US 12492151

I'll search for litigation/docket information and confirm the bibliographic details.

Both returned empty. Let me try other query formulations.

US 12,492,151 B2 — Substrate-Backed Porcelain

Search note: I could not retrieve any USPTO PatentCenter record, federal district court docket, or CAFC 2026 docket entry for this patent. Searches on the patent number combined with "lawsuit," "CAFC," "docket," and "infringement" returned zero results. The only confirmations returned were third-party citation mirrors on Google Patents (e.g., the CN107109084A and US20140238593 citation lists), which show the same bibliographic line: US12492151B2 | 2023-07-25 | 2025-12-09 | Thomas Gust | Apparatus and method for substrate-backed porcelain. Everything below is therefore drawn from the authoritative full patent text supplied to me, not from a docket/litigation record. Treat the litigation status as unknown / not evidenced, not as "no litigation exists."

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Bibliographic data

Notable prior art cited: US 4,140,837 (Formica), US 2018/0099482 A1 and US 10,618,256 B2 (Juan Lloveras Calvo, "Porcelain laminate and procedure for manufacturing it"), EP 2,684,689 B1 (SKC, flexible ceramic laminate sheet), US 2014/0238593 A1 (Henkel, multiple-layer edgebanding).

Abstract (verbatim)

A method and apparatus is disclosed for substrate-backed porcelain. A sheet of substrate is secured to a sheet of porcelain. A surface of the substrate is coated with adhesive. A surface of the porcelain is coated with adhesive. The surfaces are joined together by the adhesive. A force is applied across the surfaces to improve adhesion.

Note an internal inconsistency: the abstract and the SUMMARY describe an apparatus ("A surface covering comprising a sheet of porcelain and a sheet of substrate secured to the sheet of porcelain"). However, all 20 granted claims are method claims — no product/apparatus claim survived. The abstract's "coating a surface of the substrate with adhesive" is also narrower than the claims, which (in claims 1, 11, and 13) require adhesive on the porcelain back side only.

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Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 — Method of joining (adhesive on porcelain side only).
Apply adhesive to the back side of a porcelain sheet (the sheet has a finished/visible side and a back side). Stack the porcelain sheet and a substrate sheet so the adhesive-coated porcelain back side faces a surface of the substrate sheet. Join them. Two negative/dimensional limitations:

• the substrate sheet is between zero and one-eighth of an inch different in length and width than the porcelain sheet (i.e., near-identical footprint: same size, or up to ⅛″ smaller or larger in each dimension); and
• the porcelain sheet does not adhere to a side surface of the substrate — i.e., no adhesive on, and no wrapping around, the substrate's edges.

Because the claim says only "applying a surface of the porcelain sheet back side with adhesive," it does not require adhesive on the substrate — a meaningful scope difference from claim 13 and from the abstract.

Claim 11 — Method of creating a surface covering (closed-ended: "consisting of").
Five steps only: (1) select a porcelain sheet with a back side; (2) select a foam board having a back surface and side surfaces; (3) apply adhesive to the porcelain back side; (4) stack them so the porcelain back side faces the board back surface; (5) join them, wherein the porcelain sheet does not contact the board side surfaces.
Three things stand out: the transition is "consisting of" (closed-ended, so unrecited steps and unrecited components are excluded); no size-relationship limitation is recited; and the sole structural limit is non-contact with the board's side surfaces (which, as a practical matter, implies the board is not oversized relative to the porcelain — consistent with the spec's 1/16″ per-edge inset).

Claim 13 — Method of creating a surface covering with compression (the fullest independent claim).
Select a porcelain sheet (finished side + back side); select a foam board having a back surface and side surfaces, where the foam board is up to ⅛″ different in length and width than the porcelain sheet; apply adhesive to the porcelain back side; place the board back surface adjacent to the porcelain back side; and apply compressive force across both the porcelain back side and the board back surface to adhere them. Limitations: the foam board is up to ⅛″ smaller in length and width than the porcelain sheet, and the porcelain sheet does not contact the board side surfaces.

Drafting note worth flagging: claim 13 says "up to an eighth of an inch different" and then, in the wherein clause, "up to an eighth of an inch smaller." The second (smaller) recitation is the operative one; the first is broader and arguably ambiguous. Likewise, claim 1's "between zero and an eighth of an inch different in length and width" is an unusual absolute-value-style recitation.

Dependent claims at a glance

• Claims 2, 14: adhesive is waterproof.
• Claims 3, 12: joining/compression applied across the entire substrate sheet / across both sheets.
• Claims 4, 15: compressive force between about 30 psi and about 40 psi (matching the spec's "a force between 30 and 40 psi").
• Claims 5, 16: no compressive force applied during the adhesive's cure time.
• Claims 6, 17: cure time between about 0 and about 24 hours. Claim 10: cure time between about 0 and about 10 minutes.
• Claims 7, 19: substrate/foam board is lightweight relative to the porcelain. Claim 8: substrate is lightweight foam board.
• Claims 9, 20: porcelain and substrate/foam board are stacked horizontally.
• Claim 18: the foam board is waterproof.

Spec context (for claim construction)

Substrate may be foam board or other material — polystyrene, EPS, XPS, PU/polyester, PE, polyisocyanurate (GoBoard named), polyether, aluminum alloy foaming, plus various closed/open-cell foams and rubbers; unfaced or faced (foil, plastic, paper, clay paper, cotton, fiberglass). Substrate thickness: ⅛″, ¼″, ½″ or more; porcelain 3.5 mm, 6, 12, 20 mm, etc., up to 63″ × 126″. Adjacent panels form construction panels (598/599) with fill joint 540 sealed by sealant 547; where the substrate is inset, the joint is ~1/16″ at the porcelain and ~3/16″ at the substrate. Substrate may be point-adhered (e.g., silicone spot gluing) to underlayment or structural elements rather than fully bedded.

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Confidence and uncertainties

• High confidence on title, inventor, application/filing/priority/grant dates, claim set, and claim scope — these come from the authoritative full text.
• Moderate confidence on assignee: the record lists only "Individual," and Google Patents expressly disclaims accuracy of assignee data. If Thomas Gust assigned rights to an entity, that is not reflected in the supplied record. I cannot confirm an ownership chain.
• No authoritative litigation information. I found no district court action and no CAFC 2026 appeal docket for this patent. Because the patent only issued 2025-12-09 and the sole related continuation was filed 2025-10-27, a 2026 CAFC appeal on the merits of this patent is unlikely; the prosecution history shows allowance was reached via a Response After Final Action (2025-07-30) followed by an allowance (2025-08-15), with no apparent appeal of a rejection to the PTAB.
• One anomalous record entry: a legal event dated 2024-10-23 reading "APPEAL BRIEF (OR SUPPLEMENTAL BRIEF) ENTERED AND FORWARDED TO EXAMINER." This predates both the 2025-02-07 non-final action and the 2025-06-30 final rejection in the same file, which is chronologically odd. I cannot verify what this event refers to; it may be a data artifact or relate to a separate filing/entity-status matter. I am flagging it rather than interpreting it.
• Tool limitations: my docket searches returned empty result sets. Absence of returned results is not proof of absence of litigation. A conclusive check would require direct queries to USPTO PatentCenter and to the CAFC/RECAP docket systems, which I was unable to reach here.
• Date discrepancy to note: your prompt states today is April 26, 2026, while the patent record I fetched carries a fetch timestamp of 2026-09-10 and reflects events through the 2025-11-26 "PATENTED CASE" entry. All dates above are quoted literally from the record and are not auto-corrected.

I'll run targeted searches across litigation aggregators and docket sources for this patent number.

Let me try the exact Unified Patents URL format and other docket sources.

Litigation Search Report — US Patent 12,492,151

Bottom line: No litigation involving US 12,492,151 was found. No district court case, no Federal Circuit appeal, and no PTAB post-grant proceeding naming this patent appeared in any search I was able to run. I cannot confirm that none exists — only that my searches returned nothing.

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Search performed

Caution on false positives: several searches surfaced Unified Patents case-list URLs for other patent numbers — 109573037, 114124744, and 20010074751. Per your instruction to interpret identifiers literally and not return results for similar numbers, none of these are US 12,492,151 and I have excluded them from the findings.

Findings table

There is therefore no plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome to report. I will not populate that table with invented entries.

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Why this result is plausible (context, not confirmation)

1. The patent is extremely new. US 12,492,151 B2 issued 2025-12-09. Relative to the task's stated current date of April 26, 2026, that is a window of roughly four and a half months. Most construction-materials patents of this type are never asserted at all, and any assertion would normally need to post-date issuance.
2. The patent is individually held. The Google Patents record lists both original and current assignee as "Individual" (with Google expressly disclaiming accuracy), inventor Thomas Gust. There is no corporate assignee in the supplied record that would suggest a portfolio-monetization or competitor-litigation program. I flagged in the earlier summary that the ownership chain is unconfirmed.
3. Prosecution did not involve an appeal to the PTAB. The legal events show allowance was reached via a Response After Final Action (2025-07-30) followed by allowance (2025-08-15) and issuance. That weighs against a 2026 CAFC appeal on the merits of this patent.
4. Prior-art posture. The file cites 15–16 references including US 2018/0099482 A1 and US 10,618,256 B2 (Lloveras Calvo, "Porcelain laminate"), EP 2,684,689 B1 (SKC, flexible ceramic laminate), and US 4,140,837 (Formica). Strong prior art in the cited record can itself discourage assertion — but that is inference, not evidence of no litigation.

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Uncertainties and limitations — read these before relying on the "none" answer

• Absence of search results is not proof of absence of litigation. My queries returned empty result sets, and the Unified Patents Portal responses were generic filter/landing pages rather than an actual filtered case list. I could not execute the Portal's live patent-number filter against 12492151, nor query PACER, RECAP/CourtListener, or Docket Navigator directly. Any of those sources could contain a case I did not see.
• I could not reach an authoritative docket system. The earlier-generated summary in this file already reported the same outcome and reached the same conclusion: "The litigation status is unknown / not evidenced, not 'no litigation exists.'" I am building on that finding and it is unchanged.
• One anomalous prosecution record entry, for completeness — and it is not litigation. A legal event dated 2024-10-23 reads "APPEAL BRIEF (OR SUPPLEMENTAL BRIEF) ENTERED AND FORWARDED TO EXAMINER." This is an internal prosecution/administrative event in application US 18/461,164, not a district court or CAFC case. Its chronology (predating the 2025-02-07 non-final action and 2025-06-30 final rejection in the same file) is odd and unexplained. I flag it rather than interpret it.
• Date discrepancy to resolve with your team. This task states Current Date: April 26, 2026. The authoritative patent text I was given carries a fetch timestamp of 2026-09-10 and reflects events through the 2025-11-26 "PATENTED CASE" entry. That means the source document is timestamped roughly four and a half months after your stated current date. I have quoted all dates literally from the record and have not auto-corrected any of them. If 2026-09-10 is in fact the real current date, additional litigation could exist that post-dates the April 26, 2026 knowledge cutoff implied by your prompt — but nothing in my searches indicates any.

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Recommended next steps for a conclusive determination

Because I cannot certify a negative, treat the following as the checklist that would settle it:

1. USPTO PatentCenter, Application 18/461,164 and Patent 12,492,151 — check the "Docket"/"Prosecution" and any "Litigation" tabs; also confirm the assignment chain for inventor Thomas Gust.
2. USPTO Assignment Search (assignment.uspto.gov) — determine whether rights were assigned to an entity and whether a reexamination or supplemental examination was filed.
3. CourtListener / RECAP and PACER — full-text search for "12,492,151" and docket search for party name "Thomas Gust."
4. Unified Patents Portal, both litigation/caselist?patents=12492151 and the PTAB case list with the Patent Number filter set to 12492151.
5. Docket Navigator / Lex Machina (subscription) — authoritative for both district court and PTAB coverage with same-number precision.
6. Monitor the continuation. Related application US 19/370,372 (US 2026/0049038 A1, filed 2025-10-27, pending, same title and priority) indicates the applicant is still prosecuting in this family. Litigation, if it comes, frequently follows the issued claims of the parent — so this is the file to watch.

If you can supply a live Docket Navigator or PACER export, I can populate the requested plaintiff/defendant/jurisdiction/case-number/filing-date/outcome table precisely. Based on everything currently available, the correct answer is: no litigation known.

I'll attempt to pull public records for PGR2026-00074 before writing up.

Let me try a few more targeted checks — including any parallel district-court action that would explain the petitioner's filing.

PTAB Proceedings Report — U.S. Patent No. 12,492,151 B2

Prepared: 2026-09-10 · Patent: "Apparatus and method for substrate-backed porcelain" · Inventor/Patent Owner: Thomas Gust (record lists assignee as "Individual")

Upfront limitation on what I can tell you. The single proceeding on file was filed 2026-09-09 — one day before this report. Nothing has happened in it yet. There is no institution decision, no panel assignment, no POPR, no FWD, no settlement, and no appeal, and my searches returned no public record of the petition's contents. Everything below that is not verbatim from the structured proceedings block is labeled as either (a) statutory arithmetic, or (b) inference. I have not populated any field with invented data.

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Proceedings overview

One AIA trial proceeding is on file against US 12,492,151: PGR2026-00074, a post-grant review filed 2026-09-09 by MightySlab Distribution Company LLC, status "Pending" as of 2026-09-09 — zero claims invalidated, zero claims sustained, zero institution decisions, zero settlements, zero appeals. The defensive posture this gives a defendant today is not "the patent has survived IPRs and is hardened," and not "the claims are canceled" — it is the third and least useful position: a live, unadjudicated PGR is pending, the patent is presumptively valid and fully enforceable as issued, and the only thing a defendant currently knows for certain is that a competitor (not a defensive aggregator) has taken the first shot and is footing the bill to build an invalidity record you can read for free. Practical translation: no claim of this patent is dead, your exposure is the full issued claim set (claims 1–20), and your best asset right now is someone else's petition.

Genre note that matters more than usual here: this is a PGR, not an IPR. That is not a formality. A PGR petition may raise any ground available under 35 U.S.C. § 282(b)(2)–(3), which includes § 101 and § 112(a)/(b) — grounds an IPR petitioner simply cannot bring. See 35 U.S.C. § 321(b). For a patent that issued 2025-12-09 with method claims containing an absolute-value-style size limitation ("between zero and an eighth of an inch different in length and width," claim 1) and a closed-ended "consisting of" transition (claim 11), a PGR is the only AIA vehicle in which written-description, enablement, indefiniteness, and eligibility attacks are available at the Board. Whether the petitioner used that toolkit is unknown to me — the petition is not indexed in anything I could reach.

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PGR2026-00074 — MightySlab Distribution Company LLC v. Thomas Gust (Patent Owner)

• Type: Post-Grant Review (PGR) under 35 U.S.C. §§ 321–329.
• Filed: 2026-09-09
• Status: Pending (verbatim from the structured data); "last modified 2026-09-09." Plain English: docketed/accorded a filing date, no preliminary response on file, no institution decision, no panel publicly assigned. The case is one day old.
• Patent owner: Thomas Gust (inventor). The patent's assignee of record is listed as "Individual," with Google Patents expressly disclaiming accuracy — so I cannot confirm whether Mr. Gust still holds all rights or whether there is a co-owner/assignee not reflected in the record I have. See the uncertainty note at the end.
• Judge panel: Not public / not yet known. No APJs named in the structured data or in any source I could reach. Standing PTAB practice is a three-APJ panel, but note that 2025–2026 practice at the Office has featured Director-level involvement in institution decisions and expanded panels; a Director-authored or Director-joined denial order in a different 2026 PGR is publicly reported (see the Biocon/PGR2026-00039 summary at BiologicsHQ, 2026-08-06 entry), and the Director's 2025-11-17 memorandum creating voluntary Search Disclosure Declarations as an institution factor shows the institution gate is currently a policy-active chokepoint (Jones Day PTAB Litigation Blog, 2025-12). Treat discretionary denial as a real risk, not a formality.
• Petition grounds: Unknown — not public in any source I could reach. I will not guess at claim numbers, references, or statutory bases. What I can tell you is the legal envelope: a PGR may assert § 102, § 103, § 112, and § 101, and the institution standard is "more likely than not that at least 1 of the claims challenged in the petition is unpatentable" (35 U.S.C. § 324(a)). Note the patent's own file: 15–16 examiner-cited references, including US 2018/0099482 A1 and US 10,618,256 B2 (Lloveras Calvo, "Porcelain laminate and procedure for manufacturing it"), EP 2,684,689 B1 (SKC, flexible ceramic laminate sheet), and US 4,140,837 (Formica). Those are the obvious § 102/§ 103 starting points, and a PGR petitioner is free to go outside them.
• Institution decision: None yet. Statutory arithmetic for the deadlines, computed from the filing date — these are my calculations from 35 U.S.C. § 324(c) and 37 C.F.R. § 42.207, not docketed facts:
  • Patent Owner's preliminary response is due within 3 months of the notice according the filing date — i.e., on the order of 2026-12-09, assuming the notice issues promptly.
  • The Director must decide institution within 3 months after the later of (i) receipt of the POPR or (ii) the last date the POPR could be filed. With no POPR, that puts the outer deadline near 2027-03-09; a POPR filed promptly could pull the decision forward toward 2027-01.
• Final Written Decision: None. If instituted, the trial must be completed within 12 months of the institution date (35 U.S.C. § 326(a)(11)), putting an FWD in roughly the 2027-12 to 2028-03 window on the current schedule, with the oral hearing typically two to three months earlier.
• Settlement / termination: None indicated. Termination by settlement is available under 35 U.S.C. § 327 and is common in PGRs, but there is no filing, request, or public indication here. Any settlement terms would ordinarily be confidential.
• Appeal: None possible yet. An appeal to the Federal Circuit under 35 U.S.C. § 329 requires an FWD; there is none. I found no CAFC docket entry and no parallel district court action involving this patent — consistent with the "no litigation known" finding already in this file, which I am not updating.
• Timeliness — flag this, it is the single most interesting procedural fact available. The patent issued 2025-12-09. The § 321(c) window for a PGR is nine months from grant. Nine months from 2025-12-09 is 2026-09-09 — the exact date the petition was filed. That is consistent with a last-day filing, which is a meaningful signal: the petitioner either learned of the patent late, or (more likely, in my experience) deliberately preserved the uniquely broad PGR ground set — including § 112 and § 101 — rather than let the window lapse and be confined to IPR's § 102/§ 103-only toolkit. If the petition is even one day late the entire proceeding is barred by § 321(c), and that would be a complete defense to the petition. Because the date computation under 35 U.S.C. § 21(b) and the date the Office "accorded" the filing could diverge, timeliness under § 321(c) should be the first thing a defendant verifies — it is the cheapest possible way to make this proceeding disappear. (I am giving you the arithmetic; the legal conclusion is the Patent Owner's/your counsel's to draw.)
• Threshold bar to check before relying on this petition for anything: under 35 U.S.C. § 325(a)(1), a PGR may not be instituted if the petitioner (or its real party in interest or privy) filed a civil action challenging the validity of a claim of the patent before the petition was filed. A DJ action filed before 2026-09-09 would bar institution outright. Conversely, this is a PGR, so § 315(b)'s one-year-from-service bar does not apply — that bar is IPR-specific.
• Defensive value: Low today, potentially high later — but only for MightySlab. If you are MightySlab (or a privy/RPI), you are the petitioner and your leverage is prospective only. If you are anyone else, this proceeding gives you no estoppel benefit whatsoever — § 325(e) estoppel runs against the petitioner and its RPI/privies, not the world — and no claim has been canceled, so a demand letter citing claims 1, 11, or 13 still has a fully valid, fully enforceable patent behind it. What you get is intelligence: a competitor is committing real money to invalidate this patent in the one forum that can hear § 112 and § 101 attacks, which tells you the patent is commercially material and that a well-funded invalidity record is being assembled in public.

Competitive context I did find (third-party database; verify before relying): an IPQwery owner page for MightySlab Distribution Company, LLC (USA) lists a patent family naming inventors Contreras, Roberto and Deutsch, Armin Thomas, directed to a "reinforced porcelain panel product" in which a structural core board is adhered to a porcelain slab and "extends beyond outer peripheries of the porcelain slab" to define a "buffer region" enhancing resistance to cracking (ipqwery.com owner page). That snippet does not give a patent number, and I have not verified it against USPTO assignment records — treat it as a lead, not a fact. But if accurate, it is highly probative of motive: MightySlab's apparent commercial design is the structural mirror image of Gust's claimed limitation that "the porcelain sheet does not adhere to / contact the side surfaces" of the substrate, i.e., Gust's claims appear to require a board that is the same size or smaller than the porcelain, while MightySlab's product appears to use a board that overhangs. A competitor whose own product sits on the far side of a claim limitation has every reason to file a PGR rather than take a license — and may also be holding its own patent for counter-assertion.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: 20 of 20 claims UNTESTED. Not one claim of US 12,492,151 has been canceled, narrowed, or sustained by the Board. There is no FWD, no certificate under § 328(b), no disclaimer, and no reexamination. Claims 1–20 stand exactly as issued on 2025-12-09: independent claims 1 (method of joining, adhesive on the porcelain back side only, substrate within 0–⅛″ in length and width, no adhesion to the substrate's side surface), 11 (method of creating a surface covering, closed-ended "consisting of," no size limitation, sole structural limit being no contact with the board's side surfaces), and 13 (fullest independent claim — foam board up to ⅛″ smaller, plus compressive force). Dependent claims 2–10 and 12, 14–20 are equally untested. Any statement that a claim has been invalidated would be false, and I make none. One live wildcard: related application US 19/370,372 (US 2026/0049038 A1, filed 2025-10-27, pending, same title and priority) is outside the scope of this PGR. A PGR on the parent does nothing to the pending continuation's claims, which have not yet issued and cannot be challenged yet. Whatever happens to the parent, this family remains an active prosecution target — that is where the patent owner's forward-looking leverage is.

Estoppel landscape. No estoppel has attached and none can attach yet. Under § 325(e)(1) estoppel arises only after a final written decision (or termination after institution); under § 325(e)(2) the district-court bar reaches "any ground that the petitioner raised or reasonably could have raised during that post-grant review." Two points a defendant should internalize: (1) if institution is denied under § 324(a), nothing attaches — MightySlab walks away with no downside and can refile/repivot; (2) if the PGR is instituted and reaches FWD, the estoppel is notoriously broader than IPR estoppel, because the PGR ground set includes § 112 and § 101 — a PGR petitioner can be estopped from arguing indefiniteness or written description in the district court that it raised or reasonably could have raised at the Board. For a non-petitioner defendant, the entire prior-art universe remains available: you are bound by no estoppel, you may still assert § 102/§ 103 over any reference (including ones the petitioner didn't find), and — because you did not file the PGR — § 325(a)(1) does not bar you from filing your own DJ action. Timing caution: filing a DJ action now would bar your own later PGR under § 325(a)(1), but you would not be able to file a PGR on this patent anyway after 2026-09-09 (§ 321(c)). Your remaining AIA route is IPR, which has no 9-month window but is subject to § 315(b)'s one-year-from-service bar if you are sued.

Pattern signals. One petition, not a barrage — no second PGR from MightySlab, no IPRs, and no indication of a serial filer. No defensive aggregator: the petitioner is an operating/distribution company in the same product space, not Unified Patents or a similar clearinghouse, so this was filed for competitive reasons and will be run as a business decision — meaning it is more likely to be settled (via § 327) than litigated to a bitter FWD if the commercial picture changes. No Patent Owner-side aggressive appeals are possible yet; the prosecution history shows allowance was obtained through a Response After Final Action (2025-07-30) rather than by appealing a rejection to the Board — so unlike a hardened patent, this one has never been tested adversarially before an APJ panel. That cuts both ways for a defendant: the claims are unproven at the Board, but so is the patent owner's ability to defend them. Note the anomalous prosecution entry dated 2024-10-23 ("APPEAL BRIEF (OR SUPPLEMENTAL BRIEF) ENTERED AND FORWARDED TO EXAMINER") already flagged earlier in this file; it is internal to application 18/461,164, is not our proceeding, and remains unexplained. I flag it again rather than interpret it.

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Recommended next steps

1. Pull the actual petition. It is the whole ballgame and my searches could not reach it. Get it from USPTO PTAB E2E for PGR2026-00074 (search by proceeding number) and from the PTAB End-to-End "Documents" tab once indexed. Until you read the grounds, treat every inference above as provisional. If it is not yet indexed, re-check in one to two weeks — petitions are typically public at or shortly after accord of the filing date.
2. Attack timeliness first. US 12,492,151 issued 2025-12-09; nine months under § 321(c) expires 2026-09-09. The petition was filed that same day. Confirm the date the Office accorded the filing and whether the petition was actually received on 2026-09-09. If it slipped a day, this is over.
3. Check the § 325(a)(1) bar. Search the district court dockets (PACER / CourtListener / Docket Navigator) for a civil action challenging this patent's validity filed by MightySlab Distribution Company, LLC or its RPI/privies before 2026-09-09. If one exists, institution is barred outright.
4. Check the assignment chain. Confirm on USPTO Assignment Search whether Thomas Gust still owns the patent or has assigned to an entity, and whether any co-owner exists. Ownership affects who can grant a § 327 settlement and who must be named in any license. The supplied record says only "Individual," which Google Patents disclaims.
5. If you are a defendant being asserted against: file nothing that moots your options, but note the timing math. The POPR is due on the order of 2026-12-09; the institution decision on the order of 2027-01 to 2027-03. A district court stay request typically becomes viable only after institution, and even then the current discretionary-denial regime makes outcomes less predictable than in prior years — do not promise a client a stay.
6. Preserve your § 112 / § 101 options. If you are contemplating a validity challenge to this patent and you are not MightySlab, the PGR window closed on 2026-09-09 and you are now in IPR territory (§ 102/§ 103 only). Your § 112 and § 101 theories will have to be litigated in court. Claim 11's "consisting of" transition and claims 1/13's "between zero and an eighth of an inch different" / "up to an eighth of an inch different … up to an eighth of an inch smaller" language (already flagged in this file as internally inconsistent) are the natural § 112 targets.
7. Watch the continuation — that is where the family's next claims will come from. Related application US 19/370,372 (US 2026/0049038 A1, filed 2025-10-27, pending, same title and priority) is not covered by this PGR. Set a docket watch on that application for a notice of allowance; new claims issuing there will spawn a fresh challenge calculus. Note also that the two filings are separated by ~14 months and the continuation is a continuation, not a divisional — consistent with the applicant keeping the specification alive in this space.

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Contradiction with the previously generated sections — flagged as required

The earlier Patent summary and Litigation summary in this file state a current date of April 26, 2026 and conclude "no PTAB activity" / "no litigation known." The canonical structured proceedings block in this prompt shows PGR2026-00074 filed 2026-09-09, and this task's date is 2026-09-10. Those earlier sections are therefore stale as to PTAB activity — specifically, the earlier assertion that "If no PTAB activity exists, say so plainly. The absence is itself a signal — well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs" no longer describes this patent. The structural findings in the earlier sections (claim scope, dependence structure, spec content) remain accurate and I have built on them rather than repeated them; the earlier statement that a 2026 CAFC appeal on this patent is unlikely remains correct and is unaffected.

Confidence statement

High confidence in: existence, number, type, filing date, status, petitioner identity, and inventor of PGR2026-00074 (taken verbatim from the structured USPTO Open Data Portal block); the patent's grant date, claim set, and claim content (authoritative full text); and all statutory citations.
Moderate confidence in: the § 321(c) last-day-filing analysis (arithmetic is certain; application to the Office's accorded filing date is not), and the MightySlab competitive relationship (single third-party aggregate page, unverified against USPTO assignment records, no patent number given).
Low confidence / unknown in: the petition's grounds, challenged claims, and asserted references; the judge panel; whether a parallel district court action exists; and the current ownership of the patent. I did not locate the petition text, any institution decision, any panel, any settlement, or any appeal, and I have not invented any of those fields. Absence of returned results is not proof of absence — a conclusive check requires PTAB E2E, PatentCenter, PACER/RECAP, and USPTO Assignment Search, which I could not reach here.

I'll attempt to pull the actual assignment records before writing up.

Let me dig deeper into the assignment records and the parties.

Search-execution note (read first)

I could not retrieve any assignment record for US 12,492,151 from the USPTO Assignment Center. The searches I ran returned documentation about the Assignment Center (including a third-party scraper's field schema and USPTO's own "Using the Patent Assignment Database" briefing), plus an unrelated Patentcloud weekly-assignment digest — but zero records tied to this patent, application 18/461,164, or inventor Thomas Gust's assignment history. One follow-up batch (Patentcloud assignee-name search, "Moderno Porcelain Works" + "Thomas Gust," and a MightySlab corporate-address lookup) terminated on a tool-step ceiling, so those gaps are unresolved rather than negative.

Two things I want to flag explicitly, per your cross-reference instruction:

• Contradiction with earlier sections — flagged. The previously generated Litigation summary and Patent summary concluded "no litigation / no PTAB activity," and the Patent summary recorded the assignee as "Individual." The PTAB challenges section supersedes the first of those: PGR2026-00074, filed 2026-09-09 by MightySlab Distribution Company LLC, is now the operative adversarial fact. On ownership, the earlier sections and this one agree: the record shows an individual owner, and I found no assignment to contradict it. The earlier date discrepancy (task-stated April 26, 2026 vs. this task's 2026-09-10) persists and is unresolved.
• The premises of this task are not met by the record. This task presumes a recorded chain. There isn't one to reconstruct. I treat that as a finding, not a failure.

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Inventors

Sole named inventor: Thomas Gust. No co-inventors appear on the face of US 12,492,151 B2, on pre-grant publication US 2025/0034049 A1, or on the continuation US 2026/0049038 A1 — all three name Gust alone (structured patent data in the full-text record; patents-review.com mirror of US 2025/0034049 and US 2026/0049038 confirms the same single-inventor listing).

Unusual-pattern analysis — and the honest answer is that the usual tells cannot be applied. The pattern you asked me to look for (all inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing) requires an original assignee and a recorded employment assignment. Neither exists here. What is mildly notable:

• A single inventor on a construction-materials method patent with no corporate co-owner is consistent with either (a) a genuine independent inventor / small-business owner, or (b) an unrecorded employer assignment that simply sits in a drawer. The USPTO does not verify ownership on recordation and does not require an assignment to be recorded at all (37 C.F.R. § 3.11; USPTO's own guidance is that recordation "is a ministerial function"). So an employer relationship could exist and simply be unrecorded. I will not guess at an employer.
• A small-entity status event eight days after filing is the one concrete, citable ownership-adjacent datum in the record: the Google Patents legal events show 2023-09-05 FEPP — ENTITY STATUS SET TO UNDISCOUNTED (ORIGINAL EVENT CODE: BIG.); ENTITY STATUS OF PATENT OWNER: SMALL ENTITY, followed by 2023-09-13 FEPP — ENTITY STATUS SET TO SMALL. In plain English, the application was filed as an undiscounted (large-entity) applicant and was converted to small-entity status eight days later, shortly before the September 13, 2023 fee-payment event. This is consistent with an individual or small-business applicant, and it is inconsistent with filing as a large corporate applicant from the outset. It is corroborative of the "Individual" assignee designation — not proof of it.
• The one adjudicated inventor-related fact: there is a different porcelain-panel patent family in this exact product space naming Contreras, Roberto and Deutsch, Armin Thomas (per the IPQwery owner page for MightySlab Distribution Company, LLC), and Roberto Contreras is publicly identified as CEO of Moderno Porcelain Works (tileletter.com, stoneworld.com, April 2024 MightySlab launch releases). That is the adverse party's inventorship, not this patent's. See the verdict section for why it matters.

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Original assignee

The entity named on the issued patent is not an entity. Google Patents lists both the Original Assignee and the Current Assignee as "Individual", with the platform's express disclaimer that "the listed assignees may be inaccurate" and that it "has not performed a legal analysis." The authoritative full text supplied to me identifies the applicant/owner as individual inventor Thomas Gust.

Why this matters for the assignment analysis: an individual owner is the upstream condition from which both (a) a later shell-entity transfer and (b) direct individual assertion typically flow. Neither has occurred. As of the record I have, Thomas Gust is the owner, and the only recorded IP event on this patent is its issuance.

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Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no records for this patent that I was able to retrieve — and the record's own legal-events history is consistent with there being none. I am stating that plainly rather than reconstructing a chain.

What I can affirmatively cite:

• The Google Patents legal-events history for US 12,492,151 contains no assignment-conveyance events of any type — no AS (assignment), no security agreement, no merger, no change-of-name, no license, no release. The only recorded events are fee-payment/entity-status events (FEPP, 2023-09-05 and 2023-09-13), status/appeal and prosecution events (STCV 2024-10-23; STPP 2025-02-07, 2025-06-30, 2025-07-30, 2025-08-15, 2025-08-18, 2025-10-27, 2025-10-28, 2025-10-31, 2025-11-12), and the grant event (STCF 2025-11-26, "PATENTED CASE"). A recorded assignment is normally surfaced in this event stream; its absence is affirmative evidence — not proof — that none was recorded.

• No reel/frame, conveyance type, assignor, assignee, execution date, recording date, or correspondent of record is available to me for this patent. I will not supply one. In particular, I cannot report the correspondent of record, which is the single most useful tell in your framework — that field is precisely what I could not reach.

• One tempting near-miss, which I am flagging as a lead and expressly not as a record of this patent. A Patentcloud weekly market-pulse digest for 2025-12-22 to 2025-12-28 shows a recordation:

  73284-842 | 20251222 | 20251219 | MODERNO PORCELAIN WORKS LLC | MIGHTYSLAB DISTRIBUTION CO LLC | 20

  i.e., reel 73284, frame 0842, recorded 2025-12-22, executed 2025-12-19, covering 20 records, under the title "Reinforced Porcelain Panel Assemblies And Methods For Surface Installations." Three cautions before anyone relies on it: (1) that title is the MightySlab/Moderno family title, not "Apparatus and method for substrate-backed porcelain," so this recordation is not evidenced to touch US 12,492,151; (2) the digest does not state which entity is assignor and which is assignee, and I could not resolve the direction — do not assume; (3) the "20" is a record count, not a patent-number list. Its real value is context: it establishes that the PGR petitioner, MightySlab Distribution Company LLC, is a portfolio-holding operating entity in the identical product market that transacted 20 IP records with Moderno Porcelain Works LLC (whose CEO, Roberto Contreras, is a named inventor on that family) two weeks after US 12,492,151 issued.

Because the Assignment Center produced no records, the timeline below is not an assignment chain — it is the ownership-relevant event chronology that is documented, with the adversarial event included because it is the only thing that has moved this patent commercially.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 12492151
    2023 : Provisional filed by Thomas Gust
         : Non provisional filed 5 Sep
         : Entity status changed to small 13 Sep
    2025 : Continuation filed 27 Oct
         : Patent issued to Thomas Gust 9 Dec
    2025 : Moderno and MightySlab record 20 IP items 22 Dec
    2026 : MightySlab files post grant review

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Governing fact: there is no chain to score. Every signal below is evaluated against a chain of one (the inventor/individual owner). I mark a signal present only where a concrete reel/frame or dated record supports it — per your constraint, a suggestive name with no record behind it is not a finding, and in this case there isn't even a suggestive name.

Inverse-signal worth recording (your framework doesn't have a slot for it, so I'm noting it separately). The one genuine NPE-flavored indicator in this file points the other way from every signal above: the party doing the asserting here is a competitor, and the patent owner is the individual being attacked. MightySlab Distribution Company LLC filed PGR2026-00074 on 2026-09-09 — the last day of the nine-month § 321(c) window measured from the 2025-12-09 grant — and its apparent commercial product (MightySlab™: 6 mm porcelain over a 10 mm "Moderno Core Board" that overhangs the porcelain to form a visible "buffer region") sits on the far side of Gust's claim limitation that "the porcelain sheet does not adhere to / contact the side surfaces" of the substrate (claims 1, 11, and 13). That is an operating-company-versus-individual inventor fight, not an NPE campaign. It is also the most likely explanation for why this patent's commercial value is now undeniable.

One caveat I will not elide: "individual owner, no corporate assignee, no identified product" is a weak NPE indicator in some taxonomies (individual-singly-held patents are a classic assertion profile). I mark that unclear rather than present, because there is no evidence of assertion by Gust — no demand letter, no suit, no licensing entity — and a weak-form indicator with zero corroboration does not survive your "don't speculate without evidence" constraint.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — no assignment records exist to score, and the chain has exactly one link.

Justification. The only ownership entries obtainable are the patent's own face and Google Patents' assignee field, both of which state a single owner: Thomas Gust, listed as "Individual" for both Original and Current Assignee, with no assignment-conveyance event anywhere in the legal-events history for US 12,492,151 (events limited to FEPP 2023-09-05 and 2023-09-13, STCV 2024-10-23, STPP 2025-02-07 through 2025-11-12, and STCF 2025-11-26). There is no reel/frame, no conveyance type, no correspondent, and no second assignee — so signals 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are each not present for want of any transfer, and signal 3 is unclear because the correspondent field itself is unavailable. The verdict is not "operating-company assertion" (no evidence Gust ships a product embodying the claims) and not "defensive/non-asserting" (no aggregator in the chain). It falls squarely in your fifth category: only the original (non-corporate) ownership, with the chain uninterrupted.

Verify directly at the USPTO Assignment Center:

• https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search Patent Number 12492151 and, separately, Application Number 18461164
• Legacy interface, same underlying records: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/search
• Also worth running, since the patent number returns nothing: assignor name "Gust, Thomas" and assignee name "Gust, Thomas", to catch a recordation that was indexed against the application or publication number rather than the patent number.

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Verification steps that would settle the open questions

1. Run the three Assignment Center queries above. If they return empty, the finding is confirmed: no post-issuance assignment, and no recorded employment assignment at filing — meaning Gust owns the patent outright and is the only person who can grant a § 327 settlement in PGR2026-00074, license the patent, or assign it.
2. Order the assignment-cover-sheet PDF, if any record exists (reel/frame path, PDF icon per the USPTO's 2016-onward practice). The correspondent of record on that document is the field to capture first and the one this report is missing.
3. Pull the pre-grant assignment history for application 18/461,164 in PatentCenter, and confirm whether a 37 C.F.R. § 1.63 inventor declaration was filed in lieu of an assignment — a declaration-only filing is the ordinary signature of an unassigned individual application and would independently corroborate this report.
4. Resolve the Moderno/MightySlab direction of reel 73284/0842 (recorded 2025-12-22, executed 2025-12-19, 20 records) against the actual Assignment Center record, and confirm whether the 20-record set includes any Gust-family asset. If it does, the ownership picture in this file changes materially and immediately; on the evidence I have, it does not, because that recordation carries the MightySlab/Moderno family title.
5. Confirm the Patentcloud digest column semantics before quoting it. I have quoted the row verbatim and flagged the ambiguity rather than assigning assignor/assignee roles.
6. Watch reel activity around the PGR. If Gust intends to commercialize or enforce, a transfer into a licensing entity — or a security interest recorded to fund the PGR defense — is the next recordable event to expect, and the correspondent on that filing is your first-name link back to any related filings.

I'll run targeted searches on the cited references to ground the analysis, then build the prior-art mapping. Let me start with the most relevant porcelain/laminate references.

Now let me pull details on the remaining references.

Prior Art Analysis — US 12,492,151 B2

Patent: "Apparatus and method for substrate-backed porcelain" · Inventor Thomas Gust · App. 18/461,164 · Filed 2023-09-05 · Priority 2023-07-25 · Granted 2025-12-09 · 20 claims (independent: 1, 11, 13)

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1. Scope, verification, and what I could and could not confirm

USPTO-database verification of the target number. My direct reaches to USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Application Information Retrieval returned no retrievable record in this session. What I could confirm is the Google Patents record for the exact number US 12,492,151 B2 (not a similar number — I am not reporting, e.g., US 12,492,152 or US 12,492,150), which is the authoritative full text supplied for this file. Per your instruction, I am treating that text as ground truth and I have not auto-corrected any identifier. Everything below is drawn from (a) the citation table on the face of US 12,492,151 and (b) live lookups of the cited documents themselves.

What I retrieved live: full descriptions for US 2018/0099482 A1, US 10,618,256 B2, and EP 2,684,689 B1; substantial description for US 4,140,837 and US 2008/0118713 A1. My tool budget was exhausted before I could pull full text on the JP, CN, DE, and several US references — for those I have the citation-line metadata (number, dates, assignee, title) from the patent's own citation table plus, where noted, title-level reading only. I flag each such entry rather than embellish it.

What I did not do: I did not verify these references against PTAB E2E for PGR2026-00074 (MightySlab Distribution Company LLC, filed 2026-09-09) or against the prosecution file for app. 18/461,164. The grounds actually pleaded in the PGR remain unknown to me, and the mappings below are my independent read of the references, not a report of anyone's contentions. That is carried over from the earlier-generated sections, which reached the same limitation.

Date discrepancy carried forward and unresolved. This task states a current date of April 26, 2026. The record in this file is timestamped 2026-09-10 and the earlier PTAB challenges section documents PGR2026-00074 filed 2026-09-09 — i.e., the source record post-dates your stated date by ~4.5 months. I quote all dates literally and do not correct them.

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2. Framing: why §102 is a high bar against this particular claim set

Three structural facts drive the entire analysis, and they carry over from the claim breakdown in the earlier-generated Patent summary:

1. The effective filing date is 2023-07-25 (provisional) / 2023-09-05 (non-provisional). Every cited reference is from 2022-04-15 or earlier, so all 15–16 patent references qualify as prior art under either §102(a)(1) (printed publication / patented before the effective filing date) or §102(a)(2) (U.S. patent or application publication effectively filed before it). §102(a)(2) applies cleanly to the U.S. references including the Lloveras documents; §102(a)(1) applies to all of them, including the JP/EP/CN/DE publications.

2. §102 requires a single reference disclosing every element arranged as claimed. The independent claims here carry three limitations that most substrate/veneer art simply does not disclose:

   • adhesive applied to the porcelain back side (claims 1, 11, 13) — most laminate art applies adhesive to the substrate and/or to both faces;
   • the 0-to-⅛-inch length-and-width relationship (claims 1, 13) — essentially never recited in the cited art; and
   • the negative limitation that the porcelain does not adhere to / contact the substrate's side surfaces (claims 1, 11, 13) — a coplanar flat laminate arguably inherently satisfies this, but no reference of record discloses it, and the art that does address edges (Henkel, Bordener, EP 0 689 911) teaches the opposite (wrapping, edgebanding, overhang).

3. Prosecution posture cuts strongly against §102. The face of the patent shows 8 examiner-cited references (marked *: US 4,140,837; EP 0 689 911 A1; US 2004/0206038 A1; JP 2008-088801 A; US 2008/0118713 A1; US 2008/0268273 A1; US 2014/0238593 A1; US 2018/0099482 A1) and 8 third-party citations (including US 10,618,256 B2, EP 2,684,689 B1, US 9,259,908 B2, CN 107 109 084 B, DE 20 2018 003 474 U1, CN 114 351 965 A, US 2020/0171810 A1, US 2006/0194028 A1). The legal-events record shows a final rejection (2025-06-30) followed by a response after final (2025-07-30) and allowance (2025-08-15). No independent claim was rejected on §102 over any of these references and left unrebutted. That is affirmative evidence — not proof — that the examiner found no single anticipatory reference. The realistic invalidity theory for this patent is §103, not §102.

Note on the citation counts: the Google Patents page shows both a "Citations (15)" table and a "Patent Citations (16)" table. The difference is US 10,618,256 B2, which appears only in the 16-row table. Per your rule against auto-correction, I report both numbers as they appear and treat the set as 16 distinct publication numbers.

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3. The cited set at a glance

Tier A = closest art (ceramic/porcelain + backing). Tier B = facing/veneer bonded to a rigid board. Tier C = peripheral (edges, wraps, skins, floors, coatings).

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4. Reference-by-reference §102 analysis

TIER A — the closest art

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A-1. US 2018/0099482 A1 — Lloveras Calvo — the single most relevant reference of record

• Full citation: US 2018/0099482 A1, "Porcelain laminate and procedure for manufacturing it," Juan Lloveras Calvo (Saint Feliu de Codines, ES). Appl. 15/837,128, filed 2017-12-11; published 2018-04-12. Priority to Spanish apps 200902148 (2009-11-11), 200901564, and 200901717; divisional of Ser. No. 12/711,360 (filed 2010-02-24, published as US 2011/0111192 A1).
• §102 basis: §102(a)(1)/(a)(2) — published well before 2023-07-25.
• Description (verified live): A laminate in which a porcelain stoneware sheet of 2–7 mm is adhered to a base or support sheet selected from MDF, particleboard, high density foam, polyethylene, polypropylene, ABS, foamed PVC, methacrylate, HPL compact, plywood, or aluminium/steel plate. The adhesive is expressly "a two-component polyurethane adhesive or a PUR adhesive." The disclosed procedure (claim 12 / ¶[0051]) is: (a) cleaning the face of the porcelain that will be adhered; (b) pre-treating the base sheet; (c) "applying to the face of the base or support sheet" the two-component PU or PUR adhesive; (d) adhering the porcelain sheet to the base sheet "by gradually applying pressure," using rollers of hardness 60 "to avoid damaging the porcelain material"; and (e) resting the laminate 3–4 days, "preferably under pressure, using for example a metal bench or plate with the same dimensions as the laminate obtained." Stated advantages: lower weight, larger pieces, improved bending resistance, improved machinability with wood/metal tools, and greater impact absorption than Silestone®.
• Potential §102 target: claim 1 (nearest miss); claim 13 (weaker); claim 11 (weakest).
• Why it is not a clean anticipation — element by element:

  Claim limitation	Lloveras disclosure	Verdict
  Porcelain sheet with finished side and back side	Porcelain stoneware sheet; the process "cleans the face … that will be adhered" (implying a face not adhered = finished face)	✅ disclosed
  Adhesive applied to the porcelain back side	Adhesive is applied to the base sheet's face (claim 12(c)); the porcelain is merely cleaned	❌ not disclosed — this is the gap
  Substrate sheet stacked with back side facing	Porcelain adhered to base/support sheet	✅
  Substrate within 0–⅛″ in length and width	Not disclosed. The only dimension reference — "metal bench or plate with the same dimensions as the laminate" — describes the caul plate, not the support sheet	❌ not disclosed (inherency argument available but not compelled)
  Porcelain does not adhere to a side surface of the substrate	Not disclosed. A coplanar flat laminate arguably inherently lacks side-face adhesion, but the reference nowhere addresses the edge	⚠️ arguable inherency only

• Realistic role: the primary §103 reference. Combining Lloveras (porcelain 2–7 mm + high-density-foam backing + 2-component PU adhesive + roller pressure) with any reference teaching adhesive applied to the tile/veneer face (e.g., US 4,140,837 or US 2008/0118713 A1) gets very close to claims 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 19. That combination, not any single reference, is the patent's genuine exposure.
• Additional observation of record: the Lloveras process also teaches a [different] pressure-pad "with the same dimensions as the laminate" — i.e., a coextensive press plate. A petitioner will likely argue that this discloses or renders obvious the "same size or up to ⅛″ different" footprint of claim 1.

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A-2. US 10,618,256 B2 — Lloveras Calvo — same application, granted

• Full citation: US 10,618,256 B2, "Porcelain laminate and procedure for manufacturing it," Juan Lloveras Calvo. Appl. 15/837,128, filed 2017-12-11; granted 2020-04-14.
• Critical finding: this is not a separate reference. Per the Zhonglian/Wanfang records, both US 2018/0099482 A1 and US 10,618,256 B2 derive from application 15/837,128 — i.e., the published application and its granted patent. The abstract, specification, and claim 12 process are the same text I verified for A-1, including the two-component polyurethane/PUR adhesive and the high-density-foam support-sheet option.
• Potential §102 target: identical to A-1 — claim 1 nearest, claim 13 next, claim 11 weakest — and it fails on the same two elements: adhesive is applied to the support sheet (not the porcelain back side), and neither the 0–⅛″ size relationship nor the no-side-contact negation is disclosed.
• Practical consequence: citing both adds no new disclosure. If a petition (or an IDS) leans on "two Lloveras references," that is one disclosure counted twice, and a POPR should say so plainly.

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A-3. EP 2,684,689 B1 — SKC Co., Ltd. — closest art on the compression element

• Full citation: EP 2,684,689 B1, "Flexible ceramic laminate sheet and preparation method thereof" (also published as EP 2,684,689 A2 on 2014-01-15 and A3 on 2014-04-09; US counterpart US 2014/0017486 A1). Applicant SKC Co., Ltd.; inventors Yoo Il Hwan, Kim Jin Cheol, Kim Tae Kyoung, Lee Dong Gyu, Lee Yu Jin. EP appl. 13176054.8, filed 2013-07-11; priority KR 10-2012-0075382 / KR 10-2013-0055944 (2012-07-12); granted 2018-03-07.
• §102 basis: §102(a)(1) — published 2014/2018, long before 2023-07-25.
• Description (verified live): A ceramic laminate sheet comprising a sintered ceramic sheet having a plurality of cracks and a polymer resin layer disposed on one or both sides of the ceramic sheet, bonded by an adhesive layer / bonding layer, prepared by a roll-lamination process using a pressure roller (and an elastic roller or elastic support plate). The ceramic is a Ni-Cu-Zn ferrite sheet (~0.08 mm after sintering) for NFC antenna / magnetic-shield applications. The cracks are intentional and divide the sheet into pieces (≥100/cm²) to impart flexibility.
• Classification overlap worth noting: EP 2,684,689 B1 carries CPC B32B9/005 (layered product comprising a ceramic layer), B32B7/12 (interconnection using adhesive), and C04B37/008 — the same classification set as US 12,492,151. That is almost certainly why it was cited: C04B37/008 is "joining burned ceramic articles … by means of an interlayer consisting of an organic adhesive," which is this patent's core concept.
• Potential §102 target: none. It is a different ceramic (sintered ferrite, not porcelain/porcelain stoneware), a different backing (a thin polymer resin film, not a foam board), and a different purpose (deliberate fracturing for flexibility, not fracture resistance). It teaches away from claim 13's "foam board," and it does not disclose the 0–⅛″ dimension, the no-side-contact negation, or adhesive applied to a porcelain back side.
• Realistic role: §103 art for the compression/roller limitations of claims 3, 4, 12, 13, 15 and for the general proposition that a brittle ceramic can be laminated to a backing with a pressure roller. It is also a double-edged sword for a petitioner, because SKC's express premise is that thinning a ceramic makes it more breakable — which supports the patent's own stated motivation.

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TIER B — facing/veneer bonded to a rigid board (the general method, but not porcelain + foam)

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B-1. US 4,140,837 A — Formica Corporation

• Full citation: US 4,140,837 A, "Decorative article having a bondable surface and method of manufacture," Formica Corporation (inventors Terry P. Drees, Michael C. [surname truncated in the record]). Appl. 844,557, filed 1977-10-25; granted 1979-02-20.
• §102 basis: §102(a)(1).
• Description (verified live, partial): A decorative article of manufacture having at least one face which can be glued to other surfaces by using common adhesives and may be painted with a variety of paints and stains. The related family text describes a heat-and-pressure-consolidated structure of a self-supporting substrate plus a decorative α-cellulose paper sheet impregnated with a melamine/formaldehyde resin composition.
• Potential §102 target: none. Every element fails except the generic concept of a decorative facing bonded to a substrate. No porcelain, no foam board, no 0–⅛″ dimension, no side-surface negation, no adhesive-on-the-facing step called out as such.
• Realistic role: §103 background for the "adhesive + pressure to bond a decorative facing to a substrate" concept underlying claims 1, 3, 12, 13. Its date (1979) makes it a useful "long-known technique" citation, but a 1979 decorative-laminate patent will not carry a §102 case against a porcelain-and-foam-board claim.

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B-2. US 2008/0118713 A1 — Bordener — the most useful §103 complement

• Full citation: US 2008/0118713 A1, "Polymer-Based Face Panel Veneer and Edgeband System for Producing Decorative Panels Having Increased Durability and Decorative Effect and Associated Methods for Producing Such a System," Robert Bordener. Filed 2006-11-21; published 2008-05-22.
• §102 basis: §102(a)(1).
• Description (verified live): A system for applying a flexible decorative veneer (thermoplastic laminate) to a rigid substrate (typically particleboard) using a substantially rigid adhesive (e.g., PVA) interposed between the veneer and the substrate, plus a second adhesive (typically EVA hot-melt) at the edge. Its stated problem is differential movement between the veneer and the substrate with temperature/humidity — discussed at length in terms of the veneer "shrinking away from the edge," exposing the substrate to "water, moisture, dirt, dust, sunlight," and producing edge chips from "overbite" or "underbite" along the joint area; the specification also derides prior art where the laminate "overbites the substrate."
• Potential §102 target: none. It discloses adhesive between the veneer and the substrate (not necessarily applied to the veneer back side), and its facing is a polymer laminate, not porcelain; there is no foam board, no 0–⅛″ dimension, and no no-side-contact negation.
• Realistic role — and this is the important one: Bordener is the best available §103 complement to Lloveras for the "apply adhesive to the facing" step, because it teaches a thin brittle facing bonded to a rigid board with an adhesive and heat/pressure, and it teaches the edge as a design variable. But note the direction: Bordener's whole point is that overbite (facing overhanging the substrate) causes edge chips, which is closer to the patent's own 1/16″-per-edge inset discussion than a petitioner might like.

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B-3. US 2008/0268273 A1 — The Diller Corporation

• Full citation: US 2008/0268273 A1, "Wood veneer surfaced decorative laminate product and method of making same," The Diller Corporation. Filed 2007-04-24; published 2008-10-30.
• §102 basis: §102(a)(1).
• Description (metadata-level). A decorative laminate product surfaced with real wood veneer, and its method of manufacture — i.e., a thin decorative facing laminated onto a backing with adhesive and pressure. (I did not retrieve full text for this reference; the description is from the citation line and title.)
• Potential §102 target: none. Wood veneer is not porcelain; no foam board; no dimensional or edge limitation.
• Realistic role: §103 background as to the lamination-of-a-thin-facing step (claims 1, 11, 13).

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B-4. US 9,259,908 B2 — Dai Nippon Printing

• Full citation: US 9,259,908 B2, "Shaping sheet, resin decorative plate and method for manufacturing the same," Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. Priority 2007-03-14; granted 2016-02-16.
• §102 basis: §102(a)(1).
• Description (metadata-level). A shaping sheet and a resin decorative plate and their manufacture — decorative surface layer applied to a plate. (Full text not retrieved.)
• Potential §102 target: none. Resin decorative plate, not porcelain-over-foam; no dimensional or side-surface limitation.
• Realistic role: weak §103 background only.

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B-5. DE 20 2018 003 474 U1 — Interprint GmbH

• Full citation: DE 20 2018 003 474 U1, "Multilayer layer construction," Interprint GmbH. Filed 2018-07-26; published 2019-10-29. (German utility model.)
• §102 basis: §102(a)(1).
• Description (metadata-level). A multilayer construction — a decorative multi-layer build-up. (Full text not retrieved; German-language.)
• Potential §102 target: none. No porcelain, no foam board, no dimensional or edge limitation.
• Realistic role: weak §103 background; primarily useful as evidence that multi-layer boards with a decorative outer layer were conventional well before the critical date.

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B-6. JP 2008-088801 A — Itai Komuten:Kk

• Full citation: JP 2008-088801 A, "Interior construction material," Itai Komuten:Kk. Filed 2006-09-08; published 2008-04-17. (Japanese-language; I did not retrieve text — the description is title-level.)
• §102 basis: §102(a)(1).
• Description (metadata-level). An interior construction material — from the title alone, a building-interior panel/finish product. (Because it is examiner-cited, it presumably disclosed something the examiner considered relevant to a panel-with-facing build-up; I cannot confirm what without the JP text or an English abstract.)
• Potential §102 target: cannot be assessed — I have no claim-level content. Flagged as a verification gap. Title-level reading suggests a §103-background role on "interior construction panel," not anticipation.
• Recommended action: pull the JPO English abstract and machine translation before relying on or discounting this reference.

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TIER C — peripheral art (edges, wraps, skins, floors, coatings)

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C-1. EP 0 689 911 A1 — National Starch and Chemical S.p.A.

• Full citation: EP 0 689 911 A1, "Method for the three-dimensional wrapping of wood panels," National Starch and Chemical S.p.A. Filed 1994-07-01; published 1996-01-03.
• Description (metadata-level). A method of three-dimensionally wrapping a wood panel — i.e., an adhesive plus a facing that is wrapped around the panel's edges.
• Potential §102 target: none. Wood, not porcelain; and it teaches wrapping around the sides — the affirmative opposite of the claims' negative limitation that the facing does not adhere to / contact the substrate's side surfaces.
• Realistic role: adverse to a petitioner. For claim 1's and 11's and 13's "does not adhere to / contact the side surfaces" negation, this reference is better cited by the patent owner as evidence that the art, when it addressed edges at all, went the other way (wrapping). Use with care.

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C-2. US 2014/0238593 A1 — Henkel AG & Co. KGaA

• Full citation: US 2014/0238593 A1, "Multiple-layer edgebanding," Henkel AG & Co. KGaA. Filed 2011-11-09; published 2014-08-28.
• Description (metadata-level). A multiple-layer edgeband — a strip applied to the edge of a board.
• Potential §102 target: none. It is edge treatment, not a backing board bonded to a facing; no porcelain, no foam board, no dimensional relation.
• Realistic role: §103 background showing that edge-region adhesion is a conventional design variable — a double-edged point, since edgebanding adds material at the side surface rather than avoiding contact with it.

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C-3. US 2004/0206038 A1 — Stanchfield

• Full citation: US 2004/0206038 A1, "Smooth flooring transitions," Oliver Stanchfield. Filed 2001-11-08; published 2004-10-21.
• Description (metadata-level). Flooring transition strips/assemblies.
• Potential §102 target: none. No porcelain, no foam board, no backing-adhesion method.
• Realistic role: §103 background for floor/panel joint concepts, if at all. The patent's fill-joint 540 / sealant 547 disclosure (FIG. 5) is background, not claimed — so this reference has no claim to attack.

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C-4. US 2006/0194028 A1 — Best-Rite Chalkboard Company

• Full citation: US 2006/0194028 A1, "Replacement skins for a writing surface," Best-Rite Chalkboard Company. Filed 2005-02-25; published 2006-08-31.
• Description (metadata-level). A replaceable skin applied to a writing surface — a flexible sheet adhered over a substrate.
• Potential §102 target: none. No porcelain, no foam board, no dimensional relation.
• Realistic role: de minimis; cited for the generic "adhere a sheet to a backing" concept.

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C-5. US 2020/0171810 A1 — Golconda Holdings LLC

• Full citation: US 2020/0171810 A1, "System, method, and apparatus for magnetic surface coverings," Golconda Holdings LLC. Filed 2015-03-27; published 2020-06-04.
• Description (metadata-level). Surface coverings attached magnetically.
• Potential §102 target: none. Magnetic attachment is the antithesis of the claimed adhesive joining; no porcelain or foam board.
• Realistic role: none for §102; noted only for completeness.

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C-6. CN 107 109 084 B — 戴弗西公司 (Diversey)

• Full citation: CN 107 109 084 B, "Peelable Surface Coating Systems on Multi-Segmented Substrates." Priority 2014-10-13; granted 2020-04-28.
• Description (metadata-level). Peelable coating systems on multi-segment substrates — deliberately removable coatings.
• Potential §102 target: none. A removable coating is inconsistent with the claimed permanent structural adhesive bond; no porcelain, no foam board.
• Realistic role: none for §102.

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C-7. CN 114 351 965 A — 玛格瑞斯(盐城)新型建材有限公司

• Full citation: CN 114 351 965 A, "A kind of composite thermal insulation board containing sulphur-magnesium board and its preparation equipment and method." Filed 2022-01-14; published 2022-04-15.
• §102 basis: §102(a)(1) — published 2022-04-15, ~15 months before the 2023-07-25 priority date, so it qualifies, but it is the most recent reference in the set.
• Description (metadata-level). A composite thermal-insulation board containing a magnesium-oxysulfate ("sulphur-magnesium") board, plus its preparation equipment and method. (Full text not retrieved; Chinese-language.)
• Potential §102 target: none. The facing is a magnesium board, not porcelain; the "insulation" component is a board layer, not necessarily a foamed substrate bonded to a brittle facing; and no 0–⅛″ dimension or side-surface negation is disclosed.
• Realistic role: §103 background for "composite board = rigid facing + backing board" and for the proposition that lamination equipment for composite panels is conventional (relevant to the FIGS. 2–4 process steps if a petitioner attacks the method claims as routine). Its 2022 date makes it the weakest of the set for §103 purposes because it is temporally closest to the invention.

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NPL

N-1. Derikvand et al. (2014)

• Full citation: Derikvand, M., et al., "A feasibility study of using two-component polyurethane adhesive in constructing wooden structures," Journal of Forestry Research (2014) 25(2): 477–482.
• §102 basis: §102(a)(1) — printed publication, 2014.
• Description. A feasibility study of a two-component polyurethane adhesive for structural wood construction.
• Potential §102 target: none. It discloses no sheet structure at all — no porcelain, no substrate, no dimensions, no edge geometry. It cannot anticipate any of claims 1–20.
• Realistic role: §103 evidence for adhesive-selection limitations. It corroborates the conventionality of two-component polyurethane structural adhesive for bonding dissimilar rigid substrates — directly implicating claim 2 / claim 14 ("the adhesive is waterproof") and the spec's own list of polyurethane adhesives, and reinforcing the obviousness of Lloveras's "two-component polyurethane or PUR adhesive" as applied to a substrate-backed porcelain sheet. Its presence in the record is telling: the examiner cited it, and it is exactly the kind of reference that makes the adhesive-selection limitations look routine.

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5. §102 anticipation matrix — independent claims

⚠️ = partial disclosure requiring at least one missing element; ❌ = not anticipatory.

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6. Bottom line on §102

No reference of record discloses every element of independent claim 1, 11, or 13 as arranged. The three gaps that defeat §102 across the entire set are:

1. Adhesive on the porcelain back side. The closest art (Lloveras) applies adhesive to the substrate. Claims 1, 11, and 13 all require the reverse. This alone defeats §102 against Lloveras, the best reference in the set.
2. The 0-to-⅛-inch length-and-width relationship (claims 1, 13). Not one reference of record discloses it — the "same dimensions" language in Lloveras describes a press plate, not the support sheet.
3. The negative limitation that the porcelain does not adhere to / contact the substrate's side surfaces (claims 1, 11, 13). No reference discloses it; the art that addresses edges at all (EP 0 689 911, Henkel, Bordener) goes the opposite direction. A petitioner's only route is inherency — arguing that a coplanar flat laminate inherently lacks side-face adhesion — which is available but is a §102 argument that a POPR can contest on the "necessarily present" standard.

Strongest §102 candidates, ranked (and each is a miss):

1. US 2018/0099482 A1 / US 10,618,256 B2 (Lloveras) — nearest to claim 1; fails the adhesive-side and dimensional/edge limitations. And these two are one disclosure.
2. EP 2,684,689 B1 (SKC) — nearest on the roller/compression element only; wrong ceramic, wrong backing, opposite purpose.
3. US 2008/0118713 A1 (Bordener) — nearest on the "bond a brittle facing to a rigid board with heat/pressure" concept; wrong materials, no dimensions/edge.

Every other reference is §103 background at most.

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7. Where the actual exposure lies (building on the earlier sections, not repeating them)

Because §102 fails cleanly, and consistent with the earlier Patent summary's flagged internal inconsistencies (the abstract's "coating a surface of the substrate with adhesive" vs. the claims' porcelain-side-only adhesive; claim 13's "up to an eighth of an inch different" vs. "up to an eighth of an inch smaller"; claim 11's closed-ended "consisting of" transition), the realistic attack vectors are:

• §103: Lloveras + Bordener (or Lloveras + Formica) for claims 1, 11, 13 and dependents 2, 3, 7, 8, 12, 14, 19; add Derikvand for the adhesive limitations (2, 14) and EP 2,684,689 for the roller/psi limitations (3, 4, 12, 13, 15).
• §112 (available in the pending PGR, not in an IPR): the "between zero and an eighth of an inch different" recitation in claim 1, the "different"/"smaller" inconsistency in claim 13, and whether claim 11's "consisting of" excludes the adhesive-on-substrate embodiments described in the specification.
• A note on the "consisting of" transition in claim 11: because it is closed-ended, a reference that discloses additional steps or components (e.g., Lloveras's metal counterface layer or its 3–4-day resting step) cannot anticipate it. That makes claim 11 harder to invalidate on §102 than claims 1 or 13, not easier — a point often misread.
• PGR link: the earlier PTAB challenges section documents PGR2026-00074 (MightySlab Distribution Company LLC, filed 2026-09-09), the last day of the §321(c) window measured from the 2025-12-09 grant. The grounds actually pleaded are unknown to me; if the petitioner asserts any of the above references, the §102 table in §5 is the map of where the petition is strongest (Lloveras for §103) and weakest (everything else for §102).

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8. Contradiction flagged, and confidence

Contradiction with the earlier-generated sections — flagged as required. The earlier Patent summary and Litigation summary state a current date of April 26, 2026 and conclude "no PTAB activity" / "no litigation known." The PTAB challenges section and this file's source record show PGR2026-00074 filed 2026-09-09. Those earlier conclusions are stale as to adversarial activity; their structural claim analysis remains accurate and I have built on it. The task-stated date (April 26, 2026) and the record timestamp (2026-09-10) remain unreconciled, and I have not auto-corrected either.

Confidence:

• High on: the identity and bibliographic details of the 16 cited references and the NPL (from the patent's own citation table); the claim set and limitations; the anticipation analysis for US 2018/0099482, US 10,618,256, and EP 2,684,689 (full text retrieved); the finding that US 2018/0099482 A1 and US 10,618,256 B2 share application 15/837,128; all statutory citations.
• Moderate on: US 4,140,837 and US 2008/0118713 A1 descriptions (partial full text plus family text).
• Low / not assessed on: JP 2008-088801 A, US 2008/0268273 A1, US 9,259,908 B2, US 2014/0238593 A1, US 2004/0206038 A1, US 2006/0194028 A1, US 2020/0171810 A1, CN 107 109 084 B, DE 20 2018 003 474 U1, and CN 114 351 965 A — these are described at title/citation-line level only because my tool budget was exhausted before I could retrieve their full texts. I have not invented claim content for them. The JP and both CN documents and the DE utility model warrant translation before any of them is relied on or dismissed.
• Not verified: the actual PGR2026-00074 grounds and its challenged-claim/reference mapping. I did not reach PTAB E2E or PatentCenter in this session, and my searches on the target number returned only the Google Patents record. Absence of a retrieved USPTO record is not proof that no such record exists.

I'll ground a few §103-specific points before writing up.

Let me pin down whether the Moderno/MightySlab family has a pre-2023 priority date (which would make it §103 art).

§103 Obviousness Analysis — US 12,492,151 B2

Patent: "Apparatus and method for substrate-backed porcelain" · Inventor Thomas Gust · App. 18/461,164 · Priority 2023-07-25 · Filed 2023-09-05 · Granted 2025-12-09 · Independent claims 1, 11, 13

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Read-first notes

What this section builds on. This analysis takes the reference set and mappings established in the Prior Art section above as given and does not re-describe each reference. It assumes the verified live retrievals for US 2018/0099482 A1, US 10,618,256 B2, EP 2,684,689 B1, US 4,140,837, and US 2008/0118713 A1, and treats the ten references the Prior Art section could only reach at citation-line/title level as unassessed — I do not assign them claim content.

Contradiction with earlier-generated sections — flagged as required. The Patent summary and Litigation summary above state a current date of April 26, 2026 and conclude "no litigation known / no PTAB activity." The record in this file is timestamped 2026-09-10 and documents PGR2026-00074 (MightySlab Distribution Company LLC, filed 2026-09-09). Those earlier conclusions are stale as to adversarial activity; their structural claim analysis is accurate and is relied on here. This task states the current date as April 26, 2026 while the record post-dates it by ~4.5 months; I quote dates literally and correct none of them. I also re-flag the anomalous 2024-10-23 "APPEAL BRIEF … ENTERED AND FORWARDED TO EXAMINER" entry in application 18/461,164 — unexplained, not this proceeding.

Basis of §103 law. 35 U.S.C. § 103; Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966); KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007); MPEP §§ 2141–2144.05. In a PGR the petitioner bears the burden by a preponderance of the evidence under 35 U.S.C. § 326(e).

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1. The hypothetical person of ordinary skill (Graham factor 1)

Defining the POSITA matters here because several of my grounds rest on what such a person would have known beyond the four corners of the cited references — which KSR expressly permits ("a court must ask whether the improvement is more than the predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions").

A POSITA as of 2023-07-25 would have had: (a) a bachelor's degree in civil/mechanical/materials engineering or equivalent experience, plus 2–4 years in architectural surface products, tile/stone installation, or panel lamination; (b) familiarity with large-format porcelain slab handling and the well-known field problems the patent's own Background recites (weight, brittleness, job-site fracture); (c) working knowledge of structural/waterproof adhesives (PU, PUR, epoxy, acrylic hot-melt) and of foam board substrates (EPS, XPS, polyisocyanurate, PU) used as tile backer and insulation board; and (d) familiarity with roll lamination and press lamination of facings onto rigid backings.

That last point is dispositive of the level of skill: the art was not a blank slate. The sheet goods in the cited references — decorative laminates (Formica), polymer-faced veneer on particleboard (Bordener), wood-veneer laminates (Diller), ceramic laminates (SKC), porcelain laminates (Lloveras) — establish that bonding a thin facing to a rigid or foam backing by adhesive plus pressure was a mature, routine industrial technique well before 2023.

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2. The independent claims decomposed

Immediate consequence: claim 1 is the broadest and most vulnerable claim. It requires no foam, no compression, no adhesive on the substrate, and its dimensional limitation is satisfied by a difference of zero — i.e., by lamination with a same-size board. Claim 13 is claim 1 plus foam + compression + a "smaller" board. Claim 11 is drafted to a closed set of five steps, which makes it the narrowest of the three (a point already made in the Prior Art section on the §102 side; it applies equally under §103).

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3. Coverage map — what each verified reference supplies

Note the critical structural fact: Lloveras alone supplies both the porcelain facing and the foam backing. The stated basis for the PGR petitioner's §103 case is therefore not "two disparate references yoked together" — it is a single primary reference plus a rationale for one step change (which face receives the adhesive) and one routine dimension choice (same-size or trimmed-to-size board).

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4. The grounds of rejection

Ground A — Lloveras in view of Bordener (and/or Formica)

Claims: 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20 (and dependents as noted).

Element mapping. Lloveras discloses a porcelain stoneware sheet (2–7 mm) adhered to a support sheet that expressly includes "high density foam," using 2-component polyurethane or PUR adhesive, joined by rollers (hardness 60, chosen "to avoid damaging the porcelain material"), then rested 3–4 days, preferably under pressure, against a metal bench or plate "with the same dimensions as the laminate obtained." Bordener (or Formica) supplies the teaching of applying the adhesive at the thin facing interface with a rigid board. The negative limitation is met because a flat, coplanar laminate with a same-size or smaller board structurally presents no board side surface to the porcelain (§6.2).

Motivation — articulated per KSR/MPEP § 2143:

• Rationale (A): combining known elements (adhesive-bonded facing + backing) according to known methods (apply adhesive, stack, press) to yield a predictable result (a unified laminate) — exactly what Lloveras already claims to achieve.
• Rationale (B): applying the adhesive to the facing's back face rather than the backing's face is a simple substitution of one known step for another with predictable results. The applicant's own specification destroys any argument to the contrary: the spec states adhesive "may be applied across a surface of the sheet of porcelain," "across a surface of the sheet of substrate," and "onto a surface of the porcelain and onto a surface of the substrate" — with no stated difference in result. That is an express statement in the patent that the two placements are interchangeable.
• Rationale (F) (market forces): the patent's own Background concedes that "the tile industry has been slow to adopt porcelain due to the inherent difficulty in transporting and installing porcelain" and that fracture risk is the barrier. That is a recitation of a recognized design need and market demand — the classic KSR motivation.
• Reasonable expectation of success: Lloveras reports success (larger pieces, improved bending resistance, improved machinability, greater impact absorption) using the identical materials and process steps.

Weakest link: the dimensional limitation, addressed in §5.1.

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Ground B — Lloveras in view of SKC, further in view of Lloveras's own roller disclosure

Claims: 3, 4, 12, 13, 15 (force/compression limitations), and 13 as a whole.

Element mapping. SKC discloses roll-lamination of a brittle ceramic sheet to a polymer layer using a pressure roller and an elastic roller/support plate, expressly for the purpose of handling a ceramic too fragile to handle alone. Lloveras independently discloses roller pressure across a porcelain laminate with a stated hardness constraint.

Motivation. Rationale (C) — use of a known technique (pressure-roller lamination) to improve a similar article in the same way. Rationale (F) — both references are driven by the same market force (making a fragile ceramic sheet handleable). Rationale (E) — the applied pressure is a finite, small set of identified, predictable solutions; selecting an operating pressure was a routine optimization.

The 30–40 psi range (claims 4, 15). This is squarely an optimization-of-a-range case under MPEP § 2144.05 and In re Aller, 220 F.2d 454, 456 (CCPA 1955) ("where the general conditions of a claim are disclosed in the prior art, it is not inventive to discover the optimum or workable ranges by routine experimentation"). The record shows the art recognized pressure as a result-effective variable: Lloveras's specification ties roller hardness selection to avoiding damage to the porcelain. Under E.I. du Pont de Nemours v. Synvina, 904 F.3d 996 (Fed. Cir. 2018), and MPEP § 2144.05(III)(C), the patent owner's only rebuttal route is to show the variable was not recognized as result-effective in the art — an argument made very hard by Lloveras's own expressed concern about roller selection. The specification discloses no criticality and no unexpected results for the 30–40 psi band.

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Ground C — Lloveras in view of Derikvand

Claims: 2, 14 (waterproof adhesive), and the adhesive-selection limitations generally.

Motivation. Rationale (A)/(C). Derikvand teaches two-component polyurethane adhesive for structural bonding of rigid substrates — the exact adhesive chemistry Lloveras already discloses for bonding porcelain to a support sheet. Derikvand adds nothing that Lloveras lacks; its true role is to corroborate the conventionality of the claimed adhesive class and to defeat any argument that selecting a weather/water-resistant PU adhesive was inventive. The patent's own spec lists "water resistant" and "temperature resistant" adhesives as desiderata without tying either to a measured result.

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Ground D — Lloveras in view of CN 114351965 A (and/or US 9,259,908, DE 20 2018 003 474 U1)

Claims: 1, 11, 13 as method claims (process/equipment aspects).

Status: I cannot responsibly press this ground. The Prior Art section records that these references were reachable only at citation-line level, and I have not verified their disclosure. If a petitioner relies on them for "composite-board lamination equipment is conventional," a POPR should demand the specific disclosure. Flagged as unassessed.

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Ground E — Lloveras + Formica alone, on the narrower claims

Claims: 11, 13.

Formica's "decorative article having a bondable surface" whose face "can be glued to other surfaces by using common adhesives" supplies the concept of a facing article bearing adhesive on its bondable back face. Combined with Lloreas's porcelain + foam + PU + roller teaching, this reaches claims 11 and 13 on a two-reference theory. (Confidence moderate — the Prior Art section records only partial full text for US 4,140,837.)

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Ground F — "Single reference plus routine design choices" (KSR / Official Notice)

Claims: 1, 7, 8, 9, 18, 19, 20.

• Claims 8, 18 (foam board; waterproof): Lloveras expressly names high density foam and water-resistant polymers (PE, PP, foamed PVC) → Rationale (B).
• Claims 7, 19 (lightweight relative to porcelain): Lloveras expressly touts lower weight versus Silestone® → inherent/routine.
• Claims 9, 20 (horizontal stacking): the spec itself states "Other configurations are contemplated" and that vertical stacking "need not be the case." Orientation of two sheets during assembly is a design choice with no asserted significance → Rationale (B).
• Claim 1's open transition permits the inclusion of Lloveras's cleaning, pretreating, and resting steps.

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5. The two limitations that will actually be litigated

5.1 The "zero to ⅛ inch different in length and width" limitation (claims 1, 13)

Three independent attacks converge:

1. The range includes zero. A substrate sheet identical in length and width to the porcelain sheet yields a difference of zero and literally satisfies claim 1. Lloveras's press plate "with the same dimensions as the laminate obtained" teaches a coextensive, same-footprint relationship between the plate and the composite — the reference is thinking explicitly in terms of matching planar dimensions.
2. Routine optimization. Under MPEP § 2144.05(II) and In re Aller, In re Boesch, In re Geisler (thickness "50–100 Å" obvious over "not less than about 100 Å"), and Titanium Metals v. Banner, 778 F.2d 775 (Fed. Cir. 1985) (near-miss ranges with expected similar properties), a 0–⅛″ equivalence band is a classic optimization/design-choice case. Trim a foam board ⅛″ from a porcelain slab with a knife — that is the definition of routine shop practice.
3. No criticality in the specification. The patent ties the relationship to neither fracture resistance nor any measured result. Its only stated reason for a smaller board is sealing at the fill joint — the spec's 1/16″ per-edge inset "may facilitate better sealing during installation." A limitation whose disclosed purpose is esthetic/sealing convenience, at a magnitude of exactly twice the spec's own 1/16″ figure, is the archetype of a non-critical, result-inconsequential range. In re Woodruff, 919 F.2d 1575 (Fed. Cir. 1990), puts the burden on the applicant: "the applicant must show that the particular range is critical." Nothing in this specification does.

Counter-argument the patent owner has: the ⅛″ band is a result-effective variable not recognized as such in the art (In re Antonie, Applied Materials). This is a real but narrow exception, and it is undercut here because the specification itself doesn't recognize the variable as result-effective either — the applicant cannot claim the art failed to recognize a relationship the applicant also failed to claim or explain.

5.2 The negative limitation ("does not adhere to / contact the side surfaces")

This is the patent owner's best structural argument, and it is weaker than it looks.

• The limitation is satisfied by any flat, coplanar laminate. Where the board is the same size or smaller, or where it is larger, the porcelain's back face mates with the board's top face; the board's vertical side surfaces are simply not presented to the porcelain. Lloveras's laminate is exactly this. A challenger may establish satisfaction of a negative limitation with affirmative evidence that the excluded feature is unnecessary, not merely by the reference's silence — WAG Acquisition v. WebPower (Fed. Cir. 2025) and USAA v. PNC Bank (Fed. Cir. 2025). Lloveras performs no edge-wrapping, no edgebanding, and no adhesive application to any edge; its adhesion step is a face-to-face roll lamination. That is affirmative evidence, not silence.
• Contrast the In re Strongbridge Dublin line (Fed. Cir. 2025), where silence alone was held insufficient. The petitioner should not rely on silence; the petition should affirmatively characterize Lloveras's process as face-only bonding.
• The patent owner's strongest available point is the teaching-away/negative-direction argument already flagged in the Prior Art section: the cited art that addresses edges at all goes the opposite way — EP 0 689 911 (three-dimensional wrapping of panels around edges), Henkel (edgebanding at the edge), Bordener (overbite/underbite at the edge joint). The patent owner will argue that the field's conventional wisdom was to address edge exposure by adding material at the edge, so a claim requiring non-contact with the side surfaces is a deliberate departure. This is a genuine argument, and it is the patent's best non-obviousness theory. It is weakened by the fact that none of those edge references concerns a foam-backed porcelain slab, and by KSR's instruction that the test is not whether the prior art's preferred embodiment equals the claim, but whether the claimed configuration is a predictable use of known elements.

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6. Claim-by-claim disposition (provisional)

Realistic assessment: claims 1 and 13 and their dependents are the most exposed. Claims 5, 10, 16 are the petitioner's weakest and are where a POPR should concentrate.

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7. What the patent owner will argue (and how strong it is)

1. Teaching away at the edge. The edge-art (wrapping, edgebanding, overbite) went the other direction. Real but limited — none of those references is a foam-backed porcelain slab.
2. SKC teaches away from thinning. SKC's premise is that a ceramic must be deliberately cracked to be flexible — a reference that says thin ceramics are more fragile supports the patent's motivation. Real but self-limiting: SKC concerns ferrite for NFC antennas, not architectural porcelain.
3. No § 102 anticipation — no reference discloses all elements. Correct, as the Prior Art section concluded. But KSR makes clear that § 103 is not defeated by the absence of a single anticipatory reference.
4. Criticality / unexpected results for the dimensional limitation and the 30–40 psi band. The weakest of the four — the specification supplies no data, no comparative examples, and no stated criticality for any numerical range.
5. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4). See §9.

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8. What is not § 103 art — and the highest-value verification step

The Moderno Porcelain Works / MightySlab Distribution family is very likely date-barred as prior art against this patent, and this should be verified immediately.

My search this session located the adverse family: US 12,241,258 B1 ("Reinforced porcelain panel product fabrication methods for enhanced structural protection," inventors Roberto Contreras and Armin Thomas Deutsch, assigned to Moderno Porcelain Works, LLC), plus siblings US 12,247,403, US 12,297,646/647, US 12,359,442 B2, and US 12,435,521, and publications US 2025/0146301, US 2025/0198169, US 2025/0389124, and US 2026/0132634.

The date analysis is the whole point. The family's cross-reference chain, as retrieved, identifies its earliest provisional as U.S. 63/541,981, filed 2023-10-02, titled "SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR PORCELAIN BOARD," with later provisionals in Feb 2024 and Jul 2024 and non-provisional applications filed in 2024–2025.

• Gust's effective filing date is 2023-07-25 (provisional 63/515,553) / 2023-09-05 (non-provisional).
• A 2023-10-02 earliest priority means the Moderno family was effectively filed ~2 weeks and ~2 months, respectively, AFTER Gust. It therefore cannot be § 102(a)(2) art (it is not "effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention"), and its publications (2025–2026) are far too late for § 102(a)(1). It is not usable for § 103 either.

Consequence for the obviousness case, and it cuts in an interesting direction: the Moderno family is a near-simultaneous independent development of a substrate-backed porcelain panel by a different party in the same market, arriving within weeks of Gust's own filing. That is not prior art, but it is (a) powerful context for the KSR market-forces rationale ("known work in one field of endeavor may prompt variations … based on design incentives or other market forces"), (b) potentially probative of industry need, and (c) precisely why the PGR petitioner is an operating competitor rather than a defensive aggregator. I would not overstate it as an obviousness datum — authority on the weight of simultaneous independent invention is thin and its probative value is generally treated as low. Flagged at low confidence.

Verification action, highest priority: confirm whether any application in the Moderno/MightySlab family has an effective filing date before 2023-07-25 — including any earlier non-provisional, any foreign priority, or any parent application not captured in the chain I retrieved (I saw a truncated reference to 18/902,097 also being a CIP of another non-provisional). If such a filing exists, it becomes the single most material prior-art reference in the entire case, because it is directed at the identical problem, the identical materials (porcelain slab + foam-core structural board + adhesive), and the identical solution — with the one structural difference being that Moderno's board overhangs the porcelain to define a "buffer region," which is the mirror image of claims 1/11/13's "does not contact the board side surfaces." A reference that discloses everything except the negation, plus a market-driven reason for the variation, is the strongest § 103 case available against this patent. [Moderate confidence in the date analysis; low confidence that no earlier priority exists — I saw only a partial chain.]

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9. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4) — both sides

For the patent owner:

• Long-felt need / failure of others. The patent's Background recites that the industry "has been slow to adopt porcelain" and that fracture during transport/installation is a persistent, unsolved safety and cost problem. That is a textbook long-felt-need narrative — and it is corroborated, oddly, by the petitioner's own side: an established porcelain distributor independently built a commercial substrate-backed porcelain product (MightySlab™, reportedly 6 mm porcelain over a 10 mm core board) within ~2 years of Gust's filing.
• Industry recognition / adoption. If the 20-record Moderno ↔ MightySlab assignment of 2025-12-19/22 (reel 73284/0842) reflects a commercialization transaction around this product space, that is evidence of market significance.

Against the patent owner — the nexus problem. Secondary considerations require a nexus to the claimed invention, not to the general concept of backing porcelain. The patent's asserted benefits (fracture resistance) are attributed in the specification to the presence of a substrate, not to the 0–⅛″ dimensional relationship, the adhesive's placement on the porcelain back side, or the non-contact-with-side-surfaces negation. If the commercial success is driven by substrate backing generally — a concept the petitioner will argue was already Lloveras's — there is no nexus to the limitations that distinguish the claims. The patent owner's copying theory has the same defect: Moderno's overhanging "buffer region" design is not the claimed design.

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10. Bottom line

A well-constructed § 103 case against claims 1, 13, and most dependents is strong; the case against claims 5, 10, and 16 is weak; claim 11 is narrowest because of its closed "consisting of" transition.

The load-bearing structure of the rejection is:

Lloveras (US 2018/0099482 A1 / US 10,618,256 B2) is the primary reference and supplies nearly everything — porcelain stoneware facing, a support sheet expressly including "high density foam," a two-component polyurethane/PUR structural adhesive, roller pressure applied across the laminate with a stated concern for not damaging the porcelain, and a coextensive press plate "with the same dimensions as the laminate." Only two things are arguably missing, and neither is a structural gap:

1. which face receives the adhesive — supplied by Bordener/Formica, and disposed of by the applicant's own specification, which recites the three placements as interchangeable alternatives with no stated difference in result; and
2. the sizing relationship and the edge negation — the former a routine optimization/design choice with no criticality disclosed (Aller; Woodruff; Titanium Metals; MPEP § 2144.05), the latter inherently satisfied by a flat coplanar laminate and provable by affirmative evidence that edge treatment is unnecessary (WAG Acquisition; USAA).

Motivation is not the weak point of this case. The patent's own Background supplies the design need and market forces rationale; the shared field (B32B layered products; C04B37/008 joining burned ceramic with an organic adhesive — a classification this patent and EP 2,684,689 B1 both carry) supplies the same-field-of-endeavor rationale; the predictable, single-function nature of the change supplies the predictable results rationale; and the finite, small set of adhesive-placement and pressure options supplies "obvious to try."

The two genuine gaps the petitioner must close with evidence rather than argument are: (a) affirmative proof that Lloveras's process performs no edge treatment (to defeat the negative-limitation defense under Strongbridge), and (b) a rationale for cure time on claims 6/10/17 that survives Lloveras's express "resting 3–4 days, preferably under pressure" — which is closer to teaching away from claim 5's "no compressive force during cure time" than the petition may wish.

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Confidence and limitations

• High confidence: the claim constructions and element decomposition (authoritative full text); the Lloveras/SKC/Formica/Bordener/Derikvand disclosures as recorded by verified retrieval in the Prior Art section; the MPEP § 2144.05 and In re Aller / Woodruff / Titanium Metals / Synvina framework; the KSR rationales (A)–(G); the observation that US 2018/0099482 A1 and US 10,618,256 B2 share application 15/837,128 and are one disclosure.
• Moderate confidence: the Moderno/MightySlab date-bar analysis (the earliest priority I could retrieve is 63/541,981, 2023-10-02, after Gust's 2023-07-25 priority; the chain I retrieved was truncated and may be incomplete); the Formica "bondable surface" mapping (partial full text only).
• Low confidence / not assessed: JP 2008-088801 A, US 2008/0268273 A1, US 9,259,908 B2, US 2014/0238593 A1, US 2004/0206038 A1, US 2006/0194028 A1, US 2020/0171810 A1, CN 107109084 B, DE 20 2018 003 474 U1, and CN 114351965 A — citation-line/title level only. I have not assigned claim content to any of them, and no ground above depends on them. Translation is required before any of them is relied on.
• Not verified: the actual grounds pleaded in PGR2026-00074. My searches for the petition returned nothing. This § 103 analysis is my independent read of the references, not a report of any party's contentions. I did not invent challenged claims, references, or grounds.
• Unreconciled: the task's stated current date (April 26, 2026) versus the record's timestamp (2026-09-10) and the 2026-09-09 PGR filing. Both are quoted literally; neither is corrected.