US 3849341

I'll search for authoritative information on this specific patent number.

Let me check for any litigation or CAFC activity and cross-check the patent record.

US Patent 3,849,341 — Summary

Note on sourcing: I could not access a live USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Full-Text record directly, but the full authoritative patent text (Google Patents mirror of the USPTO grant) was available and is quoted below. The number is interpreted literally: US 3,849,341 (not 4,849,341 or any similar number).

Bibliographic data

Inventor/assignee caveat: Google Patents also shows a 2016-09-08 "Assigned to ALPHATEC SPINE, INC. …" reassignment entry. Based on the text and dates, that appears to be a database artifact (a security-interest release unrelated to this 1974 detergent patent) and should not be treated as a real change of ownership of US 3,849,341. I flag this as an uncertainty rather than a verified fact.

Abstract (verbatim from the grant)

"The use of ester-linked carboxylate derivatives of carbohydrates such as sodium starch maleate, sodium cellulose phthalate, sodium glycogen-, sucrose- and methyl glucoside-succinates and sodium semicellulose dilactate, as biodegradable builders in detergent compositions. The aforementioned compounds can be substituted in detergent compositions for existing builders containing phosphorus or nitrogen without impairing the efficiency of such detergent compositions."

(The "Abstract" field in the Google Patents metadata reproduces claim 1 almost verbatim; the text above is the printed abstract from the specification.)

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

There are two independent claims — claim 1 and claim 2. All other claims depend from one of them (claims 3–19 are all "A composition of Claim 1" or "A composition of Claim 2").

Claim 1 — polysaccharide-based builder (e.g., starch).
A detergent composition containing two required ingredients:

• (a) at least one surfactant chosen from anionic, nonionic, zwitterionic, and ampholytic detergent actives; and
• (b) a biodegradable builder that is a water-soluble salt of an ester-linked carboxyl derivative of a polysaccharide, specifically one of: starch maleate, starch succinate, starch phthalate, starch glutarate, starch citraconate, starch itaconate, starch diglycolate, or starch dilactate.
• The degree of substitution (D.S.) is about 0.5–3.
• The builder makes up about 20%–60% of the composition by weight, and the builder:surfactant weight ratio is about 1:10 to about 50:1.

Claim 2 — oligosaccharide-based builder (hydrolyzed starch).
The same composition structure, but the builder is an ester-linked carboxyl derivative of an oligosaccharide, enumerated as hydrolyzed starch maleate, succinate, phthalate, glutarate, citraconate, itaconate, diglycolate, or dilactate. The D.S. is about 1–3 (rather than 0.5–3), and the builder loading and builder:surfactant ratio ranges are the same as claim 1 (20–60 wt%; about 1:10 to about 50:1).

Key scope observations (plain language):

• The claim set is drawn to compositions, not to the ester compounds per se or to methods of making them — even though the specification describes "new organic compounds" as an object. The granted claims are composition claims.
• The builder is defined by specific enumerated ester types (a closed Markush-style list), not by a general formula, so claim scope is narrow as to the identity of the carboxylate ester.
• The claims require minimum builder loading (20%) and a specific builder:surfactant ratio window (1:10 down to 1:10… up to 50:1) — note the asymmetry: at the low-builder end the ratio is 1:10 (surfactant-heavy, more typical of light-duty), and at the high end it is 50:1 (builder-heavy, characterized in the specification as relevant to mechanical dishwashing).
• Dependent claims narrow to: anionic surfactants (3, 5), nonionic surfactants (4, 6), starch source—corn/potato/rice/arrowroot/tapioca/wheat/sago (7, 8), cation—Na/K/Li/ammonia/mono-, di-, triethanolamine/morpholine (9, 10), specific esters—starch succinate (11), sodium corn starch succinate (12), starch maleate (13), starch phthalate (14), and further ratio/level limitations (15–19).

Supporting technical content (from the specification)

• Chemistry/method: builders are made by heating the carbohydrate with a cyclic anhydride (succinic, glutaric, maleic, phthalic, citraconic, itaconic, dilactic, diglycolic) in a solvent such as toluene or pyridine, then neutralizing the acid ester (pH ~8–8.6) with bases such as NaOH, Na₂CO₃, NaHCO₃, KOH, K₂CO₃, KHCO₃, Li₂CO₃, NH₄OH, tetramethylammonium hydroxide, mono-/di-/triethanolamine, or morpholine.
• D.S. guidance: polysaccharide ester salts effective at D.S. ~0.5–3 (preferably 1–3, more preferably 1.5–3); disaccharides D.S. ~1–8 (preferably 2–8); alkyl glycosides D.S. ~1–4 (preferably 2–4). D.S. can be determined by titrating the acid ester with standard alkali.
• Performance data: Tables I–VIII report Terg-O-Tometer detergency results (Dacron/cotton soil cloth, vacuum cleaner dust, 120 °F, 180 ppm hardness, 0.2% formulation, pH 10.0), comparing the carbohydrate-ester builders against sodium tripolyphosphate controls; efficiencies in the ~74–100% range are reported in the extracted tables.
• Prior art cited on the face of the patent: US 2,505,561 (McIntire); 2,311,008 / 2,264,103 (Tucker); 2,233,475 (Dreyfus); 2,148,951 (Maxwell); 2,108,455 (Stone); 2,093,462 (Malm); 3,723,322 (Diehl); 3,629,121 (Eldib); 3,308,067 (Diehl); 2,891,947 (Paschall); 2,868,780 (Minkema); 2,853,484 (Lolkema); 2,825,727 (Caldwell); 2,759,787 (Touey); 2,661,349 (Caldwell); 2,622,997 (Lolkema); 2,613,206 (Caldwell); and GB 699,530.
• Family: priority applications in GB (GB 1,355,998), DE (DE 2,148,279), CH (CH 565858), CA (CA 967,841), NL (NL 7,113,475), plus later siblings (DE 2,304,057; CH 579138; GB 1,415,797; NL 7,301,349; and US 3,910,880, "Sulfosuccinate derivatives of carbohydrates").

CAFC 2026 docket check — no hits

I searched for any 2026 Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit docket or litigation referencing 3849341 / 3,849,341. I found no CAFC 2026 docket, no district court litigation, and no PTAB proceeding involving this patent. This is consistent with the record: the patent expired (anticipated expiration 1991-11-19) and is long past any appealable life.

One caution on a possible false positive: a search surfaced a case citation "In re Lamberti, 545 F.2d 747, 192 U.S.P.Q. 278" in a Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA) context. That is a 1976 CCPA decision and is not a 2026 CAFC docket. I could not verify that this case concerns US 3,849,341 or the same Vincent Lamberti invention, so I am explicitly flagging it as unverified rather than asserting a connection. Do not treat it as linked to this patent without a docket-level check.

Overall confidence statement

• High confidence on: patent number, title, inventor, assignee, filing date (1972-02-01), issue date (1974-11-19), Ser. No. 222,659, CIP relationship to Ser. No. 77,052, claim count (19), and the full text of independent claims 1 and 2 — all taken directly from the patent's own specification and claims.
• Moderate confidence on classification symbols (U.S. Cl. 252-546 per the face of the patent; the uspto.report listing shows later-reassigned CPC/current classes such as C11D 3/221, C08B 31/04).
• Explicit uncertainty on: (i) the ALPHATEC SPINE reassignment entry appearing on Google Patents, which I read as an artifact; (ii) any connection to In re Lamberti (545 F.2d 747); and (iii) any 2026 CAFC activity — I found none.

I'll search litigation-focused sources for this specific patent number.

Let me check litigation-specific databases and the patent's own litigation record.

Litigation search results for U.S. Patent No. 384,9341

Bottom line: I found no litigation — no district court case, ITC action, or Federal Circuit appeal — involving U.S. Patent No. 3849341 in any of the sources searched.

Search performed

I searched for the exact patent number (both "3849341" and "3,849,341") across litigation-oriented sources, including the Unified Patents litigation portal, CourtListener (which indexes PACER district dockets, Court of Appeals decisions, and Federal Circuit opinions), USPTO report/patent pages, and general web results. Every hit returned was either:

• the patent's own bibliographic/assignment record (e.g., uspto.report/patent/grant/3849341), or
• unrelated cases that merely contain similar strings of digits or the words "Lever," "Lever Brothers," or "detergent" (e.g., Haskell v. Lever Bros., Lever Bros. v. Procter & Gamble Mfg. Co., Network-1 Techs. v. Hewlett-Packard) — none of which concern Patent 3849341.

No docket, complaint, judgment, or appeal naming 3849341 as an asserted patent was located.

Why this is a plausible result

The bibliographic record is consistent with a patent that was never litigated:

• Patent: U.S. 3,849,341 — "Ester-linked derivatives of carbohydrates as builders for detergent compositions"
• Inventor / Assignee: Vincent Lamberti / Lever Brothers Company
• Priority: 1970-09-30 (continuation-in-part of Ser. No. 77,052, filed Sept. 30, 1970, now abandoned)
• Filing: 1972-02-01; Grant: 1974-11-19
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration 1991-11-19 (i.e., the patent term ran out roughly 35 years ago).
• The Google Patents "Cited By" and family listings show only patent-to-patent citations (e.g., Procter & Gamble, FMC, Colgate, Henkel, Akzo Nobel) — not litigation.

Caveats

• I could not retrieve a positive "no cases found" confirmation directly from the Unified Patents litigation case list or a PACER docket search because those portals were not fully accessible to my search; my conclusion rests on the absence of any indexed case in the sources I could reach and on the patent's expired status.
• Litigation from the 1970s–1980s predates most digitized docket coverage, so a paper-era suit (if any) might not appear in modern databases. I cannot rule that out with certainty.
• Because the patent expired in 1991, no current or pending litigation is possible — any case would be historical only.

If you need a definitive negative, the authoritative next step would be a paid PACER/Unified Patents Litigation search by patent number plus a manual review of the 1974–1991 Docket records, since that is the only window in which an infringement suit could have been filed.

If you have a specific case name or docket number in mind, give it to me and I'll verify it against the record rather than relying on the negative search result.

I'll start by verifying the structured ODP block against web search, since the canonical list says "no proceedings."

Let me run targeted checks for any PTAB docketing or assertion history specific to this patent, and confirm the family's status.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 3,849,341: 0. The structured USPTO Open Data Portal block is unambiguous — no IPR, no PGR, and no CBM proceeding has ever been instituted or even docketed against this patent — so the breakdown is 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials. My independent web searches surfaced no PTAB docket, FWD, or Federal Circuit appeal naming US 3,849,341 (see the lookalike warning below; "341" is an extremely common patent-number suffix and every hit traced to a different patent). The bottom-line defensive posture is therefore not "the patent survived two IPRs and is hardened" — it is stronger than that: the patent expired on 1991-11-19 and has been unenforceable against current activity for roughly 35 years. If a demand letter cites US 3,849,341, the problem isn't claim scope, it's that there is no live patent right to assert.

Because there are no proceedings, the per-proceeding template has nothing to populate. I've replaced it with the record facts and the two statutory reasons no AIA trial has ever been available or worthwhile here.

(No proceeding) — PTAB has never taken jurisdiction over this patent

• Type: n/a — no Inter Partes Review, Post-Grant Review, or Covered Business Method review on file.
• Filed: n/a.
• Status: No AIA trial proceedings on file (USPTO ODP, most recent ingest), consistent with the Google Patents "Application events" timeline for US3849341A, which shows only: 1974-11-19 grant → 1974-11-19 publication → 1991-11-19 "Anticipated expiration" → "Expired – Lifetime."
• Judge panel: n/a.
• Petition grounds: n/a.
• Institution decision: n/a.
• Final Written Decision: n/a. No claim of this patent has ever been canceled, confirmed, or construed by the Board.
• Settlement / termination: n/a.
• Appeal: No PTAB appeal exists to appeal. The only appellate-adjacent activity in the family is unrelated: the dominant post-grant history for this family is ex parte reexamination-style and prosecution history in the 1970s–1980s, not AIA trials (AIA trials did not exist before 2012-09-16, by which point this patent had already been expired for two decades).
• Defensive value: Maximal. There is no IPR estoppel to worry about because no one has petitioned, and there is no claim scope to design around because the patent term ended 1991-11-19.

Why no AIA trial proceeding is even legally available (or rational) here

1. PGR is barred by the effective filing date. Post-grant review under 35 U.S.C. §§ 321–329 reaches only patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. US 3,849,341 claims priority to 1970-09-30 (abandoned parent Ser. No. 77,052) and was filed 1972-02-01 as Ser. No. 222,659. It is a quintessential pre-AIA patent — no PGR is possible.
2. CBM is barred by subject matter and by the program's sunset. The AIA § 18 covered-business-method program (sunset 2020-09-16) required a patent claiming a method or apparatus for performing data processing or other operations used in the practice, administration, or management of a financial product or service. A 1974 detergent-builder composition patent is not CBM-eligible — and CBM also required the petitioner to have been sued for infringement.
3. IPR is the only theoretical vehicle, and it has no engine. An IPR under §§ 311–319 can technically be filed against a pre-AIA patent, but the Board reaches expired patents only where the claims still matter (e.g., live litigation over pre-expiration damages or collateral-estoppel effect). Here the 17-year term from the 1974-11-19 grant ran out 1991-11-19, and any damages theory would be time-barred many times over under the 35 U.S.C. § 286 six-year lookback. There is nothing left to invalidate and nobody with § 315(b) standing (a "real party in interest served with a complaint") to file.
4. No assertion history found. I located no infringement suit asserting US 3,849,341. The Litigation hits that look related — Lever Bros. Co. v. Procter & Gamble Distributing, 668 F. Supp. 924 (fabric-softener patents), and Lever Brothers Co. v. United States, 981 F.2d 1330 (D.C. Cir. 1993) (Lanham Act § 42 / customs) — involve the same assignee, Lever Brothers Company, but different patents.

⚠️ Lookalike warning — do not be misled by "the '341 patent"

Searches for "341 patent" + PTAB return a different patent family in every instance I checked, including:

• A PGR petition referencing a "'341 patent" issued 2021-02-23 and owned by Lynk Labs, Inc. — comments on claims 1–3, 5, 7–10, 12, 14–17, 19 and grounds under AIA § 102/§ 103/§ 112 against Bruning, Kabel, Dowling and Mueller. That is a 2021 LED-lighting patent, not this 1974 detergent patent. The claim-number list coincides numerically with this patent's 19-claim structure, which makes the confusion easy — check the issue date and assignee before relying on it.
• The VideoShare v. Google "'341 patent" (specification columns 19:67–22, claim 1 at 25:14–26:13) — a video-sharing patent litigated in W.D. Tex.
• Agazzi '341 (optical transceiver modules, cited in IPR2020s-era SFP petitions) and a Tobii v. Weinblatt "'341 patent" (means-plus-function written description).

None of these is US 3,849,341. I found no proceeding number that names this patent, and I have not invented one.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Every one of the 19 claims stands exactly as issued in 1974 — none canceled, none narrowed by amendment, none construed by the Board — because no post-grant or PTAB adjudication exists. Claim 1 claims a detergent composition of (a) an anionic, nonionic, zwitterionic or ampholytic surfactant and (b) a water-soluble salt of an ester-linked carboxyl derivative of a polysaccharide selected from starch maleate, starch succinate, starch phthalate, starch glutarate, starch citraconate, starch itaconate, starch diglycolate and starch dilactate, D.S. 0.5–3, builder at 20–60 wt%, builder:surfactant 1:10 to 50:1. Claim 2 is the parallel oligosaccharide (hydrolyzed-starch) claim at D.S. 1–3. Claim 3 et seq. are dependents (anionic/nonionic surfactant, starch source, cation identity, specific succinate/maleate/phthalate, ratios). The "surviving claims" are therefore all of claims 1–19 — but "surviving" is a misnomer: they survive as expired claims (term ended 1991-11-19 per the ODP/Google event log).

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) / § 325(e)(2) estoppel is empty — no petitioner has ever filed, so no petitioner or privy is estopped from anything, and there is no IPR record to borrow for an invalidity case. Conversely, the file history you can freely mine is the original 1970s prosecution plus the cited art: US 2,505,561 (McIntire), 2,311,008 and 2,264,103 (Tucker), 2,233,475 (Dreyfus), 2,148,951 (Maxwell), 2,108,455 (Stone), 2,093,462 (Malm), 3,308,067 and 3,723,322 (Diehl), 3,629,121 (Eldib), 2,891,947 (Paschall), 2,868,780 and 2,853,484 (Lolkema), 2,825,727, 2,661,349 and 2,613,206 (Caldwell), 2,759,787 (Touey), 2,622,997 (Lolkema), and GB 699,530 — useful only if you need to show the claimed ester-linked carboxylate builders were old (the specification itself concedes the compounds "are for the most part known compounds," citing Mullen & Pacsu, Ind. Eng. Chem. 35:381 (1943) and 34:1209 (1942), and Malm & Fordyce, ibid. 32:405 (1940)). That concession is a ready-made § 102/§ 103 story if anyone ever revives a claim under this family.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner, no serial IPR filer, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents, RPX, or similar involvement) — the absence isn't a strategic signal about troll-fighting; it's a function of a patent that left the enforceable population during the first Bush administration. The family did generate later industrial activity: the Board-era "Cited By" list includes P&G's US 3,919,107 (dextrin esters of polycarboxylic acids), FMC's US 3,941,771 and 4,029,590 (dextrin carboxylates as builders), and Lever's own US 4,021,376 (nonphosphate builders with two or more carboxyl groups) — i.e., competitors patented around the concept in the mid-1970s rather than petitioning. The sibling/child filings worth knowing about are US 3,756,966 (Ser. No. 222,648, filed the same day, 1972-02-01) and its division US 3,910,880 (Ser. No. 387,835, filed 1973-08-13) on sulfosuccinate carbohydrate derivatives — also long expired.

One data-quality flag. The Google/ODP record for US3849341A carries a 2016-09-08 reassignment entry to ALPHATEC SPINE, INC. described as a "RELEASE BY SECURED PARTY" involving Deerfield private funds. That is facially impossible for a patent that expired 1991-11-19 and is almost certainly a record-mapping artifact in the source data. Do not treat Alphatec as the current owner and do not rely on the ODP assignee field for chain of title. The owner of record per the patent front page is Lever Brothers Company (now part of Unilever), inventor Vincent Lamberti.

Recommended next steps

1. If you received a demand letter citing US 3,849,341 — stop negotiating claim scope and calendar the response around expiration. The patent's term ended 1991-11-19 ("Anticipated expiration," US3849341A event log: Google Patents). Post-1991 activity cannot infringe an expired patent under 35 U.S.C. § 271, and any pre-1991 damages claim is barred by the § 286 six-year limitation by a margin of decades. There is no FWD to link to because none exists — the strongest citation here is the expiration event, not a Board decision.
2. If opposing counsel or a broker hands you a "PTAB decision on the '341 patent," verify the patent's issue date before reading further. As documented above, the Lynk Labs PGR (a 2021-02-23 patent) and the VideoShare and Agazzi "341" patents are unrelated. Confirm the seven-digit number and the grant date and the assignee.
3. If you need chain of title for some reason (e.g., a license or a portfolio purchase), pull the assignment history directly from USPTO Patent Assignment Search rather than the ODP field, given the Alphatec anomaly. Expect the Lever Brothers → Unilever chain, and expect no recorded activity after the early 1990s.
4. No trial-stage milestones to track. There is no pending proceeding, so no institution-decision deadline, no oral hearing, and no statutory one-year FWD date. Confirm the null result yourself against PTAB E2E / PTAB Center if you want a fresh-of-record check — AIA trial dockets are public and searchable by patent number.
5. Bottom line for a defendant: the absence of PTAB activity here is not the usual "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs" signal, because this patent was never in the AIA-trial era to begin with. Do not budget for an IPR. Budget for a short letter explaining expiration and, if the assertion persists, consider whether it is a fraudulent demand-letter scheme — assertions of patents expired in the 1990s are a recurring pattern in mass demand-letter campaigns.

I'll research this patent's assignment record before writing anything. Let me pull the primary sources.

Let me dig into the anomalous 2016 event and any litigation or later ownership records.

Let me check the USPTO assignment databases and investigate that anomalous 2016 Alphatec event.

I was unable to complete a direct query of the Assignment Center (my access to assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov returned no record payload for this patent number), so the findings below rest on the patent's own front matter, the Google Patents legal-events feed, and the structural limits of the USPTO assignment database. I have flagged every point where I am inferring rather than reading a record, and I have not invented reel/frame numbers.

Inventors

Vincent Lamberti — sole named inventor. Address of record at filing: Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Employer of record at the time of filing: Lever Brothers Company, New York, N.Y. (the US operating subsidiary of Unilever). The face of the patent reads "Vincent Lamberti, Upper Saddle River, N.J., assignor to Lever Brothers Company, New York, N.Y.," i.e., the inventor assigned to his employer by a pre-filing assignment (executed on or before the 1972-02-01 filing date).

Provenance of the application:

• Continuation-in-part of Ser. No. 77,052, filed 1970-09-30, now abandoned (this is the priority date carried into the whole international family).
• Filed 1972-02-01 as Ser. No. 222,659.
• Directly related sibling filings in the same Lever Brothers program: Ser. No. 222,648 (issued as US 3,756,966) and Ser. No. 387,835 (issued as US 3,910,880, "Sulfosuccinate derivatives of carbohydrates").

Unusual-pattern check — negative. There is no inventor-departure signal. Lamberti is a repeat Lever Brothers inventor across the non-phosphate builder program (e.g., US 3,922,230; US 3,935,206; US 3,936,448; US 4,132,735, several co-invented with Chester R. Willis), all assigned to Lever Brothers. He appears to have stayed with the assignee through the program rather than exiting within 12 months of filing. The "all inventors depart before a fire-sale" pattern is not present.

Original assignee

Lever Brothers Company, New York, N.Y. — at issue, the US soap-and-detergent operating subsidiary of Unilever.

• Line of business: consumer packaged goods; soaps, synthetic detergents, and household cleaning products. This patent sat in Lever's phosphate-replacement research program of the late 1960s–70s, driven explicitly by the eutrophication debate described in the specification.
• Product embodying the claims: I found no evidence of a commercial detergent sold with a starch maleate/succinate/phthalate builder as claimed in claims 1–19. The specification is directed to a research portfolio of non-phosphate builders rather than to a specific marketed formulation (the Tables I–VIII are Terg-O-Tometer bench comparisons against sodium tripolyphosphate, not product data). Treat "no commercial embodiment" as an absence of evidence rather than proof of non-use.
• Current status: reporting entity is effectively operating — Unilever remains an active global company, and the US Lever Brothers legal entity is widely reported to have been renamed Conopco, Inc. (a Unilever company). Caveat: I could not verify the Conopco name change from a primary corporate filing in this session; the patent itself gives no post-issue assignee change.
• Asset status: the patent is expired. Google Patents records "Anticipated expiration" on 1991-11-19, i.e., the full pre-URAA 17-year term measured from the 1974-11-19 grant. That is term expiry, not a lapse for non-payment of maintenance fees. The subject matter has been in the public domain for roughly 35 years.

Assignment timeline

Important structural finding before the list: the USPTO's searchable assignment record (Assignments on the Web / Assignment Center, legacy EPAS data) only covers records from August 1980 forward — a well-documented limitation of the system. US 3,849,341 issued in 1974 and expired in 1991. Therefore:

1. The inventor → Lever Brothers pre-filing assignment (recorded during 1971–72 prosecution) is outside the searchable window and will not appear in an Assignment Center patent-number query. I therefore have no reel/frame for it and will not fabricate one.
2. There is no post-1980 assignment chain to reconstruct, because the patent had already expired by 1991.

What is on the record:

• On or before 1972-02-01 (executed, exact date not on the face of the patent) / recording date not retrievable — Reel/Frame not retrievable; pre-August 1980

  • Conveyance: Assignment of inventors' interest (inventor → employer), reflected on the printed patent as "assignor to Lever Brothers Company"
  • Assignor: Vincent Lamberti
  • Assignee: Lever Brothers Company, New York, N.Y.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — no reel/frame available, so the recording correspondent cannot be read. (For context only, and not an assignment correspondent: the attorney of record printed on sibling US 3,910,880 is Kenneth F. Dusyn, Lever Brothers' recurring prosecution counsel on this builder program. I am not treating that as an assignment record.)
  • Context: initial employer assignment at filing — not a sale, not a reorg.

• 1974-11-19 — Reel/Frame not applicable

  • Event: Application granted / publication of US 3,849,341A. No conveyance. Assignee of record remains Lever Brothers Company.

• 1991-11-19 — Reel/Frame not applicable

  • Event: Anticipated expiration (end of 17-year term). No conveyance.

• 2016-09-08 — Reel/Frame not retrievable; I could not verify a reel/frame for this entry — ⚠️ flagged as a probable data artifact, not an ownership record

  • Conveyance (as indexed by Google Patents legal events): "RELEASE BY SECURED PARTY (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)" — a lien release, not an assignment of title
  • Assignors as indexed: Deerfield Private Design Fund II, L.P.; Deerfield Private Design International II, L.P.; Deerfield Special Situations Fund, L.P.; Deerfield Special Situations International Master Fund, L.P. (secured lenders)
  • Indexed "assignee": Alphatec Spine, Inc.; Alphatec Holdings, Inc.; Alphatec International LLC; Alphatec Pacific, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: not a transfer to this patent's chain. Alphatec Spine is a spinal-implant company; the Deerfield funds are its secured lenders. A 2016 secured-party lien release covering Alphatec collateral has no commercial or legal relationship to a 1974 Unilever detergent-builder patent that had been expired for ~25 years. The most likely explanations are (a) a mis-scheduled property number in the recorded document, or (b) a patent-number join error in the Google Patents legal-events feed. I am not treating this as an NPE signal, and I recommend it be verified against the reel/frame before being cited anywhere. Legal events source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3849341A/en#legalEvents (Google also records an odd "reassignment" block naming Alphatec; that block's own text says the conveyance is a release by secured party).

Net: there is effectively only the original assignment on this patent. No post-issuance, post-1980 chain exists.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 3849341
    1970 : Lamberti files parent app 77052
    1972 : CIP filed as Ser No 222659
         : Assigned to Lever Brothers Company
    1974 : Patent granted to Lever Brothers
    1991 : Patent term expires
    2016 : Deerfield lien release indexed here

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No licensing-only LLC ever appears as assignee of record. The only assignee on the chain is the operating company Lever Brothers Company. The 2016 Alphatec/Deerfield entry is a secured-party release, not a transfer to a holding entity, and is unverifiable as a reel/frame record. No "IP / Holdings / Ventures" entity is in this chain.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. Neither Lever Brothers/Unilever nor any Acacia, Marathon, IV, Wi-LAN/Conversant, Mosaid, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, or Spangenberg-linked entity appears anywhere in the record. Nothing in this chain surfaced on the RPX or Unified Patents asserter directories in my searches.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present / not assessable. With no reel/frame for the original 1972 assignment (pre-August 1980 database cutoff), there is no correspondent-of-record string to harvest for the chain. I cannot identify a recording attorney, so no recurrence can be shown. I decline to substitute the prosecution attorney printed on a sibling patent for an assignment correspondent — that would not be a finding.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. Zero consecutive assignments in any window, let alone a chain of LLCs inside 24 months. The single transfer is inventor → employer, executed once around filing.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. I found no infringement litigation naming US 3,849,341 in my searches (flagged: I did not complete an exhaustive PACER / Docket Navigator sweep). There is accordingly no assertion date to measure a 6-month window against, and no transfer within such a window in any event.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. No Chapter 7/11 sale, no assignment out of a bankruptcy estate, no sale order, no debtors-in-possession conveyance appears. Unilever is solvent and operating.

7. Privateering — not present. No operating company → NPE transfer exists in this record; the patent never left the original corporate family.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present (inverse signal not triggered). The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. I checked the cited-by and family-citing sets (e.g., Akzo Nobel, Ecolab polysaccharide-graft art) — those are citing documents, not assignments in this chain, and must not be mistaken for ownership transfers.

The 2016-09-08 Deerfield/Alphatec entry: classified unclear as evidence, and not an NPE signal. It is labeled "release by secured party," which extinguishes a lien rather than conveying title; the counterparties are a spinal-device company and its lenders; and the patent had already been expired for ~25 years. It reads as an indexing artifact, not a chain link.

Verdict

Insufficient data — meaning: no post-1980 recorded assignment chain and, in substance, only the original assignment.

Justification: US 3,849,341 was assigned by its sole inventor, Vincent Lamberti, to his employer Lever Brothers Company at filing (executed on or before 1972-02-01), and no subsequent conveyance is on the record — the sole later entry, dated 2016-09-08, is a Deerfield release by secured party indexed against the patent, not an assignment of title, and is most credibly a data artifact involving Alphatec Spine. The asset expired at end of term on 1991-11-19 (Google Patents "Anticipated expiration"), so for ~35 years there has been nothing left to transfer, and no NPE, asserter, cascading-LLC, fire-sale, privateering, or defensive-aggregator evidence exists anywhere in the chain. Any future diligence should first pull the pre-1980 assignment record from the USPTO Assignment Recordation Branch directly, since the online database's August 1980 cutoff is the reason the original reel/frame is missing here.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (patent-number search: 3849341; note the pre-August 1980 coverage gap) and cross-check legal events at https://patents.google.com/patent/US3849341A/en#legalEvents.

I'll verify the patent record and each cited reference against live sources before assessing anticipation.

Let me verify each cited reference individually.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 3,849,341

Status of record retrieval. I retrieved the grant record for 3849341 specifically (not a similar number). Google Patents mirrors the USPTO grant full text (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US3849341](/patent/US3849341)/en), and the bibliographic face was independently confirmed at https://uspto.report/patent/grant/3849341, which lists Issue Date 1974-11-19 and current classes 510/471, 252/180, 536/2, 536/3, 536/48, 536/63, 536/109, 536/115, 536/119, 510/356, 510/357. No separate USPTO PatentCenter full-text page was reachable in this session, so I rely on the grant text as the authoritative source (consistent with the rule to prefer the supplied full text).

One correction/flag to the previously generated sections. The earlier summary listed the reference date for US 2,233,475 (Dreyfus) as a 1941 grant and grouped the "X" citations loosely. The face of this patent lists Dreyfus at "3/1941" — treat the month as listed on the face, not as a verified day. More importantly, I flag that my verification of the individual contents of most cited references is incomplete (search limits were reached), so the descriptions below are marked [VERIFIED] vs. [INFERRED — unverified].

1. Why the anticipation question is narrower than it looks

Claims 1 and 2 are composition claims requiring, in combination:

• (a) a surfactant from the anionic/nonionic/zwitterionic/ampholytic group;
• (b) a water-soluble salt of an ester-linked carboxyl derivative of a polysaccharide (claim 1) or oligosaccharide (claim 2), drawn from a closed list (starch maleate/succinate/phthalate/glutarate/citraconate/itaconate/diglycolate/dilactate; hydrolyzed-starch versions in claim 2);
• (c) D.S. ≈ 0.5–3 (claim 1) or ≈ 1–3 (claim 2);
• (d) builder = 20–60 wt% of the composition; and
• (e) builder:surfactant weight ratio ≈1:10 to ≈50:1.

A §102 anticipation therefore needs a single reference disclosing all of these. The word "ester-linked" in element (b) is the pivotal limitation: it excludes ether-linked carboxylates (e.g., carboxymethylated starch), which is where the bulk of the prior art sits. The cited references fall into two buckets, and neither bucket, on its face, supplies the full combination.

2. The cited references, one by one

Sources: the "References Cited" section printed on the face of US 3,849,341 (authoritative), plus live verification where noted.

(The patent's face also carries the "U.S. Cl." cross-reference note "252-89, 132, 135, 180, Digests 2, 11 & 15; 260-209.5, 209.6, 210 R, 224, 233.5, 234 R" — these are search-class notations, not additional references.)

3. Bottom-line anticipation assessment

No reference cited on the face of US 3,849,341 anticipates claim 1 or claim 2 under §102. My reasoning, stated with the appropriate confidence:

1. The 1930s–1950s references (items 1, 3–7, 11–19) are compound-chemistry art. They teach how to put carboxyl-bearing ester or ether groups onto cellulose, starch, and sugars — i.e., they support the premise that the esters themselves were old (the specification concedes this, citing Mullen & Pacsu, Ind. Eng. Chem. 35 381 (1943); ibid. 34 1209 (1942); Malm & Fordyce, ibid. 32 405 (1940)). But they are not detergent compositions, and they disclose none of the D.S., 20–60 wt%, or 1:10–50:1 ratio limitations. They cannot anticipate claims drawn to a built detergent composition.

2. Tucker US 2,311,008 is the nearest functional analogue and still fails §102. It is verified to disclose starch-derived, water-soluble polycarboxylate salts having builder-type function (water softening; lowering the soap requirement for suds; the same Na/K/ammonium/alkanolamine cations later claimed in the '341 dependent claims). But the record is explicit that Tucker's products are polyglycollic acid ethers — the acetic-acid residue is "joined through an ether linkage." Claims 1 and 2 of '341 require an ester-linked carboxyl derivative. That is a structural difference in the claimed element, so Tucker cannot anticipate; it is, however, strong §103 material — it supplies the motivation (starch polycarboxylate salt functioning as a soap/water-hardness builder).

3. The two "builder" references dated between the priority date and the filing date — Diehl US 3,723,322 (3/1973) and Eldib US 3,629,121 (12/1971) — cannot be assessed as §102 art without their application filing dates. Because '341 is a continuation-in-part of Ser. No. 77,052 filed 1970-09-30, the claims get the 1970-09-30 date only for subject matter supported in the parent. Under pre-AIA §102(e)/§102(b), a US patent that issued after the priority date is prior art only if its own application was filed before the applicant's invention/priority date. I could not verify the filing dates of Diehl '322 or Eldib '121 in this session — that is the single most important factual check to complete, and I will not assert an anticipation conclusion from them without it. If either was filed before 1970-09-30 and discloses an ester-linked carboxyl derivative of starch at the claimed D.S./levels, that would be the only realistic §102 challenge. On the record I have, neither is shown to do so.

4. Diehl US 3,308,067 (3/1967) is genuine pre-priority art but is a §103 reference. It corroborates "polycarboxylate builders in detergent compositions" as an established concept by 1967, yet it is not the closed Markush list of starch maleate/succinate/phthalate/etc. required by claim 1.

Most likely challenge, if one existed: a §103 combination of Tucker US 2,311,008 (starch polycarboxylate salt as a water-hardness/soap builder) + Diehl US 3,308,067 (polycarboxylate builders in detergents) + a starch-esterification reference such as Malm US 2,093,462 or Paschall US 2,891,947 — potentially with Diehl US 3,723,322 (carboxylated carbohydrates as builders) as the tip. The patent's own argument against that combination would be the ester-vs-ether linkage distinction and the asserted complete biodegradability plus the 74–100% detergency efficiencies in Tables I–VIII.

4. Confidence and open items

• High confidence: the list of 19 cited references and their printed dates/classes (taken verbatim from the grant face); the identity and content of Tucker US 2,311,008 and of Diehl US 3,308,067 / 3,723,322 as builder art (both corroborated against EP 0 550 606 B1 text); the conclusion that no cited reference is a clean §102 anticipation of claims 1 or 2.
• Moderate confidence: the subject-matter descriptions marked [INFERRED] for references 1, 3–7, 11–19 — these are inferred from the assigned USPTO classes and known assignee/inventor lineages, not from reading each document. They should be confirmed against the actual PDFs before being relied on in any filing.
• Explicit gaps I did not close: (i) the application filing dates of Diehl US 3,723,322 and Eldib US 3,629,121 (decisive for any §102(e) theory); (ii) the full text of McIntire US 2,505,561, Dreyfus US 2,233,475, Malm US 2,093,462, Paschall US 2,891,947, Caldwell US 2,613,206/2,661,349/2,825,727, Lolkema US 2,622,997/2,853,484, Minkema US 2,868,780, Touey US 2,759,787, Maxwell US 2,148,951, Stone US 2,108,455, Tucker US 2,264,103, and GB 699,530. I am not asserting content I did not verify.
• Not prior art here: the "Cited By" documents (e.g., US 3,919,107 Thompson/P&G; US 4,029,590 and US 3,941,771 Finley/FMC) post-date '341 and are follow-on art, not §102 references against it.

Recommended next step for a definitive answer: pull the front-page filing dates for US 3,723,322 and US 3,629,121 from USPTO PatentCenter, then read the claims of each against '341 claims 1 and 2 element-by-element. That single check determines whether any §102(e) exposure existed; everything else on the cited list is §103 material.

I'll ground the prior-art analysis by verifying what the key cited references actually disclose, since the patent's own "References Cited" list gives only numbers and class codes.

Key hits. Let me verify a few more of the cited references to characterize what each discloses.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent 3,849,341 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Note on dates and sourcing. The task header gives today's date as April 26, 2026; the environment date is 2026-09-30. This does not affect the analysis. The patent is long expired (anticipated expiration 1991-11-19 per the record in the previously generated sections), so any § 103 challenge would be historical/re-exam or litigation-reconstruction in nature rather than an active proceeding. All reference numbers are reproduced exactly as they appear on the face of the patent; I do not correct them.

Verification status. I verified the subject matter of the four most important cited references (US 3,308,067; US 3,629,121; US 3,723,322; US 2,093,462; plus US 2,613,206 and US 2,661,349) against live sources. For the remainder of the face-of-patent citations I rely on the patent's own listing, the assigned original U.S. classification codes, and titles where recoverable; those are flagged below as unverified specifics.

1. Legal framework applied

The '341 patent issued 1974-11-19 on a CIP of Ser. No. 77,052 filed 1970-09-30. Pre-AIA § 103 controls the retrospective analysis: whether "the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art." The Graham v. John Deere factors (scope and content of prior art; differences; level of ordinary skill; secondary considerations) govern, as substantially restated in KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007). The MPEP 2143 rationales most directly in play are:

• (A) combining prior-art elements according to known methods to yield predictable results;
• (B) simple substitution of one known element for another to obtain predictable results;
• (C) use of a known technique to improve similar devices in the same way;
• (D) applying a known technique to a known device ready for improvement; and
• (F) design incentives / market forces (here, the phosphate-substitution mandate).

Prior-art status/timing of the detergent references. Both Diehl US 3,723,322 (filed 1969-02-24) and Eldib US 3,629,121 (filed 1969-12-15) have effective filing dates before the applicant's 1970-09-30 priority date and therefore are available as prior art under pre-AIA § 102(e), even though neither issued until after that date (1973-03-26 and 1971-12-21 respectively). US 3,308,067 (issued 1967-03-07) is § 102(b)/(a) art. If any claim depends on new matter added only in the 1972-02-01 CIP (e.g., the Tabulated example data), the effective date is even later, which only strengthens prior-art status. These are the load-bearing references.

2. Scope and content of the prior art of record (grouped)

Group I — Carbohydrate + cyclic-anhydride ester chemistry (the "make-the-compound" art)

Critical admission. The '341 specification itself states the compounds "are for the most part known compounds and their method of preparation is described in the art," citing Mullen & Pacsu, Ind. Eng. Chem. 35, 381 (1943) and 34, 1209 (1942) and Malm & Fordyce, ibid. 32, 405 (1940). The claimed builder species (starch succinate, maleate, phthalate, etc.) and the claimed method (carbohydrate + cyclic anhydride in toluene or pyridine, then neutralization) are therefore admitted prior art under In re Fout / MPEP 2129. All that is arguably "new" is the use — a use already disclosed for carboxyl-bearing polysaccharides in detergents by Group II.

Group II — Carboxylated polysaccharides and polycarboxylates as detergent builders (the "use-it-in-a-detergent" art)

Group III — The problem statement (eutrophication)

Both Diehl references and the '341 specification independently recite the same motivation: phosphate builders are implicated in eutrophication (algal blooms), creating market/regulatory pressure to find biodegradable, non-phosphorus builders that match tripolyphosphate performance. Diehl US 3,723,322 describes the identical landscape: "It is theorized … that the presence of these polyphosphates tends to contribute to the growth of algae … sufficient to cause eutrophication," and "detergent manufacturers continue to search for effective, non-phosphate detergent builders."

3. Element-by-element comparison — claim 1 (the representative independent claim)

Claim 2 substitutes "oligosaccharide … hydrolyzed starch" species and a D.S. of about 1–3. Hydrolyzed (thin-boiling/dextrinized) starch is the standard, well-known low-viscosity form of the same polysaccharide; Diehl '322's carboxylated polysaccharide disclosure is expressly directed to water-soluble, low-molecular-weight (DP 20–30,000) derivatives, i.e., the same design space. Claims 3–19 add only conventional narrowing (surfactant class, starch botanical source, cation identity, and ratio/level windows), none of which introduces an unobvious structural or functional difference.

4. Motivation to combine — the rationales a challenger would advance

A § 103 challenge would proceed on the two-reference combination {Group I carbohydrate-ester chemistry} + {Group II carboxylated-polysaccharide or polycarboxylate builder}, and the record supplies each KSR/MPEP rationale directly:

1. Same field of endeavor / analogous art (MPEP 2141.01(a)). All references are drawn from (i) carbohydrate ester chemistry and (ii) detergent builders. They are not only the same field; they were cited against one another on the face of the '341 patent and appear in the same classification schedules (C11D 3/22, C08B 31/**). There is no field-of-invention impediment to combining.

2. Common, expressly recognized problem (Rationale F — market/regulatory force). The phosphate/eutrophication problem is recited in Diehl '067, Diehl '322, and the '341 specification in identical terms. Where the problem is known and the broad solution (carboxylate salt builders) is known, applying that known solution to a known carboxylate-functionalized polysaccharide is obvious.

3. Simple, predictable substitution of one known element for another (Rationale B). The prior-art carboxylated polysaccharides of Diehl '322 and Eldib '121 are ether-linked (carboxymethyl). The '341 builders are ester-linked (succinate, maleate, etc.). The moiety that does the builder work — the carboxylate anion (--COO⁻) that sequesters Ca²⁺/Mg²⁺ — is identical. The linking group (carboxymethyl ether vs. succinate/maleate half-ester) is a design choice among known, conventional carbohydrate derivatization chemistries that Group I supplies in detail. Nothing in the references suggests the builder function depends on the linkage type.

4. Known technique to improve a known product, with predictable results (Rationales A/C). Group I teaches that starch and cellulose react readily with cyclic anhydrides to give water-soluble carboxyl-substituted half-esters. Substituting a starch succinate/maleate half-ester for the known carboxymethyl starch as the builder in a detergent is combining known elements by known methods to achieve the known result of detergency/sequestration.

5. Reasonable expectation of success. Both Diehl '067 and Diehl '322 report measured detergency/whiteness results approaching or matching STP. A person of ordinary skill would expect a polysaccharide carrying the same carboxylate functional groups at comparable D.S. to behave comparably. Indeed, the '341 patent's own Tables I–VIII report performance of only ~74–100% relative to phosphate controls — i.e., parity, not a surprising improvement (see § 6).

6. "Obvious to try" within a narrow, identified set (KSR). The anhydrides enumerated in claim 1 (succinic, glutaric, maleic, phthalic, citraconic, itaconic, diglycolic, dilactic) are the standard, commercially available cyclic anhydrides; and Diehl '067 independently names the acid counterparts (maleic, itaconic, citraconic) as builder-forming carboxylates. Selecting among a small, identified set of known anhydrides with predictable properties meets the "obvious to try" standard.

7. Optimization of a result-effective variable (MPEP 2144.05). D.S. (0.5–3), builder level (20–60%), and builder:surfactant ratio (1:10–50:1) are classic result-effective variables for balancing water solubility, chelation capacity, and formulation performance. Broadened ranges that encompass the prior-art values (Diehl '322: D.S. 1.3–2.0; ratio 10:1–1:20) are prima facie obvious absent a showing of criticality — and the '341 ranges are broad, not narrow-critical.

Best single-reference-plus-secondary combination for a challenge:

• Primary: US 3,629,121 (Eldib) or US 3,723,322 (Diehl) — teaches carboxylated polysaccharides as detergent builders with ratios/D.S. values overlapping the claims.
• Secondary: US 2,093,462 (Malm) and/or US 2,661,349 / US 2,613,206 (Caldwell) — teaches making ester-linked carboxyl derivatives of polysaccharides with cyclic anhydrides (same solvent chemistry as the spec).
• Optional tertiary: US 3,308,067 (Diehl) for the express disclosure that polycarboxylate salts replace phosphate builders, and US 2,311,008 / US 2,264,103 (Tucker) for hardness-sequestration use of carbohydrate carboxylates.

5. Where obviousness is hardest to establish (the strongest counterarguments)

An honest analysis must flag the seams:

1. No single reference teaches an ester-linked polysaccharide carboxylate as a detergent builder. Eldib '121 and Diehl '322 use ether-linked (carboxymethyl) polysaccharides. The patent could argue this is a different compound class and that the references give no hint to ester linkages specifically. The counter is that the references are combined, not applied singly, and that no reference teaches away from esters.

2. A credible teaching-away theory: alkali-lability of esters. The claims recite wash conditions at pH ~7–11 (spec: "pH range of from about 7-11 … more preferably 8-10"). Esters are hydrolytically labile in hot alkaline solution. A person of skill could argue the prior art taught to avoid ester linkages in alkaline detergent media and to prefer the more hydrolytically robust ether-linked (carboxymethyl) polysaccharides of Diehl '322/Eldib '121 — a classic "teaching away." Rebuttal: the '341 specification shows the ester builders functioning at pH 8–10 with 74–100% of STP performance, so any "instability" is not disabling; and Caldwell '349-type starch esters were known to survive practical use. The teaching-away argument is therefore weak but not frivolous.

3. Objective indicia (secondary considerations). The patent's own data cut against it: Tables I–VIII show parity, not superiority, versus tripolyphosphate (and in Table VIII sucrose succinates are markedly worse — efficiencies as low as 40–46%). There is no evidence in the record of unexpected results, long-felt unmet need satisfied in a surprising way, or industry praise. Biodegradability is an inherent property of a carbohydrate backbone and would be expected, not surprising. Any patentability argument resting on "the compounds are new" is undercut by the specification's admission that the compounds and their preparative methods are "for the most part known."

4. Grammar/dependent-claim defects. Several claim limitations are garbled in the OCR text of record (e.g., claim 15 "from about 1:10 to about :1"; claim 17 "…to about 18"; the Formula I definition of R/X/R″ is partially corrupted). This does not change the § 103 analysis but would complicate any construction and indicates the claims add little substantive scope beyond the two independents.

6. Bottom line

On the record of art cited on the face of U.S. Patent 3,849,341, the composition claims would very likely have been held obvious under pre-AIA § 103:

• Claims 1–2 are obvious over US 3,629,121 (Eldib) or US 3,723,322 (Diehl) in view of US 2,093,462 (Malm) and/or US 2,613,206 / US 2,661,349 (Caldwell) — i.e., "use a known ester-linked carboxylate polysaccharide (known compound class, known preparation) as the builder in a detergent, in place of the known ether-linked carboxylate polysaccharide builder." With US 3,308,067 (Diehl) supplying the express phosphate-replacement rationale.
• Claims 3–19 are obvious as further obvious narrowings (surfactant type, starch source, cation) or as range optimizations of result-effective variables (D.S., builder wt%, builder:surfactant ratio) that overlap the prior-art ranges disclosed in Diehl '322 (D.S. 1.3–2.0; ratio 10:1–1:20) without any demonstrated criticality.
• The only meaningful non-obviousness lever is the teaching-away/alkali-instability argument against ester linkages, and the patentee's own working examples (functioning at pH 8–10 with STP-comparable performance and no unexpected superiority) substantially neutralize it.

Confidence: High on the legal framework, on the identity and subject matter of the four principal detergent/carbohydrate references (all verified live), and on the motivation-to-combine rationales, which flow from the references' own recitations of the eutrophication problem. Moderate on the unverified 1930s–1950s references (Malm excepted) and on the precise claim-by-claim outcome, which would depend on claim construction of the OCR-degraded limitations and on whether a patentee could marshal objective evidence that is not present in the patent as issued. I found no litigation or re-exam record in which these obviousness positions were actually adjudicated, so the above is a reconstructed prima facie case, not a holding.