation assessment: this reference is the strongest candidate for a § 102(a)(1) anticipation challenge, and the strongest candidate for an obviousness-type double-patenting (ODP) objection. It is not an anticipation finding — the examiner cited it and still allowed D740117's claim, meaning the office did not consider the two designs to be identical in all material respects. Whether they differ enough is a factual question about the tray wall/well geometry, which cannot be settled from the text summary alone (the drawings themselves control). Source: https://www.freepatentsonline.com/D655165.html and https://uspto.report/patent/grant/D655165

8. US D655154 S1 (Amos et al. / Philip Morris USA, app. 29/353,152, filed 2010-01-04, granted 2012-03-06). "Package," classes D9/425 + D9/407; a continuation-in-part of abandoned app. 29/311,483 (filed 2009-03-30); two embodiments, 11 figures. § 102(a)(1). Potential anticipation: low–moderate. Source: http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/4f/ae/12/3046cbeb176c6e/USD655154.pdf

9. US D660142 S1 (Kirk et al. / General Mills Marketing, filed 2004-04-30, granted 2012-05-22). "Packaging for dough product," class D9/416. A refrigerated-dough can/package design. § 102(a)(1). Potential anticipation: moderate — food-product packaging tray/container, but a rounded canister form rather than a flat multi-well tray.

10. US D708951 S1 (Studt et al. / Sonneborn LLC — "Wax packaging tray," filed 2013-03-15, granted 2014-07-15; class D9/456). This reference has a non-obvious timing posture and deserves careful treatment:

• Filed 2013-03-15, i.e., two days before D740117's 2014-03-13 filing (actually nearly a year before), but granted 2014-07-15, i.e., after D740117 was filed.
• Because D740117 is an AIA application, D708951 is prior art under § 102(a)(2) (a U.S. patent "effectively filed" before the claimed invention's effective filing date) — the AIA analogue of the old pre-AIA § 102(e). A pre-AIA analysis would have missed this reference; under the AIA it is squarely available.
• Same class D9/456 as D740117, and the title ("Wax packaging tray") is nearly coextensive in subject matter.
• Anticipation assessment: a genuine § 102(a)(2) candidate and one of the two strongest references on the list (with D655165).

11. US D152555 (Millard, Feb. 1949 — FPO-only listing, "N/A" title, class D9/418). Appears in the FreePatentsOnline reference table but not in the Google Patents citation table. I have low confidence in its bibliographic accuracy and cannot confirm its title or content. If genuine, it would be § 102(a)(1) art (patented 1949). It cannot be meaningfully assessed without the drawings.

4. Consolidated Anticipation Summary (against Claim 1)

Bottom line: On the face of the record, no cited reference anticipates Claim 1 — the examiner cited all ten and nonetheless allowed the single claim, which is inconsistent with a substantial-similarity finding. If anticipation were to be asserted, the only defensible theories are § 102(a)(1) over US D655165 and § 102(a)(2) over US D708951, and both would require a side-by-side ordinary-observer comparison of the actual FIG. 1–7 drawings — which the text-only record here does not provide.

5. Additional Grounds the Citations Imply (outside § 102)

• Obviousness-type double patenting (ODP): US D655165 is the natural ODP target — same title, same class, overlapping inventors, same corporate assignee line (Cao Group). This is an invalidity theory distinct from § 102 and is often the more efficient attack on a design patent.
• § 103 obviousness: combinations built on D655165 + D708951 (same class) or D655165 + D633388 would be the natural combination theories, though § 103 is not what the question asked for.

6. Discrepancies and Confidence Flags

1. "Cited By" count differs between sources — Google Patents shows both 21 and 37 depending on which table is read; the fuller listing (37) includes many later Stasher, Inc. and Apple Inc. design patents. Not material to anticipation.
2. Primary examiner attribution differs — Justia lists Hattan (primary) / Koenig (assistant) for D740117; FPO lists "KOENIG, VY N" as primary. Unresolved records conflict.
3. A secondary aggregator (worldtro.com) mislabels D740117 as the "Lumist 美白贴" (whitening strip) patent. Per your strict-ID rule I do not adopt that label. The official title is "Packaging tray" (confirmed at Google Patents, Justia, and FPO). A separate Sohu article correctly identifies the enforcement action: Bishop Diehl & Lee filed Cao Group design-patent suits in 2024 (cases 24-cv-00901 and 24-cv-01211) asserting D740117 ("PACKING TRAY"), D655165, and a third Cao Group design. Treat these case numbers as secondary-source claims, not verified court records.
4. D152555 appears only in the FPO reference list; I could not verify it. Do not rely on it without pulling the document.
5. I have not viewed the actual drawing sheets of D740117 or of the cited references. All "anticipation risk" ratings above are inferred from bibliographic data (title, class, figure captions, dates, inventorship) and are not a substitute for the visual comparison that design-patent § 102 analysis requires.

Primary sources:

• https://patents.google.com/patent/USD740117/en
• https://patents.justia.com/patent/D740117
• https://www.freepatentsonline.com/D740117.html
• https://www.freepatentsonline.com/D655165.html
• https://uspto.report/patent/grant/D655165
• https://patents.google.com/patent/USD655154S1
• https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/16/5c/22/6f783b1e7fa1c5/USD633388.pdf

I'll ground this analysis by pulling specifics on the examiner-cited references before building the § 103 combinations.

Obviousness Analysis — US D740117 S1 ("Packaging tray") under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Threshold corrections and evidentiary limits

Three things must be fixed before the § 103 analysis is meaningful, and one of them corrects the framing used in the bibliographic section above.

(a) The AIA governs, not pre-AIA § 102(b). D740117 has an effective filing date of 2014-03-13, which is after the March 16, 2013 changeover. So the operative provisions are AIA 35 U.S.C. §§ 102(a)(1), 102(a)(2), 102(b)(1), 102(b)(2), and 103, with § 103 applied to designs through 35 U.S.C. § 171 ("The provisions of this title relating to patents for inventions shall apply to patents for designs, except as otherwise provided"). Any analysis resting on pre-AIA § 102(b)'s one-year statutory bar is using the wrong statute, even though in this case the outcome on the key reference happens to be the same.

(b) The record gives me figure legends, not figures. The authoritative text supplied contains only the seven-view legend. I have not visually compared the D740117 drawings against any reference, and I have not retrieved the drawing sheets. Every visual-similarity judgment below is therefore conditional — it identifies which combinations are legally available and which rationales a challenger would have to establish, not a conclusion that the claim is obvious. Stating otherwise would be fabrication.

(c) The examiner already considered the single most dangerous reference. See § 3 below. This is not a footnote; it is the central fact of the case.

Date discrepancy (flagged per instruction): the task header states "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while the fetched authoritative record is timestamped 2026-09-28. The other previously-generated section treats 2026-09-28 as the operative date. I use the record's date for legal-status statements and flag the conflict rather than silently reconciling it.

1. The governing design-patent obviousness framework

The claim here is "The ornamental design for a packaging tray, as shown and described." The entire claimed subject matter is the three-dimensional appearance of FIGS. 1–7. Nothing functional, no materials, and — per the record — no broken-line disclaimer of any portion, so the whole contour and surface design is in issue.

2. Step 1: Is there a "basically the same" primary reference?

For most design patents, no single reference clears Rosen. Here, one does — and it is unusual.

US D655165 S ("Packaging tray") — the anomaly

Retrieved data (Google Patents and the patent PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../USD655165.pdf) establishes an overlap with D740117 that goes far beyond the ordinary:

The seven-view legend is verbatim and in the same order. That is the drafting fingerprint of the same design team continuing the same design concept.

§ 102(a)(1) availability despite shared inventorship. D655165 issued 2012-03-06 — more than one year before D740117's 2014-03-13 filing. The AIA § 102(b)(1)(A) grace-period exception (disclosure by the inventor or a joint inventor) applies only to disclosures "made 1 year or less before the effective filing date." Because the disclosure here is outside that window, the exception does not reach it. A patent granted more than a year before the filing date is § 102(a)(1) prior art regardless of common inventorship. Note also that the § 102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership exception is unavailable, because it excuses only § 102(a)(2) art, and § 103(c)'s common-ownership carve-out likewise reaches only § 102(e)/(f)/(g)-type art — neither reaches publicly-available § 102(a)(1) art. The same-inventor, same-assignee status does not disqualify D655165.

Analogical-art check. D655165's CPC classes as reported on uspto.report include A61C2202/00 (dentistry) alongside B65D packaging classes. This corroborates the previously-flagged description of D740117 in the TRO-tracker sources as a tray for dental whitening strips: both patents sit at the intersection of dental-product packaging and general packaging. Either way, both are squarely within the field of endeavor of a packaging-tray designer, and D655165 was classified and searched in the identical field.

Why this is the only viable primary reference. The other nine examiner-cited references each occupy a different field of endeavor and present a different overall appearance:

• D363218 (Inverness) — earring display package, filed 1994; five figures, an exploded perspective with a planar base; D9/428 and D9/418 classes.
• D417146 (Kraft Canada) — multi-container package, filed 1997; five figures; expressly claims a flat package with tear lines and broken-line lettering; D9/345.
• D660142 (General Mills) — packaging for dough product.
• US 2010/0025278 A1 (One Source Industries) — printed packaging, a utility publication; usable only for what its figures visually disclose.
• D633388 (Apple; inventors including Steve Jobs) — packaging; eight figures including top/bottom perspective, front, rear, two sides, and top/bottom plan; D9/456-type packaging art.
• D584141, D614023, D655154 (Philip Morris) — package designs of the tobacco-carton lineage.
• D708951 (Sonneborn) — wax packaging tray, filed 2013-03-15, issued 2014-07-15.
• D655165 (Jensen) — see above.

None of the others is a packaging tray with the same title, class, and view structure. Under Durling, each fails Step 1 standing alone, because each would have to be re-designed substantially to reach the claimed appearance. D655165 is the only reference that could plausibly be pleaded as "basically the same."

3. The decisive counterweight: the examiner had D655165 — and allowed anyway

The authoritative record lists USD655165S1 in the "Patent Citations (10)" table with the asterisk meaning "cited by examiner." D740117 was therefore examined with its near-identical sibling of record in front of her.

Two further facts sharpen this:

1. Same primary examiner. The previously-generated section notes Justia lists Primary Examiner Susan Bennett Hattan for D740117; the retrieved D655165 record also lists Primary Examiner Susan Bennett Hattan. The same examiner had personal familiarity with both designs.
2. Cross-citation symmetry. D633388 (Apple) is cited in both patents, confirming the examiner and the D655165 applicant were working the same search field.

Consequence for the § 103 attack: the strongest available combination is not merely "available"; it was considered and rejected. Any invalidity theory must therefore be framed as "the examiner's visual comparison was wrong" — which is an evidentiary burden on the challenger, and per High Point Design is a fact question ordinarily not resolvable on summary judgment. An IPR-style facial attack that simply recites the D655165 + secondary-reference combination without addressing the examiner's contrary visual finding is likely to be dismissed as a repackaging of art already of record.

4. Step 2: The combinations a challenger would plead

All combinations below take D655165 as the primary reference (the only Step-1-qualifying reference). Each secondary reference must be shown to (i) be analogous art, and (ii) supply a feature whose substitution or incorporation into D655165's design leaves a modified design that still satisfies Rosen.

Reading the table: combination B (D655165 + D633388) is the strongest; A is the strongest on timing grounds but weakest on motivation; C is the strongest only if the D740117 drawings actually depict multiple compartments, which I cannot verify.

5. Why a designer of ordinary skill would have been motivated — the affirmative case

Running the MPEP § 1504.03 rationales against the packaging-tray art:

1. Same field of endeavor. Every reference in the examiner's list sits in the packaging/container classification (D9/4xx, D9/456, 0907), and the prior-art keywords in the D740117 record itself are "packaging tray / tray / packaging / view / ornamental design."
2. The primary reference is the applicant's own starting point. Where a reference is a same-title, same-class, same-assignee, overlapping-inventorship design with an identical seven-view legend, the ordinary designer is not merely motivated to start there — they are in effect already there. Adjustments to compartment count, wall taper, flange width, and corner radii are precisely the "predictable variations" KSR contemplates.
3. Functional pressure. A tray for small flat articles (dental whitening strips, per the D655165 CPC dental classification A61C2202/00 and the TRO-tracker descriptions) needs a perimeter flange for heat-sealing, tapered sidewalls for nesting/denesting, and rounded corners for tooling. Both the D740117 and D655165 designs sit on the same functional constraints, and where functional constraints narrow the design space, the resulting ornamental variation is more likely to be obvious.
4. The Apple reference was already in the design team's own lineage. D633388 appears in the "References Cited" of D655165 itself — i.e., Cao Group's own earlier design effort cited it. A designer continuing that effort would have it at hand, which supplies the "known technique" bridge rather than requiring speculation.

6. Why the challenge may nonetheless fail

The above is the affirmative case. Candidly, it is weaker than it looks, for four reasons:

1. The examiner's contrary visual finding (§ 3) is on the record and must be rebutted, not ignored.
2. No drawings reviewed. I cannot say whether D655165 is "basically the same" as D740117 or differs in the well geometry, taper angle, corner treatment, or surface ornamentation. Design invalidity often turns on exactly those differences. Durling's threshold is high, and if D655165 is not basically the same, no combination in § 4 can get off the ground, because there is no other Step-1 candidate.
3. The references cut against each other. D655165's own cited art includes D633388; the D740117 prosecution added D363218, D417146, D660142, D708951, and the Philip Morris family. That is a mixture of jewelry, tobacco, dough, wax, and electronics packaging — a grab-bag whose combination invites the Borden/Harvey "selective picking" objection and a non-analogous-art argument against each member.
4. Secondary considerations cut toward nonobviousness. D740117 is cited by 37 later design patents, including multiple Apple packaging designs (USD774899, USD779932, USD800549, USD842091, USD887828), Cryovac (USD791584), Mishima Kosan (USD779948), and the extended Stasher container family. Citation count is not commercial success, but it is evidence of the design's recognition in the art. Independently, the previously-generated section reports (unverified) that Cao Group asserted D740117 in Cao Group, Inc. v. e-commerce sellers in N.D. Ill. 2024-cv-00901 and 2025-cv-14512, obtaining a TRO around 2026-01-08. Copying by competitors is a classic secondary consideration, and if the record shows copying with nexus, it materially strengthens the case for nonobviousness and would be a substantial obstacle to summary judgment under High Point Design. (Treat the TRO facts as unconfirmed — they come from third-party sources, not dockets.)

7. A stronger alternative theory the record actually supports

If the object is to invalidate D740117, § 103 over D655165 is a difficult road. Two adjacent theories are cleaner and should be assessed first:

(i) Anticipation under § 102(a)(1). If the D740117 drawings are identical — or nearly so — to D655165's, the correct challenge is that a single reference discloses the claimed design, which requires the reference to be clearly the same (International Seaway Trading Corp. v. Walgreens Corp., 589 F.3d 1233 (Fed. Cir. 2009), applying the ordinary-observer test to anticipation). This avoids the entire motivation-to-combine apparatus. The identical titles, identical view legends, overlapping inventorship, and identical assignee make this a live question that only image comparison can answer.

(ii) Obviousness-type double patenting over D655165. Both patents are commonly owned by Cao Group. The record discloses no terminal disclaimer (none appears in the D740117 prosecution history as supplied). If D740117's design is not patentably distinct from D655165's, ODP applies to design patents and would invalidate D740117 — and, unlike § 103 over § 102(a)(1) art, ODP does not depend on the reference being "prior art" in the statutory sense. The differing inventive entities (Jensen + Nichols versus Jensen + Nichols + Cao + Larsen) is an obstacle to "same invention" double patenting, but not to obviousness-type double patenting where a single entity (Cao Group) controls both.

Related anomaly to investigate: Google's family data lists D740117 under Family ID 54204096 as a single-member family, and D655165 under a separate family — i.e., the databases record no formal familial relationship, and D740117's record shows no benefit claim to 29/396,528 or 12/885,729. Two design patents with identical titles, identical classification, an identical seven-figure legend, overlapping inventors, and a common assignee, sitting in unrelated families with no priority claim, is precisely the configuration that generates double-patenting exposure. This discrepancy (heavy documentary overlap vs. no recorded family relationship) should be resolved against the actual USPTO continuity data in PatentCenter, which was not reachable.

8. Bottom line

• Under § 103 as pleaded, the only cognizable primary reference is US D655165 ("Packaging tray," Jensen + Nichols, Cao Group, issued 2012-03-06). It is available as § 102(a)(1) prior art notwithstanding shared inventorship, because the disclosure predates D740117's 2014-03-13 effective filing date by more than the § 102(b)(1)(A) grace period.
• The best secondary reference is US D633388 (Apple, packaging), already of record in both D655165 and D740117, supplying a known rounded-corner, flanged packaging vocabulary. US D708951 is a stronger § 102(a)(2) reference (filed 2013-03-15) but a weak motivation reference (not publicly available until 2014-07-15). US D417146 is useful only if D740117 depicts multiple compartments.
• The combination is legally available but factually fragile. The examiner cited D655165 against D740117 and allowed the claim anyway, with the same primary examiner of record (Hattan) on both. That converts the dispute into a fact-bound visual-identity question of the kind that survived summary judgment in High Point Design.
• Confidence: I would put a § 103 invalidity judgment over D655165 + D633388 at low-to-moderate, contingent entirely on a drawing comparison I could not perform. I would put obviousness-type double patenting over D655165 and § 102(a)(1) anticipation by D655165 at materially higher viability if the drawings turn out to be substantially the same — which the identical legends, titles, class, and inventorship make a real possibility rather than a remote one.

9. Discrepancy flags (cumulative, including one correction to the prior section)

1. CITATION CORRECTION — statute. The earlier section's date reasoning implicitly applied pre-AIA § 102(b). Because D740117 was filed 2014-03-13, the AIA governs. The practical result for D655165 (available as prior art despite common inventorship) is unchanged, but the statutory citations in any invalidity contention must be AIA §§ 102(a)(1) / 103, not pre-AIA § 102(b).
2. Family-data contradiction. Google Patents reports D740117 in single-member Family ID 54204096 with no benefit claim, yet D655165 shares its title, class, figure legend, two inventors, and assignee. Unresolved; requires PatentCenter continuity data.
3. Examiner identity. The previously-generated section flagged inconsistent reporting of the D740117 examiner (Hattan vs. Koenig). Independently, the retrieved D655165 record confirms Hattan as primary examiner there, which makes the Hattan attribution for D740117 the more credible of the two and reinforces the "examiner already considered it" point.
4. "Whitening strip" vs. "Packaging tray." Unchanged from the prior section. The D655165 CPC classification A61C2202/00 (dentistry) plus B65D classes weakens the "secondary sources simply erred" hypothesis and supports a dental-packaging reading — but the claim remains to a tray's appearance, not to a strip.
5. D708951 timing. Its issue date (2014-07-15) postdates D740117's filing (2014-03-13). It is prior art only via § 102(a)(2) on the strength of its 2013-03-15 filing date, which is a legally valid but practically awkward basis for a motivation-to-combine argument.
6. Unreached references. I was unable to retrieve drawing-level or bibliographic detail for D584141, D614023, D655154, D660142, and US 2010/0025278 A1 before exhausting search capacity. Their characterizations in § 4 are drawn from their titles and the examiner-citation context only and should be verified before being relied on.