US 12009619

I'll research this specific patent number across the requested sources.

Let me dig deeper into the litigation and appellate dockets.

Let me find the actual claim set and check for any litigation specifically naming this patent.

Scope note up front

I searched for the literal string 12009619 (and the punctuated forms 12,009,619 / 12009619) across patent-office and court-oriented sources. I deliberately did not substitute nearby numbers. Where I could not verify something authoritatively, I say so explicitly rather than filling gaps.

One important framing point: the results you get for "12009619 + litigation" are mostly about its patent family, not about this patent itself. I explain that below.

1. Bibliographic summary — US 12,009,619

Sources: Google Patents family/prosecution data (https://patents.google.com/patent/US12009619/en) and the Justia patent-history panel (https://patents.justia.com/patent/12009619).

Termination-date caveat (interpret literally): Google Patents shows both a 2004-11-24 prior-art/priority date and an "Adjusted expiration" of 2025-10-08. Read literally, those two data points are consistent with a maximum term measured from the 2004 priority chain (2004-11-24 + 20 years ≈ 2024-11-24) plus a PTA adjustment landing on 2025-10-08 — i.e., a very short remaining term despite the 2024 grant. I did not independently verify the PTA figure or any terminal disclaimer from the official face of the patent, so treat the expiration date as a database assertion, not a verified legal conclusion.

Continuity chain (from the patent's own Cross Reference section): 17/196,545 ← 16/653,713 (Oct 15, 2019) ← 16/050,726 (Jul 31, 2018, now US 10,446,983) ← 15/431,018 (Feb 13, 2017, now US 10,038,284) ← 15/094,451 (Apr 8, 2016, now US 9,570,859) ← 13/448,937 (Apr 17, 2012, now US 9,312,611) ← 13/118,617 (May 31, 2011, now US 8,157,589) ← CIP of 12/418,103 (Apr 3, 2009, now US 8,071,174) and 12/941,709 (Nov 8, 2010, now US 7,950,958); the latter being a continuation of 12/397,087 (Mar 3, 2009, now US 7,828,595), itself a continuation of 10/997,218 (Nov 24, 2004, abandoned). Keep these numbers verbatim — several are the same family members that appear in the litigation below.

2. Abstract (verbatim)

"A connector includes a body having a central bore and a first grounding contact surface, a post disposed within the central bore and having an outwardly projecting flange configured to produce a first portion of a mating interface, and a conductive coupler. The post portion has a tubular sleeve configured to mechanically and electrically engage a prepared end of a coaxial cable. The conductive coupler has an engagement surface at a first end configured to mechanically and electrically engage an interface port, a lip at a second end configured to produce a second portion of the mating interface, and a second grounding contact surface opposing the first grounding contact surface. The first and second portions are configured to slide along the mating interface to rotate about an elongate axis of the connector. The connector includes a conductive ring disposed between the first and second grounding contact surfaces and configured to produce an electrical path between the body and the conductive coupler."

3. Plain-language overview of the independent claims — with an explicit limitation

I must flag a gap: the authoritative text supplied to me for this patent ends mid-sentence in the Detailed Description ("…the connector bod"), so I do not have the verbatim granted claim set in front of me, and my searches did not surface the granted claim text for 12,009,619 specifically (the claim text that search did surface belongs to sibling patents — e.g., the long claim-1 recitation I found is from US 9,225,083, and appears in the IPR exhibits, not from 12,009,619).

What I can state with confidence is the subject matter the independent claims are directed to, because the abstract is the claim-level summary of the invention and the title names the governing feature:

The patent families into the PPC "conductive O-ring / grounding member" line of coaxial (F-connector-type) cable connectors. In plain terms, the claims are directed to a connector made of three main conductive structures plus a conductive ring:

1. A body with a central bore, the body presenting a first grounding contact surface.
2. A post seated inside the bore, with an outwardly projecting flange that forms a first portion of a mating interface, and a tubular sleeve that slips under the cable's braided shield and around the dielectric to make mechanical and electrical contact with the cable's grounding shield.
3. A conductive coupler (nut) whose front end engages the interface port and whose rear end has a lip forming a second portion of the mating interface, and which presents a second grounding contact surface facing the body's first grounding contact surface. The two mating-interface portions slide on one another so the nut can spin about the connector's long axis while the body/post stay put.
4. The point of novelty (the "connector body conductive member"): a conductive ring — in the specification, an O-ring, item 80, seated at the connector body's second end (annular recess 56) and captured in the coupler's cavity (38) against outer internal wall (39) — disposed between the first and second grounding contact surfaces to create and maintain an electrical path between the body and the coupler.

The functional payoff recited consistently throughout the specification is (a) a redundant/unbroken ground path from the cable shield → post → ring → nut → port, and (b) a moisture/environmental seal at the same junction that closes the RFI/EMI ingress gap. The specification also describes a second, distinct conductive ring at the post mating edge (item 70, the "conductively coated mating edge member"), and states that a single connector embodiment may use both 70 and 80; note that the title and abstract of 12,009,619 are keyed to the body-side member (80), so if you need to know whether 70 is also claimed, that requires the granted claim text I could not retrieve.

Bottom line on the claims: I can give you the substance of the independent claims at abstract level with high confidence, but I cannot give you claim numbers, count, or verbatim language without the granted claims in hand. Do not treat section 3 as a substitute for the claim text.

4. Litigation and the CAFC 2026 docket — the key finding

No CAFC 2026 docket naming US 12,009,619 was identified. The only 2026 Federal Circuit decision in this PPC coaxial-connector dispute is:

• PPC Broadband, Inc. v. Amphenol Corp., Nos. 2024-1776, 2024-1777, 2024-1778, 2024-1779 — judgment entered March 4, 2026; nonprecedential, per curiam (Reyna, Hughes, Cunningham, JJ.); AFFIRMED under Fed. Cir. R. 36 (no written opinion). Appeals from PTAB Nos. IPR2022-00718, -00719, -00720, -00721.
  • https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/24-1776.RULE_36_JUDGMENT.3-4-2026_2656063.pdf
  • https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cafc/24-1776/24-1776-2026-03-04.html

The four patents in those IPRs are family siblings of 12,009,619, not 12,009,619 itself. Per the PTAB filings:

Source: PTAB papers at ptacts.uspto.gov (e.g., the consolidated caption listing "10,965,063 … 10,446,983 … 10,038,284 … 9,225,083"), and the docket-alarm hearing transcript for IPR2022-00721.

Why "12,009,619" shows up in IPR search results: the Justia page for 12,009,619 carries the family's PTAB/litigation history, which is how the phrase "Inter Partes Review Case IPR2022-00719 … U.S. Pat. No. 10,446,983" appears adjacent to this patent number. That is a family cross-reference, not an IPR against 12,009,619. IPR2022-00719 was filed March 18, 2022 and terminated October 23, 2023 — both before 12,009,619 issued on June 11, 2024, so it categorically could not have challenged 12,009,619.

Related district-court matters referenced in the IPR papers (same family; I could not confirm from search results that 12,009,619 itself was asserted in them):

• PPC Broadband, Inc. v. Amphenol Corporation and Times Fiber Communications, Inc., No. 1:21-cv-00654 (D. Del.)
• Times Fiber Communications, Inc. v. PPC Broadband, Inc., No. 1:21-cv-01823-UNA (D. Del., filed Dec. 27, 2021)
• Google Patents also flags a Darts-ip family litigation record (family 44647595), i.e., "Family has litigation / First worldwide family litigation filed" — again, family-level, not patent-level.

Inference worth noting (flagged as inference, not verified): Because the PTAB found the challenged claims of the family unpatentable over combinations of coaxial/cable-connector prior art, and the Federal Circuit affirmed on March 4, 2026, the commercially relevant sibling claims are gone. 12,009,619 shares that specification and much of that subject matter, so an Amphenol-side validity challenge to 12,009,619 would draw on the same prior-art theories. However, I found no IPR and no court decision addressing 12,009,619 itself, and I will not state otherwise.

5. Explicit uncertainty list

• Verbatim granted claims of 12,009,619: not retrieved. Section 3 is abstract-level and should not be quoted as claim language.
• PTA / expiration date (2025-10-08) and "Expired – Lifetime" status: database assertion from Google Patents; not verified against the printed patent's (45)/(22)/(85) data or a terminal disclaimer.
• Two competing priority anchors (2004-11-24 via 10/997,218; 2009-04-03 via 12/418,103): both are listed on Google Patents; the effective priority date for any particular claim was not resolved here.
• Whether 12,009,619 was ever asserted in 1:21-cv-00654 or 1:21-cv-01823: unverified — the litigation hits I found concern the family, and I could not confirm the specific patents-in-suit.
• Whether any IPR petition against 12,009,619 exists: none found, but I had a bounded number of searches and cannot rule one out (the post-issuance IPR window from a June 11, 2024 grant would have run into late 2025).

I'll search litigation-specific sources for the literal patent number 12,009,619.

Litigation involving US Patent No. 12,009,619

Bottom line

I found no litigation — district court, ITC, PTAB, or Federal Circuit — in which US Patent No. 12,009,619 is named as a patent-in-suit, a challenged patent, or otherwise a subject of the proceeding.

Every litigation hit for "12,009,619" traces to the patent family, not to this patent. I set out exactly what I found, what it actually concerns, and what remains open, so you can audit the negative result.

1. What I searched (so the negative is auditable)

Search returned unrelated noise (e.g., a Romanian retail price list containing the SKU "12009619") and near-number artifacts; I discarded those and did not substitute them.

2. The one record that actually links 12,009,619's application to a proceeding

This is the closest thing to a "hit," and it is important to characterize it precisely.

In IPR2022‑00719 (Amphenol Corp. v. PPC Broadband, Inc., challenging US 10,446,983), PPC's Patent Owner Mandatory Notices (dated April 8, 2022) list among related matters:

• PPC Broadband, Inc. v. Amphenol Corporation and Times Fiber Communications, Inc., Case No. 1:21‑cv‑00654 (D. Del.)
• IPR2022‑00718 (US 10,965,063); IPR2022‑00720 (US 10,038,284); IPR2022‑00721 (US 9,225,083)
• U.S. Patent Application No. 17/196,545 — this is the application that issued as US 12,009,619
• U.S. Patent Application Nos. 17/196,472 and 17/196,508

Source: ptacts.uspto.gov, IPR2022‑00719, Patent Owner's Mandatory Notices.

What this does and does not establish:

• Does: as of April 2022, application 17/196,545 (→ 12,009,619) was a listed related application in the IPR against its parent, 10,446,983. That is a family/continuity relationship, not an assertion.
• Does not: it does not establish that 12,009,619 was ever asserted in 1:21‑cv‑00654. It could not have been — 12,009,619 did not issue until June 11, 2024, and the reference is to the application number, not a patent number.

3. Family-level litigation (NOT 12,009,619 — included only to close out the search)

For completeness, these are the matters in the same PPC/Belden coaxial-connector family. None of them names 12,009,619, and I verified the patent numbers listed in each from the filings/dockets:

PTAB proceedings (family, not 12,009,619):

• IPR2022‑00718 (10,965,063), ‑00719 (10,446,983 — direct parent of 12,009,619), ‑00720 (10,038,284), ‑00721 (9,225,083) — filed Mar. 18, 2022 by Amphenol; -00719 terminated Oct. 23, 2023.
• IPR2022‑00946, ‑00947, ‑01087, ‑01088 — PPC v. Times Fiber (10,988,342; 11,001,471; 10,941,016; and related).

Appeal (family, not 12,009,619):

• PPC Broadband, Inc. v. Amphenol Corp., Nos. 2024‑1776, ‑1777, ‑1778, ‑1779 (Fed. Cir.), judgment March 4, 2026, per curiam (Reyna, Hughes, Cunningham, JJ.), AFFIRMED under Fed. Cir. R. 36 (no opinion). Appeals from IPR2022‑00718/‑00719/‑00720/‑00721.
  • https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/24-1776.RULE_36_JUDGMENT.3-4-2026_2656063.pdf
  • https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cafc/24-1776/24-1776-2026-03-04.html

4. Why "12,009,619" surfaces in litigation searches

Three mechanisms, all family-level:

1. Continuity string. 12,009,619's specification (Cross Reference section) recites 16/653,713 ← 16/050,726 (10,446,983) ← 15/431,018 (10,038,284) ← 15/094,451 (9,570,859) ← 13/448,937 (9,312,611) ← 13/118,617 (8,157,589) ← CIP of 12/418,103 (8,071,174) and 12/941,709 (7,950,958) ← 12/397,087 (7,828,595) ← 10/997,218. Those are the patents litigated. Anything keyed to the specification inherits the family's litigation history.
2. Related-matters listings. As shown in §2, 17/196,545 is named as a related application in IPR2022‑00719.
3. Aggregator family pages. Google Patents flags a Darts‑ip family record (family 44647595, "Family has litigation / First worldwide family litigation filed") — a family-level flag with no patent-level case attached.

5. Explicit uncertainty / limits on this answer

• Negative result, not proof of absence. I could not reach a PACER/Unified caselist entry keyed precisely to 12,009,619, and my tool access was bounded. The post-issuance IPR window (issuance June 11, 2024 → roughly June 2025) is now closed, so no new IPR against this patent can be filed absent joinder, but a district court or ITC action filed between June 2024 and now cannot be ruled out simply from the searches above. If you need certainty, pull the patent's own "Referenced By / Litigation" tab on Google Patents, the USPTO PatentCenter "Patent Litigation" (USPTO Patent Litigation Docket, formerly the Patent Examination Data System litigation search), or run a Lex Machina / Docket Navigator patent-number search.
• Dispositions of the §3 cases are marked "unverified" where search results gave the docket but not a final judgment; I did not confirm terminations for 1:21‑cv‑00654, 1:21‑cv‑01823, or 1:20‑cv‑01148.
• Cross-check against the earlier section: consistent — it reported no CAFC 2026 docket naming 12,009,619 and no IPR against it. One refinement to flag: the earlier section listed the Federal Circuit oral argument audio posted March 2, 2026 and the judgment March 4, 2026; both are now confirmed in the CAFC record. No contradiction found.
• Not a legal conclusion. Absence of a finding here is a research result, not a representation that no suit exists or that the patent is unasserted.

I'll verify the structured data against live sources before drafting, since the task asks me to flag anything the ODP hasn't indexed.

Let me run two more targeted checks — one on the patent's own prosecution/PTAB page, and one on the assignee's recent PTAB activity.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 12,009,619: zero.

Per the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal, canonical), the ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings — no IPR, no PGR, no CBM — naming US 12,009,619. My independent web searches (patent number alone, patent number + IPR/PGR, assignee + recent PTAB activity) surfaced nothing inconsistent with that block: no petition, no institution decision, no FWD, no termination, no appeal. Breakdown by status is therefore: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0.

Bottom-line defensive posture: This is not a "patent hardened by surviving IPRs" story, and it is not a "claims canceled, ignore the demand letter" story either. It is a "nobody has ever challenged this patent at the Board" story — which, given that the patent's own parent was invalidated in IPR and that invalidation was affirmed by the Federal Circuit on 2026-03-04, is a defendant-favorable signal about challenge viability, not about validity. Read the next section carefully before you conclude anything about the family IPRs.

No per-proceeding sections follow, because there are no proceedings to describe. Inventing a proceeding number, panel, or FWD here would be fabrication. Instead I set out the adjacent proceedings that are most often mistaken for challenges to this patent, and then the strategic read.

Adjacent proceedings that are NOT against this patent (do not conflate)

These appear throughout search results next to the 12,009,619 number. None of them challenged 12,009,619. The earlier litigation section of this analysis already lays these out in detail — I cross-reference rather than repeat, and add only the PTAB-specific layer.

Sources: CAFC Rule 36 judgment — https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/24-1776.RULE_36_JUDGMENT.3-4-2026_2656063.pdf and https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cafc/24-1776/24-1776-2026-03-04.html ; PTAB docket for IPR2022-00721 — https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-00721/Amphenol_Corp._v._PPC_Broadband_Inc/ ; oral argument audio — https://www.courtlistener.com/audio/[102881](/patent/102881)/ppc-broadband-inc-v-amphenol-corp/

Two additional false positives to wave off:

1. The Unified Patents portal lists "US-12009619-B2 / Connector Having a Connector Body Conductive Member" on pages that also list other PPC patents. That is a family/portfolio listing, not a challenge. Unified Patents does not appear anywhere in the chain as a petitioner on this patent. (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-[2549647](/patent/2549647)-A — illustrative of the family-listing format.)
2. Google Patents' "Family has litigation" badge (Darts-ip family 44647595) is a family-level flag, not a proceeding against this patent.

⚠️ Contradiction to flag in the prior section

The prior "Litigation and the CAFC 2026 docket" section says: "the post-issuance IPR window from a June 11, 2024 grant would have run into late 2025." That conflates two different statutes and should be corrected. IPR has no post-issuance window — a petitioner may file at any time, subject only to the § 315(b) one-year bar running from service of an infringement complaint. The nine-month post-issuance window belongs to PGR (35 U.S.C. § 321(c)). Corrected framing: a PGR against this patent would have had to be filed by approximately 2025-03-11, and that window has closed. An IPR remains available today absent a § 315(b) bar.

Strategic summary

Which claims are canceled vs. sustained vs. untested. For 12,009,619 itself: all claims are UNTESTED. No claim of this patent has been canceled, confirmed, or even reviewed by the Board. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. Separately — and this is the family context a defendant actually needs — the PTAB's Final Written Decisions in the four 2022 Amphenol IPRs held the challenged claims of the sibling patents unpatentable, and the Federal Circuit affirmed those determinations on 2026-03-04 without opinion. The PTAB paper I retrieved in connection with IPR2022-00719 (the '983 parent) closes with "ORDERED that claims 1–5, 8–15, and 18 of U.S. …" — i.e., the parent's challenged claim set was canceled. I am reporting that verbatim from the retrieved snippet and not extrapolating it to 12,009,619's claim numbers, which I have never seen (see the earlier section's explicit gap on the granted claim text).

Estoppel landscape. Because no IPR was filed against 12,009,619, there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaching to this patent. Amphenol's estoppel from IPR2022-00718–00721 runs to the claims of the challenged patents ('063, '983, '284, '083) and to Amphenol and its privies — it does not bar Amphenol (or anyone else) from raising Youtsey, Lionetto, Horak, Tarrant, Bell, or the other Dickens-declaration references against 12,009,619's claims in district court. Practically, that cuts both ways: the prior-art grounds are fully available, but so is a collateral-estoppel / issue-preclusion theory against PPC on the shared specification's disclosures about the redundant-grounding-path motivation, which the Board found persuasive and the CAFC affirmed. Note also the Corning Optical Communications RF LLC v. PPC Broadband decision that PPC's own docket shows was designated precedential — relevant to RPI-identification practice if you do file.

Pattern signals. The same petitioner (Amphenol) filed four IPRs against four different PPC family members on the same day, coordinating the same expert (Dr. James Dickens) and the same redundancy-of-grounding-path theory across all four. PPC appealed all four losses and lost on all four. No defensive aggregator appears anywhere in this patent's history. And note the changed procedural climate: as of the 2025-03-26 Workload Management memorandum and Director Squires' reclaiming of institution decisions, PPC — a serial PTAB defendant with an established playbook — is now more likely to obtain a discretionary denial than it was in 2022. That weighs against assuming that the 2022–2024 results automatically repeat.

The commercial point that dominates everything else: per Google Patents, this patent carries an adjusted expiration of 2025-10-08 and "Expired – Lifetime" status (flagged as a database assertion, not verified, in the prior section). Today is 2026-09-30. If that date is right, 12,009,619 is already expired. An expired patent cannot support an injunction or ongoing royalties; recovery is limited to past damages within the § 286 six-year lookback, and the patent owner cannot amend claims in any Board proceeding (37 C.F.R. § 42.121(a) practice on expired patents).

Recommended next steps

1. Verify the expiration date before you do anything else. This is the single highest-leverage fact in the file. Pull the printed patent's (45)/(22)/(85) data, any PTA certificate, and any terminal disclaimer from USPTO PatentCenter (application 17/196,545). If 2025-10-08 holds, your demand-letter response should lead with expiry, not with invalidity.

2. Treat this as a fresh-challenge patent, not a pre-challenged one. There is no FWD to link or quote for 12,009,619, and I will not manufacture one. If you are served or threatened, your IPR deadline is governed solely by 35 U.S.C. § 315(b) — one year from service of the complaint on you or a privy/RPI — with no post-issuance deadline otherwise. PGR is gone as of ~2025-03-11; CBM sunset in 2020 and is unavailable. Check PTAB E2E yourself before relying on my search: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/ and the decisions portal at https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/patent-trial-and-appeal-board-decisions — a recently filed petition could post-date the ODP ingest.

3. If you do petition, start from the family record. The 2022–2024 Amphenol papers are the closest thing to a template: the Youtsey / Lionetto / Horak combination (Ground 1) and Tarrant / Bell combination (Ground 2) were accepted by the Board, and the redundancy-of-grounding-path motivation survived PPC's appeal. Because 12,009,619's independent claims are keyed to the conductor body-side ring (the "connector body conductive member" of item 80), the natural mapping is the body-to-coupler grounding path, exactly as the '983 IPR framed it. But obtain the verbatim granted claims first — this analysis has never had them, and no ground should be drafted without them.

4. Sequence the invalidity defenses. If you are a privy of Amphenol, § 315(e)(2) estops you on the '983/'083/'284/'063 claims but not on 12,009,619; if you are an independent defendant, you face no PTAB estoppel at all on this patent and can run both tracks. In district court, the mother of all defenses here is issue preclusion built on the affirmed '983 FWD plus the shared specification — pursue it alongside, not instead of, your own § 102/§ 103 case.

5. Do not over-read the absence of IPRs in the other direction either. Fewer than one in a hundred issued patents is ever challenged. The absence of PTAB activity on 12,009,619 means, at most, that it has never been commercially worth attacking — which is itself informative if the demand letter you are holding tries to value it highly.

I'll research the assignment record for US 12,009,619 across the required sources.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 12,009,619 B2

Methodological caveat up front (read before using the timeline)

I was not able to retrieve reel/frame numbers for this patent. The USPTO Assignment Center / Assignment Search interface (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/, mirrored at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) is a JavaScript-driven search that my available queries did not surface indexed reel/frame payloads for, and no third-party mirror returned a reel/frame for application 17/196,545 or patent 12,009,619. I will not invent reel/frame numbers. Where I cite an assignment, I cite it from the Google Patents legal-events record (which is itself drawn from the USPTO assignment feed) and I flag the reel/frame as unretrieved.

That gap does not change the substance of the analysis, because the substance is a negative finding: this patent's recorded chain contains a single assignment, and the chain terminates at an operating company.

Inventors

Basis for employer attribution: all three are named on the long PPC "conductive grounding member" family — e.g., US 9,225,083 (granted Dec. 29, 2015), whose face reads "PPC Broadband, Inc., East Syracuse, NY (US)" as assignee and "Mary Kreneeski, Troy, NY (US); Roger Mathews, Syracuse, NY (US); Noah P. Montana, Syracuse, NY (US)" as inventors (note: the OCR on that printed patent renders the surnames "Kreneeski"/"Montana"; the correct spellings per the 12,009,619 record and the family applications are Krenceski and Montena — an OCR artifact, not a different person). Krenceski is indexed with 19 US patents, all attributed to PPC Broadband, spanning 1990–2024 (https://www.patentleaderboard.com/ppc-broadband/mary-krenceski/[262969](/patent/262969)).

Pattern assessment — no fire-sale precursor:

• Inventor departures within 12 months of filing: not present / not evidenced. These are career connector engineers with continuous multi-decade PPC output; Montena and Krenceski appear as PPC-assigned inventors both before (2004–2018) and after (2021–2024) this filing. The same three-inventor team recurs across the entire 20-year chain.
• Unusual inventor pattern: none. The co-inventor set is stable and the assignment runs to the employer, consistent with standard employee invention assignment.
• ⚠️ Caution flag: do not build a "departing inventors" narrative here. The prior-art/priority date of 2004-11-24 on this patent reflects the specification's priority claim, not the inventors' employment span on this filing. The application itself (17/196,545) was filed 2021-03-09.

Original assignee

PPC Broadband, Inc., East Syracuse, NY (3766 E. Molloy Road / 6176 E. Molloy Road, East Syracuse, NY 13057).

Name-history note (relevant to older family members, not to this record): earlier applications in the same chain were assigned to John Mezzalingua Associates, Inc., East Syracuse, NY (see the face of the family publication US 2012/0202378 A1, app. 13/448,937: "(73) Assignee: JOHN MEZZALINGUA ASSOCIATES, INC., East Syracuse, NY (US)"). John Mezzalingua Associates, Inc. is PPC's predecessor corporate name. No change-of-name assignment is recorded against 12,009,619 itself — by the 2021 filing the assignee of record was already PPC Broadband, Inc. The Mezzalingua→PPC name change therefore sits behind this patent in the family history, not inside its record.

Assignment timeline

Total recorded assignments against US 12,009,619: ONE.

~2021-03-09 (executed) / recorded 2021-03-10 — Reel ⟨not retrieved — see caveat⟩/⟨not retrieved⟩

• Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS' INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
• Assignor: KRENCESKI, MARY; MATHEWS, ROGER; MONTENA, NOAH P. (all three, individually)
• Assignee: PPC BROADBAND, INC.
• Correspondent: Not retrievable from the Assignment Center index I could reach. The prosecution correspondent of record across this family is Oliff PLC, P.O. Box 320850, Alexandria, VA 22320-4850 — USPTO Customer No. 130569, which appears as the designated correspondence address on PPC filings in this chain (e.g., the 16/050,726 preliminary amendment in the parent, per the IPR2022-00719 exhibits). Caveat: I am inferring Oliff as the likely recording correspondent because it is the family's customer-number of record; I did not confirm Oliff as the assignee-side signatory on the reel/frame itself. Note also that Oliff is a full-service prosecution firm, not an NPE-recording shop, and its recurrence here is a single-chain recurrence — not a troll signal.
• Context: Initial employer take-up of employee inventors' rights — the standard first assignment executed on or about the filing date (application filed 2021-03-09; recording landed the next day). This is the only link in the chain.

No subsequent assignments recorded. Per Google Patents legal events for 12,009,619, after the 2021-03-10 assignment the only further events are the 2021-06-24 publication of US 2021/0194186 A1, the 2024-06-11 grant, and the 2025-10-08 adjusted-expiration entry. There is no assignment to Belden Inc. or to any Belden IP-holding entity, and no assignment to any third party.

Why there is no Belden-level assignment (and why that is expected, not a gap): Belden acquired PPC Broadband, Inc. as a corporate entity in 2012. When a parent buys the stock of an operating subsidiary, the subsidiary's patents stay titled in the subsidiary's name — no patent assignment is recorded. That is precisely what the record shows, and it is corroborated by the PTAB RPI statement that Belden "wholly owns" PPC. Any analyst looking for a PPC→Belden reel/frame will not find one, and should not report that as missing data. The chain is complete and intact as recorded.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 12009619
    2012 : Belden acquires PPC Broadband
    2021 : App 17 196 545 filed by PPC
         : Inventors assign to PPC Broadband
    2024 : Patent issues as US 12009619
         : No further assignments recorded

Note: The 2012 Belden entry is a corporate acquisition of the assignee entity, not a recorded patent assignment. It is shown for completeness because it is the parent relationship that governs who actually controls the patent.

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Operating-company assertion

Justification. The entire recorded chain is a single assignment — inventors Krenceski, Mathews and Montena → PPC Broadband, Inc., executed on/about 2021-03-09 and recorded 2021-03-10 — with no subsequent transfer to any LLC, aggregator, or NPE, and no assignment of any kind after the initial employer take-up. The assignee is a genuine manufacturer (Belden's wholly-owned coaxial-connector subsidiary, with real product lines and a live East Syracuse, NY manufacturing/engineering site funded by a 2024 NY state grant), it independently confirmed in a PTAB filing that "PPC Broadband, Inc. and Belden Inc., which wholly owns PPC Broadband, Inc." are the real parties in interest, and it litigates in its own name as an operating-company plaintiff against actual market competitors (Amphenol/Times Fiber, Corning, PerfectVision). All eight NPE signals are "not present," with the sole unretrieved data point being the reel/frame number and recording attorney for the single 2021 assignment — a gap that, even filled, could not change the verdict, since the assignee is an operating company on both ends of the only recorded link.

Residual caution: this verdict describes the assignment record, not the current litigation posture. Per the two prior sections, the family is under heavy attack (IPR2022-00718/‑00719/‑00720/‑00721, affirmed under Fed. Cir. R. 36 on 2026-03-04), and PPC's own sibling claims have been cancelled. That is an enforcement-risk finding about the portfolio, not an NPE finding about ownership.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search "12/009,619" or application "17/196,545") — pull the single reel/frame to confirm the recording date, the executing signatories, and the correspondent attorney name, which is the one field I could not retrieve.

Explicit gaps and one cross-reference check

• Reel/frame, execution date, recording date, and recording correspondent for the 2021 assignment: not retrieved. Recording date (2021-03-10) is from Google Patents legal events; execution date is inferred from the filing date (2021-03-09). Do not treat either as a USPTO-verified reel/frame fact until pulled from Assignment Center.
• Cross-reference against prior sections: consistent. The prior "Patent summary" section independently recorded the same single 2021-03-10 PPC assignment and the same inventor/assignee set. No contradiction found. One minor variance to note: prior sections did not identify Belden Inc. as the controlling parent; the PTAB RPI statement and PPC's Rule 7.1(a) disclosure supply that link now, and it is an addition, not a correction.
• Name-spelling artifacts ("Kreneeski," "Montana") appear in OCR renderings of sibling patents (US 9,225,083). These are not separate inventors; the controlling record spells them Krenceski and Montena.
• Not a legal conclusion. This is an assignment-record reconstruction. It is not a representation of current title, encumbrance, licensing, or standing.

I'll search for the patent's cited references and claim text.

Let me pull the front-page references and claim text from the patent document itself.

Scope note before the analysis

Two things I have to state up front, because they constrain everything below:

1. I could not retrieve the "References Cited" (56) list printed on the front page of US 12,009,619. My searches returned the patent's family/prosecution record (Justia patent-history page for 12009619), the litigation record, and unrelated near-number noise — including a Romanian retail price list containing the SKU "12009619" and content for other patent numbers (EP 4 588 440, US 11,919,956, US 12,245,859, JP 2017-519110, etc.). Per the strict rule, I discarded those and did not substitute them. So I cannot hand you the literal, examiner-cited (56) list. To get it authoritatively you need the patent PDF front page, the Google Patents "Patent Citations" tab, or USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter.

2. I still do not have the verbatim granted claims of 12,009,619 (consistent with the gap flagged in the earlier section). So I cannot map art to claim numbers with confidence. That is a real limitation on the §102 question you asked — anticipation is claim-by-claim.

What I can do, and did: the patent's direct parent is US 10,446,983, and its grandparent is US 10,038,284, both of which share this specification. Those patents were challenged in IPR2022-00718/‑00719/‑00720/‑00721, and the art cited there is the most reliable available proxy for the art of record against 12,009,619's claimed subject matter — precisely because 12,009,619 claims the same "connector-body conductive member" (O-ring 80, spec ¶ on FIGS. 8A/8B) that the IPRs were about. I also have the reexamination record for family member US 7,833,053 (Reexam Control 95/001,689, Appeal 2013-009123), which is another window into the art of record for this disclosure.

⚠️ Contradiction to flag

Your authorities conflict on the priority date one day apart:

The specification's own Cross Reference section says U.S. App. Ser. No. 10/997,218, filed on Nov. 24, 2004, abandoned. I therefore treat 2004-11-24 as the controlling recitation and flag the 11-23 figure as a database/INPADOC discrepancy. It is immaterial to the §102 analysis below, since every reference identified predates both dates by years and also predates the secondary 2009-04-03 anchor.

The located prior art of record against this disclosure

All of the following are named in the PTAB record for the IPR2022-00718/‑719/‑720/‑721 set (same specification as 12,009,619) and/or in the family reexamination. Dates are the printed issue dates as recited in those decisions.

Bottom line on §102

• No reference I located is an unambiguous single-reference §102 anticipation of the connector-body-conductive-ring claim as the abstract recites it. Every reference that discloses a ring in the body↔coupler interface (Youtsey o-ring 84, Tarrant o-ring 12, Bell o-ring 34) discloses it as a seal, with conductivity supplied by combination. Every reference that discloses a genuinely conductive ring (Lionetto elastomer 34, Horak rubber ring 18) places it in the body↔post interface, which is a different claimed location.
• The only actual §102 rejections in this family came from Palinkas (US 6,716,062 B1) under §102(a)/(e) — and those were aimed at the post-end conductive member (item 70) claims of US 7,833,053, not the body-side member (item 80) that 12,009,619 is titled and abstracted to.
• The body-ring claim was disposed of in the sibling IPRs by §103, over Youtsey + Lionetto + Horak (and the parallel Tarrant- and Bell-led combinations), and the Federal Circuit affirmed that outcome on March 4, 2026 (Nos. 2024-1776/‑1777/‑1778/‑1779, Rule 36). That is the strongest signal that the relevant art is obviousness art, not anticipation art.
• Family members are not prior art to 12,009,619. US 7,828,595, 7,950,958, 8,071,174, 8,157,589, 9,312,611, 9,570,859, 10,038,284, 10,446,983, 9,225,083, 10,965,063 (and the PPC Montena "coupler-body continuity member" patents such as US 8,915,754 B2) share the chain or the inventive entity. They appear in continuity listings, and I have not counted them as §102 art. If any of them reflects a distinct chain with a different inventive entity and a pre-2004 date, that needs a separate §102(b)(2) analysis — I did not verify each chain.
• Priority-date sensitivity: 12,009,619 lists two anchors (2004-11-24 via 10/997,218; 2009-04-03 via 12/418,103). If the body-ring claims are supported only by the later applications, the effective date slips to 2009 or later and the universe of §102 art expands. I could not determine which anchor governs the body-ring claims, because I don't have the claims.

Explicit uncertainty list

1. Front-page (56) citations of 12,009,619: NOT retrieved. Everything in the table above comes from the family's PTAB/reexam record, not from 12,009,619's own face. Items I could not verify at all: Tarrant's and Bell's patent numbers and dates, Bence's patent number and prior-art status, and Tatsuzuki's / Peng's full citations.
2. Granted claims of 12,009,619: NOT retrieved (same gap as the earlier section). Consequently, "which claims are anticipated" is answered at the level of claim features, not claim numbers. Do not cite the §102 column as a claim-number mapping.
3. Priority-date contradiction flagged above (2004-11-24 vs. 2004-11-23).
4. Palinkas's §102(a)/(e) rejection was against US 7,833,053's claims, whose subject matter (post-mating-edge member, item 70) differs from 12,009,619's title/abstract subject matter (body-side member, item 80). I have not verified whether Palinkas was ever applied against 12,009,619 or its parents.
5. No verification that any of the IPR-named references (Youtsey, Lionetto, Horak, Tarrant, Bell, Palinkas, Bence) was actually cited by the Examiner during prosecution of application 17/196,545. Their relevance to the claimed subject matter is my inference from subject-matter identity across the shared specification.
6. Not a legal conclusion. Anticipation requires element-by-element correspondence in a single reference; I cannot complete that analysis without the claims and the full text of each reference. To close the gaps: pull the 12,009,619 front page, the 17/196,545 file wrapper (PatentCenter), and the IPR2022-00718/‑719/‑720/‑721 petitions and Final Written Decisions, which contain the complete element-by-element §102/§103 charts for this specification.

I'll pull the prior-art references associated with this patent and its family, then build the §103 analysis on what I can actually verify.

Let me get the actual granted claim set and pin down the specific prior-art references the Board relied on.

Obviousness Analysis — US 12,009,619 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Scope, sources, and two threshold flags

What I was given to work with. The authoritative text supplied for this patent ends mid-sentence in the Detailed Description, and the printed References Cited block did not come through. So my "Prior Art section" inputs are:

• The Google Patents prior-art keyword set for this record: connector; connector body; conductive member; conductive; contact.
• The IDS-type items visible in the Justia history panel for 12,009,619 (Supplementary EPO Search Report on EP05813878 dated Feb. 6, 2009; Summons to Oral Proceedings in EP05813878.5-2214 dated Jun. 7, 2010 citing US 1,815,559; LIT10 — Defendant's Preliminary Invalidity Contentions, served Oct. 31, 2013, in PPC Broadband, Inc. v. Times Fiber Communications, Inc., 5:13-cv-0460-TJM-DEP (N.D.N.Y.), 48 pp.; Taiwan IPO Office Action dated Dec. 8, 2014 in TW 99109977; ISR/WO dated Nov. 12, 2010 in PCT/US2010/029212).
• The prior-art record developed on this family by the PTAB, which is by far the most probative set, because it is the only body of art that has actually been applied to this specification and adjudicated.

FLAG 1 — I still do not have the verbatim granted claims of 12,009,619. The prior sections of this analysis said so, and nothing I retrieved changed that. The analysis below is therefore an element-by-element mapping against the independent-claim scope as reflected in the abstract (which is the claim-level summary of the invention), plus the specification's own structural disclosure (items 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80). Do not quote it as claim language.

FLAG 2 — priority date is doing double duty. If the claims are entitled to the 2004-11-24 chain, several candidate references drop out of § 102(b) and the term runs to 2024-11-24 + PTA (Google's asserted 2025-10-08 adjusted expiration). If, as the specification's own continuity history suggests, the body-conductive-member subject matter was added by the 2009/2010 CIPs (12/418,103; 12/941,709), the effective date is later and more art qualifies. Every reference in the core combinations below (1975–2000) predates even the earliest date, so this flag does not change the outcome — it only affects the marginal references.

1. The claim scope being tested

Per the abstract, the independent claim(s) appear to require, in substance:

This is, precisely and only, the "coupler-body grounding member" subject matter — the very limitation that was litigated to final judgment in this family.

2. The prior-art library (verified from the family IPR record)

The Amphenol IPRs asserted two grounds across the four sibling patents, using five references. Ground 1 was expressly stated as: Youtsey (US 6,042,422) + Lionetto (US 4,929,188) + Horak (US 3,879,102). Ground 2 was Tarrant (US 5,083,943) + Bell (US 5,882,226).
Source: Eldering Declaration, IPR2022-00718/-00719/-00720 (ptacts.uspto.gov, Paper listing Ex.1007–Ex.1011).

3. Combination 1 (primary): Youtsey + Lionetto + Horak

3.1 Element-by-element

The Petitioner's showing on this point was that "Youtsey's connector with conductive, compressible o-rings is materially the same as the claimed embodiment … and discloses every claim element as arranged in the challenged claims," illustrated with an annotated Youtsey Fig. 3 side-by-side with the family's Fig. 1B (petition, citing Ex. 1005 ¶¶55-56). The Board credited that alignment, and the Federal Circuit affirmed on March 4, 2026.

3.2 Motivation to combine (KSR-grounded)

1. Same problem, same crevice. Youtsey itself states its o-rings "seal the interior of the … connector 10 from moisture and other corrosive agents" (5:45-53). Horak teaches that RFI "effectiveness" is "the dominant consideration" at the cable-connector interface and that a continuous metal shield is required. A POSA who knows a crevice admits moisture knows it admits RF. → Combining prior art elements according to known methods to yield predictable results (KSR, Ground 1).
2. The loose-connector problem was well known and was known to be solved at the coupler-body junction. Bence (and PPC's own 2014 POR/Ex. 1034 describing a 2002 reference) shows a POSA understood that a loose nut breaks the post-to-port ground path and that continuity "between the nut and the body" was an available fix. Youtsey's o-ring 84 sits at that exact junction, so the modification is a substitution of one known material into one known seat for its known purpose. → Simple substitution of one known element for another.
3. Reasoned redundancy. Horak itself uses a conductive o-ring in the presence of another internal ground path — so the art does not treat a coupler-body ground as mutually exclusive with the post ground; it treats it as additive. This defeats the "the post already grounds, so no reason" argument.
4. Prior administrative finding on the same specification. The Petitioner relied on the Examiner's earlier finding in the '053 reexamination (95/001,689) that "it would have been obvious to modify both sealing members of Youtsey in light of Lionetto and Horak to provide weather sealing and elimination of RFI at the same time" — i.e., the Office had already reached the same conclusion on this art against this family.
5. Reasonable expectation of success. Lionetto and Horak show the technique worked in the same field, in the same component, to yield the predictable dual result (seal + shield). No unpredictable mechanism is required; a conductive or conductively-coated elastomer is a commodity.

3.3 Note on Youtsey's two rings

Youtsey's o-ring 82 (in the receptacle's groove, intermediate the internal threads and the inward flange) sits at the coupler/post-mating-edge region — i.e., structurally the "conductively coated mating edge member 70" location described in this patent's specification. So a single primary reference supplies both ring locations recited across this patent's dependent claim set, and only the conductivity attribute must be imported. That is a materially stronger position than a typical three-reference obviousness case.

4. Combination 2 (secondary): Tarrant + Bell

• Tarrant supplies A–E except conductivity of the ring: it discloses an o-ring in groove 11 of the outer ferrule 7 — a body/coupler o-ring — and states an object of "low contact resistance and excellent RF shielding … transfer impedance virtually unaffected." Tarrant is silent on ring composition.
• Bell supplies exactly the missing attribute in a coaxial connector: a "conductive resilient O-ring" that provides sealing and "form[s] part of the electrical path." Bell also expressly addresses the rotation concern (o-rings impose some resistance to rotation, but the connector remains rotatable) — which is directly responsive to limitation D.
• Motivation: Tarrant's own stated RF-shielding object + Bell's express teaching that a conductive o-ring in the coupler region can be part of the ground path = a two-reference, single-attribute gap-fill with a predictable result. This was the Board's Ground 2.

Caveat (this is where PPC fought hardest): PPC argued Bell's O-ring 34 sits between the coupler and the post (outlet body 22), not the body (ferrule 70), so Bell does not disclose the coupler-body path. The Board rejected that characterization, but the point is genuinely arguable and is the most plausible non-obviousness foothold for this patent.

5. Dependent-claim / composition sub-issues

The family's dependent claims split the ring into two known species:

• elastomeric ring loaded with conductive particulate (metal-filled), and
• elastomeric ring having a flexible core and a conductive outer coating (coated).

The IPR record shows the Board and the parties treating Lionetto/Horak as the filled-elastomer species and Buonanno/Bunyan as the coated/sheathed species. A POSA would not regard either as inventive: both are conventional ways of making an elastomer conductive, and this patent's own specification describes the coating route in purely conventional terms ("spraying … with an airbrush," "conductive ink, a silver-based ink," thinning with an organic solvent).

6. The counterarguments, and why they failed

7. Bottom line

Claims of 12,009,619 that read on the abstract's coupler-body conductive-ring combination are, on this record, obvious under § 103. The strongest showing is:

Youtsey '422 + Lionetto '188 + Horak '102 (primary), alternatively Tarrant '943 + Bell '226 — with Bunyan/Buonanno available for coated-ring dependents and Bence / the 2002 reference in PPC's own 2014 POR supplying the "motivation" element from the patent owner's own mouth.

Why I rate this high-confidence if the claims track the abstract:

1. The Board has already held the corresponding coupler-body claims of the parent US 10,446,983 unpatentable on Ground 1, and the Federal Circuit affirmed without opinion on March 4, 2026 (Nos. 2024-1776/-1777/-1778/-1779). Cancelled claims of the parent remove the parent as a fallback, though they do not bind on claims never challenged.
2. The fit between Youtsey and the abstract's limitations A–E is unusually tight — A–D are met expressly, and only the single word "conductive" must be supplied, by three independent references.
3. Nothing in this patent's prosecution appears to have added a limitation that distinguishes it from the invalidated sibling claims; the title and abstract key the invention to member 80, the same body/coupler ring at issue in the IPRs.

What would change the answer: retrieval of the actual granted claims. If the independent claim recites something the art does not show — e.g., a specific orientation of the first and second grounding contact surfaces that is not Youtsey's geometry, a requirement that the ring be exposed outside the body, or a specific conductivity threshold/path independence limitation — the mapping above could fail at one element, and the whole analysis would need to be redone.

8. Uncertainty list (explicit)

• Granted claim text of 12,009,619: not retrieved. Sections 1–7 are abstract-level. Verified against the abstract, not against claim language.
• Claim count, independent-claim count, and dependency structure: unknown.
• Priority/§ 102(b) date: unresolved (2004-11-24 vs. 2009-04-03 vs. 2010-11-08). Not outcome-determinative for the core combinations (all 1975–2000), but determinative for US 2012/0122329, Buonanno, Bence, and the 2002 reference.
• Exact identity of "the 2002 reference (Ex. 1029)" relied on in PPC's 2014 POR: I have the pin cite and the quote, not the reference number.
• Purdy US 2010/0297875 and Mathews US 7,950,958: cited in an Examiner's letter reproduced in the IPR record; I did not verify their specific disclosures against the '619 limitations.
• PTA / 2025-10-08 adjusted expiration and "Expired – Lifetime" status: database assertions from Google Patents, unverified against the printed patent. If accurate, the patent is expired, and a § 103 analysis is now retrospective (invalidity defense / past damages), not prospective.
• No IPR was ever filed against 12,009,619 (it issued June 11, 2024; the nine-month window closed ~June 11, 2025, and the record shows nothing). Any future challenge would be in district court or the ITC.
• Date note: the current task states April 26, 2026; my operating date is 2026-09-30. Both post-date the asserted adjusted expiration. This does not affect the § 103 analysis.