US 4833308

I'll search for this specific patent number across USPTO and court resources.

Now let me check for any court dockets (CAFC or district court) referencing this patent.

Certification / grounding note

All identifiers below are read literally. I found no evidence of any CAFC case — 2026 or otherwise — naming U.S. Patent No. 4,833,308, and no federal district‑court docket for it. I also could not re‑verify via a live USPTO PatentCenter/assignment query with the tools available, so the ownership chain below rests on the Google Patents bibliographic record for US4833308A, which the user message designates as authoritative.

1. Bibliographic summary — US 4,833,308

Assignment / security-interest chain (per the Google Patents reassignment list):

1. 1987‑07‑02 — assigned to CheckRobot Inc. (Deerfield Beach, FL), assignor Humble.
2. 1988‑06‑20 — assigned from CheckRobot, Inc. to Advance Promotion Technologies, Inc.
3. 1991‑04‑09 — GTE Interactive Services Incorporated recorded a security interest (assignor: Advanced Promotion Technologies, Inc.).
4. 2001‑02‑28 — State Street Bank and Trust Company security agreement; assignor listed as Xinetix, Inc. (a different entity from the '308 owner — worth flagging as a literal-recording oddity).
5. 2006‑12‑07 — Sperry and Hutchinson Company, Inc., release by secured party (assignor: U.S. Bank National Association).

Term note: As a pre‑URAA patent issued May 23, 1989, the enforceable term was the longer of 17 years from issue (2006‑05‑23) or 20 years from filing (2006‑07‑24). The record's listed 2006‑07‑24 expiration is consistent with the 20‑year measure prevailing.

2. Abstract (verbatim, as published)

"An expanded display unit for communication with a customer in a supermarket checkout facility is furnished with information from a system responsive to UPC signals provided by a scanner. Such system discerns selected characteristics of the customer, particularly deducing from products selected for purchase, other products which may be of interest to the customer. The system then provides information respecting the other products to the display unit, which may be customer-interactive for the dispensing of coupons or the like."

3. Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 — System (the "targeted checkout display" claim)

A checkout system with four cooperating elements:

• (a) Sensing means — the scanner, producing output signals representing the product codes (UPCs).
• (b) First circuit means — receives the scanner signals and emits an output signal only when a scanned code matches the code of a preselected product (i.e., the store's "trigger" UPCs). Preferred structure per the spec: one buffer per trigger UPC feeding its own comparator, with the scanner output fed to all comparators in common.
• (c) Second circuit means — stores promotional messages and outputs one selectively in response to the match signal. Critically, each stored message concerns a predetermined product different from the trigger product, but in the same category ("each such predetermined product having common category with a respective such preselected product"). The spec's example: dog food → flea-collar offer; yogurt → vitamins; diet soda → low-calorie snacks; store as video-disk memory.
• (d) Display means — presents the message to the customer and is "adaptive to customer input," i.e., the system can receive a customer response to the displayed offer (touch-interactive screen / coupon dispensing per the spec).

So the core of claim 1 = scan a trigger UPC → look up a category-related cross-sell message → display it → accept the shopper's response.

Claim 6 — Method (the corresponding process claim)

Steps (a)–(f):

1. (a) store codes of the preselected (trigger) products;
2. (b) store promotional messages about other products, each in a common category with a respective preselected product;
3. (c) detect the sensible codes of purchased products;
4. (d) compare detected codes with the stored codes;
5. (e) display the stored messages selectively according to the comparison result;
6. (f) selectively effect the promotion (e.g., honor/dispense the offer) responsively to a customer decision made after the message is displayed — i.e., the customer-action step closes the loop, rather than display alone.

Dependent claims 2–5 (structure only)

• 2: the first circuit means comprises multiple buffers, each holding the code of a distinct preselected product.
• 3: adds multiple comparators, each receiving the scanner output and individually connected to one buffer.
• 4: the second circuit means comprises multiple storage units, each holding a message for a distinct predetermined product.
• 5: each such storage unit is wired to a distinct comparator and also to the display means, so a match routes the corresponding message to the display.

4. Court / docket search results

• CAFC 2026 dockets: Searches for "4833308"/"4,833,308" combined with Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, 2026 dockets, and the assignee/inventor names returned no case involving this patent. I cannot certify the absence of such a case from the general web sources available; I simply found none.
• Why a 2026 assertion is implausible as a matter of law: the patent's term ended in 2006 (record status: "Expired – Lifetime"), so it could not underpin a newly filed 2026 infringement suit, and an expired patent is also no longer eligible for AIA IPR. Any live dispute could only be residual (e.g., enforcement of an earlier judgment, a license/royalty accounting, or a pre‑expiration damages window).
• PTAB footnote: a search hit (Docket Alarm, IPR2013‑00171, Exhibit 2028) reproduces Humble-family specification text with "promotional plan" wording and a "UPC purchase/promotional plan monitor 32" — different wording from the '308's "promotional scheme" and "UPC purchase categorizer 32." That exhibit appears to quote a different but related Humble patent, not the '308 verbatim. Treat any claim that "the '308 was an IPR exhibit" as unverified.

5. Uncertainty and identifier-collision warnings (read literally)

• "4833308" appears in many unrelated records. The same digit string surfaces as (i) a Brazilian commercial-registry entry (COMERCIO DE APARELHOS MUSICAIS MIL SONS LTDA), (ii) a Florida FEI/EIN number (87‑4833308, KUORICHE GROUP LLC), and (iii) UK Companies House liquidation references. None of these relate to the patent — they are coincidental numeric matches, not auto-corrections.
• "'308 patent" is ambiguous in court documents. Several opinions cited in my searches use "'308" for entirely different patents (e.g., a CAR‑T immunotherapy '308 and the Grecia content‑access '308). Those are not US 4,833,308.
• Assignee field caution: the Google Patents page both lists "Current Assignee … Advance Promotion Technologies Inc" and shows a 2001 security agreement whose assignor is "Xinetix, Inc., a corporation of Delaware." I have not independently reconciled that; the effective owner as of expiration should be verified against USPTO Assignment records if this matters.
• Legal-status disclaimer: search results themselves state the status is an assumption, not a legal conclusion. I have reported it as found.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 4833308. Let me search multiple sources.

Let me search more targeted sources, including Unified Patents and specific case databases.

Litigation Search — U.S. Patent No. 4,833,308

Bottom line: I found no evidence of any litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 4,833,308 (US4833308A). Based on the searches I was able to run, I cannot identify any plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome for this patent. I am not able to state affirmatively that no suit was ever filed — only that no such record surfaced.

The patent at issue

From the authoritative full text supplied (Google Patents, US4833308A):

• Patent No.: US 4,833,308 (US4833308A)
• Title: "Checkout counter product promotion system and method"
• Inventor: David R. Humble
• Application: US 06/889,351
• Filed: 1986-07-24
• Granted: 1989-05-23
• Assignee chain: Advance Promotion Technologies, Inc. (original) → assigned to Checkrobot Inc. (1987-07-02) → reassigned back to Advance Promotion Technologies, Inc. (1988-06-20); later security interests recorded to GTE Interactive Services (1991) and others.
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration 2006-07-24.

This is directly relevant to your question: the patent's entire enforceable term ended in July 2006, and its commercially active enforcement window would have been roughly 1989–2000 — largely before electronic PACER dockets and modern patent-litigation databases were comprehensive.

What my searches did and did not return

I searched for the literal identifiers "4833308," "4,833,308," and combinations with litigation-oriented terms (Unified Patents caselist, district court, lawsuit, CAFC, Docket Navigator, CourtListener). Results fell into these categories — none of which is a litigation record for this patent:

1. The patent used as prior art / cited-by references. Justia and Google Patents show US 4,833,308 (Humble, May 23, 1989) cited in the "References Cited" / prior-art tables of numerous later patents (e.g., later couponing and offer-targeting patents). Being cited by another patent is not litigation.
2. Unrelated "308-suffixed" patents and cases. Search results surfaced unrelated patents such as U.S. 8,639,308 (Beijing Choice / Contec fingertip oximeter litigation), U.S. 8,307,286, the "‘308 Patent" asserted in Precision Medical v. Tenacore/Genstar, and AB v. MED-EL (the "‘308 patent" there), plus unrelated "308" patents in China. Per your strict rule, I am treating these as distinct identifiers and NOT attributing them to US 4,833,308.
3. A coincidental numeric match. A Florida LLC annual report bearing FEI Number 87‑4833308 — an unrelated corporate tax ID, not the patent.

I did not obtain a direct, verifiable hit from the Unified Patents litigation caselist, PACER, CourtListener, or the Federal Circuit for this specific patent number.

Why an absence of results is not proof of absence

Please treat this as a gap, not a negative finding, for these reasons:

• Era problem. Any enforcement of this patent would most likely have occurred in 1989–1999. Pre-2000 district court dockets, many of which are not fully text-searchable and are not indexed by modern free patent-litigation tools, would not appear in web search results.
• Expired status. The patent expired in 2006. Unified Patents' litigation caselist and similar tools are weighted toward active/practicing-entity campaigns of the last ~15 years; an expired 1980s patent asserted decades ago may simply not be in those datasets.
• Assignee history is suggestive but not probative. The reassignment chain (Checkrobot → Advance Promotion Technologies, plus a GTE Interactive Services security interest and later lenders) indicates the patent was commercially* important** to these entities, which is consistent with possible enforcement activity — but I found no filing to confirm that.

Recommended next steps to close the gap

To answer this definitively, the following would need to be checked directly rather than via general web search (I was unable to retrieve authoritative hits from them within this session):

• Unified Patents litigation portal — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist (search the exact number 4833308).
• PACER / CourtListener RECAP — docket-text search for "4,833,308" and "4,833,308" within complaint documents (complaints recite patent numbers verbatim).
• Docket Navigator (subscription) and Lex Machina (subscription) — historical patent-case search.
• The patent's litigation/assignment history on the USPTO Patent Center and the USPTO Assignment database (for any recorded licenses or judgments, which sometimes correlate with suits).
• Trade press of the period (e.g., Supermarket News, Chain Store Age, The Recorder) for 1989–1999 coverage of Advance Promotion Technologies / Checkrobot enforcement.

Bottom line

For US Patent No. 4,833,308 specifically, I found no known litigation to report — no case caption, court, case number, filing date, or disposition. I am explicitly flagging this as an absence of found records rather than a verified conclusion that the patent was never litigated, and I have deliberately avoided attributing any of the unrelated "‘308" cases or numeric look-alikes to this patent.

I'll verify the ODP result against public sources before writing anything up.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 4,833,308: zero. Breakdown: 0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials.

The canonical ODP block in this prompt states the API returns no AIA trial proceedings, and independent checking is consistent with that: targeted searches of PTAB E2E / PTAB Decisions, the USPTO PTACTS petition archive, CourtListener, and the Unified Patents portal surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming US 4,833,308 as the challenged patent. The bottom line for a defendant is not "the patent is hardened by PTAB wins" — it is "the patent was never challenged at the PTAB because it expired on 2006-07-24, long before the AIA trial regime mattered." There is no PTAB precedent, no estoppel, and no claim-level adjudication to lean on; the defense rests on the expiration date and the § 286 damages bar, not on a Final Written Decision.

Near-miss to avoid confusing: a public petition document (Apple, referencing IPR2023-00993 / IPR2024-00570 against Samsung/Sony) discusses an "'830 patent" with Amaya on its face — that is a different, modern patent whose number merely ends in "830." It is not US 4,833,308. Do not cite those proceedings against this patent.

No proceedings to report

Because the count is zero, the per-proceeding template cannot be populated without fabricating numbers, which I will not do. For completeness, here is what I did verify and what I could not:

• Searched and found nothing: PTAB E2E patent-number lookup, PTAB petition documents on ptacts.uspto.gov, CourtListener docket text, Google Patents' litigation/PTAB panels for US4833308A, and Unified Patents' patent portal.
• Not verifiable from the sources I have: whether any pre-AIA proceeding exists (interference, or an ex parte reexamination). AIA trial data does not capture those, and my searches surfaced none — but I cannot affirmatively rule out an old ex parte reexam from the record available here. Treat that as an open item, not a confirmed "none."
• Why the absence is expected: Google Patents records the legal status as "Expired - Lifetime" with "Anticipated expiration 2006-07-24" and a 2006-07-24 "Anticipated expiration" event. A CBM review was never available in practice after that date, and an IPR on a patent that expired in 2006 has no prospective injunctive or damages value to justify the filing fee.

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is UNTESTED. US 4,833,308 issued 1989-05-23 with six claims — independent claim 1 (system) and independent claim 6 (method), plus dependent claims 2, 3, 4, and 5 (which depend, in a chain, on claim 1 via claims 2 and 3). No PTAB panel has ever construed a term, found a claim unpatentable, or upheld one. There is no cancelled claim to point to and no surviving-claim list to build around, because nothing was adjudicated. The only narrowing of record is prosecution-side: the claims were allowed over the five references on the examiner's list (US3959624, US4419573, US4554446, US4658125, US4674041), and the EPO later treated US 4,833,308 as a novelty-destroying "X" reference against claim 1 of WO 02/11092 — a signal that the claims are narrow, not that they are strong.

Estoppel landscape: empty on both sides. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel is triggered by a petitioner in an instituted IPR/PGR. With no instituted trial, no petitioner or privy is estopped from anything, and equally no prior art is off the table for you — you are free to run § 102/§ 103 on the full universe of art, including art that a hypothetical earlier petitioner "reasonably could have raised." Practically, though, art-based invalidity is a secondary defense here: for any accused conduct after 2006-07-24, the primary defense is that the patent term ended, and under 35 U.S.C. § 271 infringement requires activity "during the term of the patent." For pre-expiration conduct, § 286 caps recovery at six years before the complaint — i.e., from 2020-10-01 forward, which is entirely after expiration.

Pattern signals: none of the usual ones. No serial petitioner, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents or RPX filing on this number), no PTAB appeals, and no Federal Circuit docket tied to the patent. The relevant ownership trail is old and corporate: filed 1986-07-24 by David R. Humble; assigned to CheckRobot Inc. (1987-07-02); assigned to Advance Promotion Technologies, Inc. (1988-06-20 — still the listed current assignee); security interests recorded to GTE Interactive Services (1991-04-09) and State Street Bank (2001-02-28, against Xinetix, Inc.), and a party release to Sperry and Hutchinson (2006-12-07). What US 4,833,308 actually is, in the modern record, is prior art: the Google Patents "Cited By" list runs to hundreds of later documents (Catalina Marketing, Symbol Technologies, L.V. Partners/RPX, Coinstar, American Express, and many more), and the INPADOC family report shows "NONE" for family members — a single, terminal US filing. That is the profile of a seminal 1986 disclosure that the industry built around, not a live assertion asset.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and a demand letter cites US 4,833,308:

1. Lead with expiration. The patent expired 2006-07-24 (see the Google Patents legal-status entry, "Anticipated expiration," 2006-07-24: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4833308/en). Any accused product that was not on sale or in use before that date cannot infringe, because § 271 reaches only conduct "during the term."
2. Then the damages bar. Recovery for pre-expiration conduct is limited by § 286 to acts within six years of the complaint — no earlier than 2020-10-01. There is no damages theory left for any product shipped in the last two decades.
3. Then the invalidity fallback. There is no IPR estoppel blocking you. Independent claim 1's "common category" limitation and the claim 6 step (f) "selectively effecting promotion … responsively to customer decision" are the likely narrow points; the EPO's treatment of the '308 as an X reference against claim 1 of WO 02/11092 shows how the claim reads on routine point-of-sale messaging. Note you cannot get claim-level cancellation via IPR at this point in any practical sense — the patent is already dead — so use this only as a merits rebuttal, not a PTAB strategy.
4. Do not represent that any claim has been canceled. Claims 1–6 are UNTESTED at the PTAB. If you tell a court or opposing counsel "claims 1–5 were invalidated," you will be corrected.

If a letter cites the patent as a blocking reference (e.g., in a later prosecution, or in a licensing stack purporting to cover retail loyalty messaging): the useful fact is the opposite one — US 4,833,308 is heavily cited by later patents as background art, so a licensor claiming it as a foundational, still-enforceable right is claiming a 1989 patent that expired in 2006.

Open verification items (say so, don't assume): (a) confirm the expiration date and any post-issuance disclaimer or ex parte reexamination through USPTO Patent Center, since the ODP structured block here covers AIA trials only and my searches surfaced no reexam; (b) if the counterparty asserts a family or continuation right, get the specific number — the family report shows no US family members, so any continuation theory should be tested immediately.

Plain statement of the threshold point: there is no PTAB activity on this patent. That absence is not a signal of strength — it is explained by the 2006-07-24 expiration. The absence of an IPR is the least interesting thing about US 4,833,308; the expiration date is the whole case.

Sources: Google Patents US4833308A (structured text supplied in prompt; legal-status and citation data: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4833308/en) · PTAB E2E / PTACTS (no proceedings located: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/) · PTAB Final Written Decisions database (no FWD located: https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/decisions) · CourtListener (no appeal located: https://www.courtlistener.com/) · EPO INPADOC family report and WO 02/11092 international search report (family "NONE"; '308 cited as X reference against claim 1).

I'll research the assignment record and related entities before writing up.

Now let me look for litigation history and the specific security-interest records.

Ownership & Assignment Reconstruction — US 4,833,308

Patent: US 4,833,308 A — "Checkout counter product promotion system and method"
App. No.: 06/889,351 · Filed: 1986-07-24 · Issued: 1989-05-23 · Expired (anticipated): 2006-07-24
Inventor of record: David R. Humble (sole) · Assignee of record on the face: Advance Promotion Technologies, Inc.

Record-quality caveat up front (please read before relying on anything below).
I could not open USPTO Assignment Center directly within this session's tool budget, and the Google Patents legal-events mirror for this patent — which is what the authoritative text supplied to me contains — exposes only the event date, conveyance type, assignor and assignee. It does not expose reel/frame or the correspondent of record. I have therefore not populated reel/frame numbers or attorney names anywhere below, because inventing them would be worse than leaving them blank. Every "Reel NNNNNN/NNNN" and "Correspondent" field is an open pull for a direct Assignment Center lookup (see verification link at the end). Everything else — event dates, conveyance types, party names, and the entity histories — is grounded in the supplied Google Patents record and the press/trade sources cited.

Inventors

Unusual patterns worth flagging:

• Inventor departure ~12 months post-filing, with the patent rights following him. The application was filed 1986-07-24; Humble left CheckRobot in 1987 to found Advanced Promotion Technologies, Inc. The rights assignment to CheckRobot is dated 1987-07-02 (≈11.5 months after filing), and CheckRobot then pushed the patent to the new venture on 1988-06-20. This is the "inventor exits, asset follows the inventor" shape — but here it terminates in a funded operating joint venture, not a fire-sale, which materially changes the read (see Verdict).
• Chronology inconsistency in the bibliographic record. Google Patents lists the 1986-07-24 filer as "Advance Promotion Technologies Inc," yet Humble's own bio materials date APT's founding to 1987, and the trade press describes APT as a CheckRobot / Procter & Gamble / Donnelley Marketing joint venture formed around 1988. The filing entity and the 1986 applicant of record are therefore probably not the same legal person as the 1987-established APT. Treat the "original assignee" label on the face of the patent as a post-hoc reflection of the 1988 assignment, not as proof APT existed at filing.
• Humble was a serial founder (Sensormatic → CheckRobot → APT → eDiets.com) and held ~17 US patents; he is also the named assignee on related case US 4,949,256 (filed 1988-05-06, issued 1990-08-14) — i.e., the APT-era family was partly held in his personal name. No recorded departure of other inventors is possible to assess, since Humble is the only inventor.

Original assignee

Advance Promotion Technologies, Inc. (APT) — Delaware corporation, Deerfield Beach / Fort Lauderdale, FL.

• Primary line of business: interactive, in-lane point-of-sale supermarket marketing — touch-screen customer displays at the checkout tied to UPC scanning, driving targeted promotions and coupon dispensing. The trade press of the period describes the APT system as a "touch-sensitive video screen and a processor" able to read "immediate and/or past purchases" before deciding what promotional offer to present, with Humble explicitly describing it as an AI/market-basket targeting play. This is the commercial embodiment of the claimed subject matter — the patent is not an abstract paper asset at origin.
• Corporate shape: a joint venture of CheckRobot, Inc., Procter & Gamble, and Donnelley Marketing (CheckRobot's 1988 disclosure of an 800k+ order for 70 in-lane promotion units explicitly names APT as the buyer and names all three JV parents). Humble was CEO and Chairman; the company completed an IPO and NASDAQ listing.
• Status today: no evidence of current operation; the entity should be treated as defunct or absorbed. Its asset lineage runs into the supermarket-loyalty business (Xinetix → Sperry & Hutchinson/S&H Solutions), described below. Google Patents still lists APT as "Current Assignee," which on this record looks like a stale inference drawn from the 1988 assignment rather than a live ownership fact.

Related history: CheckRobot (the first assignee, a public company at the time — Deerfield Beach, FL, self-checkout pioneer; "a European firm eventually bought his company" per later reporting) and Sperry & Hutchinson (the last named party, the 1896 S&H Green Stamps company) were both operating businesses, not IP-holding vehicles.

Assignment timeline

All five post-filing entries below are drawn from the Google Patents legal-events record for US 4,833,308. Event dates as recorded there. Reel/frame and correspondent are not present in the retrieved record and are shown as unavailable. Note also that the mirror gives a single date per event; where it is the recordation date versus the execution date cannot be resolved without the Assignment Center document, so I have not split the two.

1987-07-02 — Reel/Frame not available in retrieved sources; correspondent not available

• Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
• Assignor: HUMBLE, DAVID R. (individual inventor)
• Assignee: CHECKROBOT INC., 160 Southwest 12th Avenue, Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442, a corporation of Delaware
• Correspondent: not available — no recurrence evidence obtainable; flag as an open pull.
• Context: in-house clean-up of inventor-to-company title, executed roughly a year after filing, while Humble was still the CheckRobot founder/principal.

1988-06-20 — Reel/Frame not available; correspondent not available

• Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
• Assignor: CHECKROBOT, INC.
• Assignee: ADVANCE PROMOTION TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
• Correspondent: not available — no recurrence evidence obtainable.
• Context: internal reorg / JV contribution — CheckRobot moves the patent into the CheckRobot/P&G/Donnelley joint venture it had just capitalized, matching CheckRobot's contemporaneous disclosure that APT was buying 70 in-lane promotion units from it.

1991-04-09 — Reel/Frame not available; correspondent not available

• Conveyance: Security Interest (record states "see document for details")
• Assignor: ADVANCED PROMOTION TECHNOLOGIES, INC., a corporation of Delaware
• Assignee: GTE INTERACTIVE SERVICES INCORPORATED
• Correspondent: not available — no recurrence evidence obtainable.
• Context: securitization / secured financing — GTE Interactive Services takes a lien over the APT portfolio (consistent with a vendor/investor financing relationship around APT's satellite-linked store network, not a title transfer).

2001-02-28 — Reel/Frame not available; correspondent not available

• Conveyance: Security Agreement
• Assignor: XINETIX, INC., a corporation of Delaware
• Assignee: STATE STREET BANK AND TRUST COMPANY, a corporation of Massachusetts
• Correspondent: not available — no recurrence evidence obtainable.
• Context: securitization — a second lien layer, this time granted by Xinetix (Fort Lauderdale supermarket-loyalty marketer, merged into Sperry & Hutchinson in 2000 and thereafter an S&H subsidiary) to an institutional lender.

2006-07-24 — not an assignment; anticipated expiration of the patent.

2006-12-07 — Reel/Frame not available; correspondent not available

• Conveyance: Release by Secured Party
• Assignor: U.S. BANK NATIONAL ASSOCIATION (secured party)
• Assignee: SPERRY AND HUTCHINSON COMPANY, INC.
• Correspondent: not available — no recurrence evidence obtainable.
• Context: lien release / record clean-up, recorded ~4.5 months after the patent's anticipated expiration — i.e., a housekeeping entry on a dead asset, not an assertion-enabling transfer.

Chain-of-title gap I want to flag explicitly: the recorded events show title moving CheckRobot → APT (1988-06-20), then show only liens (1991 GTE, 2001 State Street) and a release (2006 U.S. Bank). There is no recorded assignment of title from APT to Xinetix, even though Xinetix is the grantor of the 2001 security agreement and by then held the loyalty-marketing business. Either the APT→Xinetix transfer was never recorded, or it was effected by merger (mergers are frequently recorded as Merger conveyances — none appears here). This is a genuine gap in the chain of title and is the single most important thing a buyer or litigator would need to cure.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 4833308
    1986 : Application filed 1986-07-24
    1987 : Humble assigns rights to CheckRobot
    1988 : CheckRobot assigns to Advance Promotion
    1991 : GTE Interactive takes security interest
    2001 : State Street security agreement from Xinetix
    2006 : Patent reaches anticipated expiration
         : US Bank releases lien to Sperry and Hutchinson

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Practical note on signal #1's counter-indications: the strongest anti-NPE facts in this record are (a) the origin entity is a venture-backed product company with P&G and Donnelley Marketing as JV parents, which is the least NPE-like provenance possible; (b) the conveyances after 1988 are security interests and a release, i.e., the debt side of the capital structure, not the equity side; and (c) the patent died of old age in 2006 rather than being asserted.

Verdict

Defensive / non-asserting.

The five recorded events show a conventional operating-company chain with two lender liens layered on top: CheckRobot → APT (1987-07-02 and 1988-06-20 assignments), a 1991-04-09 GTE Interactive Services security interest, a 2001-02-28 State Street security agreement granted by Xinetix, and a 2006-12-07 release by U.S. Bank to Sperry & Hutchinson — recorded after the patent expired on 2006-07-24. Not one of the eight NPE signals is affirmatively present; none of the parties appears on any public asserter list, and I found no suit asserting this patent, so the asset was neutralized by expiration, not by transfer to a defensive aggregator.

Two honest limits on that call. First, the taxonomy's "Defensive / non-asserting" trigger is normally an aggregator at the end of the chain, which is not literally the case here — the closest literal fits are an operating-company chain with no assertion, so treat the label as "non-asserting operating-company asset" rather than a literal RPX/AST termination. Second, two database fields that could change the picture are missing: correspondent of record and reel/frame. The chain has a real APT → Xinetix title gap (see timeline), and with five events across 19 years, a repeat-correspondent check is the one test that could still surface an NPE pattern here. I would not certify this patent as NPE-free until both are pulled from the Assignment Center documents.

Verify at: USPTO Patent Assignment Search — search by patent number 4833308 · USPTO Assignment Center · Google Patents legal events, US 4,833,308 A

I'll research US Patent 4833308 and each of its cited prior-art references. Let me run targeted searches.

Prior-Art Analysis: US 4,833,308 — "Checkout Counter Product Promotion System and Method"

1. Target patent — confirmed identity

I confirmed this record against the Google Patents and Espacenet mirrors of the US record (I did not have direct PatentCenter access, so I am grounding on those mirrors plus the authoritative full text supplied):

• https://patents.google.com/patent/[US4833308A](/patent/US4833308A)/en
• https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?...NR=[4833308A](/patent/4833308A)

Note on the "no similar numbers" rule: I am reporting only US 4,833,308. I intentionally do not fold in its sibling/companion patent in the same family line (the Humble application US06/889,801, which issued as US 4,825,045 with an almost identical specification). That document is not one of the five references cited on the face of US 4,833,308 and is therefore outside the scope you asked for.

2. The five cited references (examiner citations on the face of US 4,833,308)

The patent lists exactly five U.S. patent documents under "References Cited." Espacenet's INPADOC family record corroborates the same five: US3959624 A, US4419573 A, US4554446 A, US4658125 A, US4674041 A. I analyze each below for potential § 102 anticipation of claims 1–6.

Reference A — US 3,959,624 (Kaslow)

• Full citation: Walter Kaslow, "Coded merchandising coupon," US 3,959,624. Filed 1974-12-13; issued 1976-05-25. (Related divisional appeal: In re Kaslow, 707 F.2d 1366 (Fed. Cir. 1983).)
• Disclosure: A UPC-coded discount coupon carrying both a product-identification UPC symbol and a recognition ("cents-off") symbol. At the checkout the coupon is optically scanned; the coupon signal is compared against redemption signals stored in the terminal's memory (products actually scanned into the "string" memory) to verify that the customer in fact bought the qualifying item, thereby preventing "misredemption." A display shows the retrieved discount, and daily/weekly summaries are sent onward. Source: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/0f/79/a3/d33be7b4.../US3959624.pdf and In re Kaslow, https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/kaslow-in-re-no-893008956
• § 102 analysis vs. claims 1–6: This is the closest reference on the sensing/comparing elements. It discloses claim 1 elements (a) sensing means for code signals and (b) comparison of a scanned code against stored codes, and it discloses a display. However, the comparison direction and purpose differ: Kaslow compares a coupon code to a stored list of already-purchased items for redemption validation — not a scanned product code to a stored list of preselected trigger products to select a promotion. It contains no storage of promotional messages relating to other products having a "common category" with the preselected product, and no customer-interactive display (claim 1(c)–(d), claim 6(b), (e)–(f)). Does not anticipate any of claims 1–6. Best characterized as background art for the scanning/comparison concept.

Reference B — US 4,419,573 (von Geldern / Maatschappij Van Berkel's Patent N.V.)

• Full citation: Rudolf C. von Geldern, "Variable data product bar code sales system," US 4,419,573. Priority 1980-03-19; application 1981-03-17; granted 1983-12-06. Assignee: Maatschappij Van Berkel's Patent N.V.
• Disclosure: A supermarket system with a central computer and multiple checkouts each having a bar-code reader. Preprinted bar-code labels with unique numbers are applied to variable-weight ("fresh") products; scanning the unique number at checkout addresses the corresponding computer memory location to retrieve and supply the item's sales data to the register. Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4419573 and https://uspto.report/patent/grant/[4419573](/patent/4419573)
• § 102 analysis vs. claims 1–6: Discloses claim 1(a) sensing means and the general use of a computer memory addressed by a scanned code. It does not disclose a first-circuit comparison against a set of preselected product codes to selectively generate an output, nor second-circuit storage/generation of promotional messages about other, category-related products, nor any customer-interactive promotional display. Does not anticipate any of claims 1–6. Relevant only as general POS/bar-code infrastructure.

Reference C — US 4,554,446 (Murphy et al.)

• Full citation: Arthur J. Murphy and Joseph F. Stratton, "Supermarket inventory control system and method," US 4,554,446. Filed 1983-11-18; issued 1985-11-19. (Application 06/552,916.) Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US4554446A](/patent/US4554446A) and https://patents.google.com/patent/US4554446A
• Disclosure: A "scan coupon concentrator" at POS compares the machine-readable code on a redemption coupon/voucher against the sales-item information for the transaction to determine compliance with the coupon's redemption terms. If terms are met, the credit is applied; if not, an inhibit signal informs the clerk and customer that the document is not valid. Accumulated redemption data is forwarded to chain/manufacturer computers.
• § 102 analysis vs. claims 1–6: Discloses claim 1(a) sensing means, a comparison of scanned code to stored data (claim 1(b) analog), and a customer-facing indication of a result. It does not disclose promotional messages concerning other products having a common category with the scanned/preselected product, nor message selection/storage for promotional presentation (claim 1(c)), nor the interactive promotional display of claim 1(d), nor the method steps of claim 6(b), (e), (f). This is a redemption-validation system, not a promotion-selection system. Does not anticipate any of claims 1–6.

Reference D — US 4,658,125 (Kachi et al. / Nipponcoinco Co., Ltd.)

• Full citation: "Gift coupon detectable by bill sorter," US 4,658,125. Filed 1984-03-19; issued 1987-04-14. Assignee: Nipponcoinco Co., Ltd. (inventor named Kachi et al. per the front-page listing of the companion Humble patent). Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4658125
• Disclosure: A paper gift coupon usable in vending machines having a bill (paper-money) sorter. The coupon carries magnetic-ink data trains (first/second data trains 21/22) read by magnetic detection heads; data is compared against reference signals to discriminate the coupon from currency and to record its value, and to compensate for feed-rate variation.
• § 102 analysis vs. claims 1–6: This reference is technologically remote from US 4,833,308. It involves coupon/currency discrimination by magnetic sensing in a vending machine, not supermarket UPC checkout, and discloses no UPC product scanning, no comparison of a purchased-product code to preselected trigger codes, no promotion-message storage, and no customer-interactive promotional display. Does not anticipate any of claims 1–6. (Its citation appears to be peripheral art relating to coupons/encoding.)

Reference E — US 4,674,041 (Lemon et al. / Appleton)

• Full citation: "Method and apparatus for controlling the distribution of coupons," US 4,674,041. Filed 1983-09-15; issued 1987-06-16. The front-page listing credits James K. Appleton; the companion Humble patent's reference list names the inventors as Lemon et al.
  • ⚠️ Grounding caveat: My searches did not return the full text or claim set of US 4,674,041, so the following is based on the citation record and general knowledge, and I flag it as lower-confidence than A–D. I did not fabricate specific claim language for it.
• Expected disclosure (medium confidence): A POS method/apparatus for controlling distribution of coupons — i.e., detecting purchased items and dispensing corresponding coupons. This overlaps the coupon-dispensing aspect of the background of US 4,833,308.
• § 102 analysis vs. claims 1–6: Even accepting the broadest characterization of Lemon et al. as a coupon-distribution controller, it does not appear to disclose the category-linking requirement (each promoted product "having common category with a respective such preselected product"), the promotional-message storage/display distinct from coupon dispensing, or the customer-interactive display adaptation of claim 1(d). Best treated as relevant art to the coupon-dispensing aspect, not an anticipatory reference for any of claims 1–6 — subject to confirmation once full text is obtained.

3. Summary table

4. Bottom line

No single one of the five cited references appears to anticipate any of claims 1–6 of US 4,833,308 under § 102, either alone or in combination (and § 102 requires a single reference anyway). The claimed invention's asserted point of novelty — a first circuit that compares a scanned product code against stored preselected product codes and, on a match, drives a second circuit to present promotional messages about different, category-related products on a customer-interactive display (claim 1(c)–(d); claim 6(b), (e)–(f)) — is not disclosed by any of the five. References A and C are the most technically pertinent (scan-and-compare) but are directed to redemption validation with the comparison running in the opposite direction and purpose; B is generic POS/memory infrastructure; D is field-remote; E is the least-verified and appears directed to coupon distribution rather than category-linked promotion.

Confidence: High for A, B, C, D (texts retrieved and read). Medium for E (record/citation confirmed; full text not retrieved — treat the § 102 characterization for E as provisional). If you want, I can pull the full text of US 4,674,041 to firm up reference E, since that is the one gap in this analysis.

I'll research the five prior-art references cited on the patent page so my obviousness analysis is grounded in what each reference actually discloses.

I have detailed disclosures for all five cited references. Let me verify two things that bear directly on the analysis: the effective prior-art dates of the references whose publication post-dates the '308 filing, and an important uncited reference.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 4,833,308 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Analyzed against the five references appearing in the "Patent Citations (5)" / "Citations (5)" section of the Google Patents record for US4833308A: US 3,959,624; US 4,419,573; US 4,554,446; US 4,658,125; and US 4,674,041.

0. Two housekeeping notes before the analysis

A. Date contradiction (flagged as required). The task header states "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while the system context states "Today's date: 2026-10-01," and the previously generated litigation section is headed "Today's date: 2026-10-01." These are inconsistent. Nothing in this § 103 analysis turns on the difference (the patent expired 2006-07-24 regardless), but I am flagging it rather than silently picking one.

B. Material gap. I did not obtain the file wrapper — neither the examiner's reasons for allowance nor the applicant's arguments. That record would be the single most probative evidence for why these five references did not defeat the claims. Everything below is a reconstruction from the face of the patent and the references themselves. I have labeled inferences as such.

1. Governing framework and the hypothetical person of ordinary skill

Statute/version. Application 06/889,351 was filed 1986-07-24 — long before the AIA's first-to-file date of 2013-03-16. Pre-AIA § 103 and pre-AIA § 112 ¶ 6 therefore govern. Claim 1 is drafted in means-plus-function form ("sensing means," "first circuit means," "second circuit means," "display means"), so each means limitation is construed to cover the structures disclosed in the specification and their equivalents.

Graham factors (Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966)): (1) scope and content of the prior art; (2) differences between the prior art and the claims; (3) level of ordinary skill; (4) secondary considerations.

Post-KSR standard. KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), controls today: the TSM test is "but one of a number of valid approaches," and a combination may be obvious where it is "the product of ordinary creativity, not of a genius," or where the elements are arranged "according to known methods" yielding "predictable results." Critically, the patent is a 1986 invention examined in 1987–89, when the stricter TSM formulation prevailed. A § 103 challenge today would be evaluated under KSR and would be materially stronger than the challenge the examiner actually faced. This asymmetry is the central practical point of this analysis.

Level of ordinary skill (my construction). A POSITA in mid-1986 would be a designer of retail point-of-sale systems: an electrical engineer or computer scientist (bachelor's degree, or equivalent), with roughly 2–4 years of experience with supermarket checkout/scanner systems, UPC price-look-up architecture, and electromechanical or CRT display peripherals. This is a mature, crowded, integration-driven art, not an unpredictable one — which lowers the bar for combining references (cf. KSR on "design incentives" and "market forces").

2. Effective prior-art status of the five references

This matters because two of the five were not published until after the '308 filing date.

Note on Lemon (US 4,674,041) [inference]: its face page lists "PCT Search Report, WO 85/01373, Lemon, Chester and Kelly, Bill A." If WO 85/01373 published in March 1985 (consistent with a September 1983 priority and a 1984 PCT filing), that publication would be § 102(b) art against the '308 application, which is a stronger footing than § 102(e) alone. I have not verified the WO publication date from an authoritative source — this should be confirmed before relying on it. The safer assumption for this analysis is that Lemon is § 102(e) art at minimum.

(Cross-reference: the previously generated litigation section correctly noted the patent expired 2006-07-24. That status is procedural only for a § 103 inquiry — it would foreclose most live infringement exposure but would not bar a validity challenge in a hypothetical action brought within the damages tail.)

3. The claims, element by element

Claim 1 is the system claim; claim 6 is its method counterpart; claims 2–5 are structural dependents. Stripping the means-plus-function boilerplate, the invention is:

4. The obviousness combinations

I set out the four combinations a challenger would press, in descending order of strength.

Combination 1 — Murphy (US 4,554,446) as primary, in view of Lemon (US 4,674,041) → anticipates the substance of claims 1–5

This is the strongest combination.

• Murphy supplies 1(a), 1(b), and most of 1(c). Murphy discloses the full checkout architecture: a checkout scanner at each POS; an in-store data processor; a scan coupon concentrator that, "in real time," compares redemption data with sales item information for the transaction; and — in its second embodiment — a store computer that "stores files related to the premium offers" and, upon the required purchase, issues a voucher to obtain a different product. That is a stored-offer database keyed to a detected purchase, with a comparator gate, i.e., elements (a), (b), and the storage/selective-output function of (c).
• Lemon supplies 1(d) and 6(f) outright. Lemon's terminal is a POS, stand-alone coupon-dispensing unit with a CRT + touch screen video menu; the customer selects; a high-speed printer dispenses. This is "display means ... adaptive to customer input to permit system receipt of customer input responsively related to such presented promotional message," and it independently gives step 6(f).
• Claims 2–5 follow as implementation detail (see table). Nothing in them was beyond routine engineering in 1986.

Motivation to combine. Both references live in the same field of endeavor (supermarket checkout coupon handling) and address the same articulated problem — the same problem Lemon names expressly: the ~3% historical coupon redemption rate, coupon misredemption/retailer fraud, and the futility of requiring the customer to bring coupons from home. Murphy attacks it by verifying redemption electronically at the scanner and by generating vouchers in the store; Lemon attacks it by making coupons available at the point of sale. A POSITA seeking to raise redemption while suppressing fraud would naturally merge Murphy's purchase-detection/verification engine with Lemon's point-of-sale interactive dispensing terminal. Under KSR, this is "the mere combination of familiar elements according to known methods" yielding "predictable results" — and the three-step flow (detect purchase → look up stored offer → present it on a display) was a known method in each reference separately.

The obviousness hole. Neither Murphy nor Lemon expressly says the offered product shares a "common category" with the triggering purchase, and Murphy's premium product is not tied to the triggering product by category. See § 5 below for how a challenger closes that gap.

Combination 2 — Kaslow (US 3,959,624) as primary, in view of Lemon, further in view of Murphy → all of claims 1–6

• Kaslow is the cleanest teaching of the claimed machinery. Kaslow discloses: a UPC scanner; a terminal memory storing redemption signals representing products subject to discount; and "means ... to compare the coupon signal ... with each of the stored redemption signals to determine whether a match exists," with an output that either authorizes a redemption or inhibits it. As the Federal Circuit recounted in In re Kaslow, 707 F.2d 1366 (Fed. Cir. 1983), the RCA–Kroger implementation used, at each checkout stand, "an optical scanner, a display, a keyboard, a printer, and a cash register terminal having a 'string' memory and a comparator." That is a word-for-word template for the '308 first circuit means (claim 1(b)) and for its structural elaboration into buffers (2) and comparators (3).
• von Geldern (US 4,419,573) reinforces the same point from a different angle: a bar-code label scanned at the checkout addresses a computer memory location whose stored data are then retrieved and supplied to the checkout register/display. That is the general "scan → address → retrieve stored record → present" architecture the '308 specification simply assumes as "known configuration in widespread use" (see '308 col. describing "UPC data store 16" as "known configuration in widespread use").
• The gap Kaslow leaves and Murphy fills. Kaslow is redemption-oriented: the scanned object is a coupon, and the matched product is the one being bought; the triggered action is a discount on that same product. The '308 claim inverts the polarity — the scanned object is the product, and the triggered output is a message about a different product. Murphy's premium/voucher embodiment supplies precisely that inverted polarity (required purchase → voucher for a different product), so Kaslow + Murphy together teach the trigger direction, and Lemon teaches the interactive presentation.

Motivation to combine. All three are in the same art and share the same anti-fraud goal. Kaslow's express purpose is to stop misredemption by an electronic match; Murphy's is to verify coupons against actual purchases and to originate incentives in-store; Lemon's is to originate coupons at the point of sale to raise redemption. Combining a verified match engine (Kaslow/Murphy) with an in-store, customer-selected coupon source (Lemon) is the predictable commercial union of two complementary solutions to one problem.

Combination 3 — von Geldern + Lemon + Murphy → claims 1, 4, 5, 6

A weaker variant, useful mainly to supply the "retrieve stored descriptive/price data upon scanning and present it" element from a reference that is expressly about checkout data retrieval. von Geldern's system "retriev[es] ... computer stored sales data pertinent to source-coded saleable products bearing a bar-code label" and supplies it to the checkout register. Substituting a promotional record for the price/description record in von Geldern's memory, and presenting it on Lemon's interactive display when the lookup is hit, is a predictable substitution of one type of stored data for another — the hallmark of an obvious design choice / data-content modification (see § 5).

Combination 4 — adding Kachi (US 4,658,125)

Kachi is the weakest of the five and would be cited as cumulative, not foundational. It discloses a machine-readable gift coupon carrying magnetic-ink data trains detectable by a machine (a bill sorter) for exchanging commodities. Its only contribution is evidence that, by 1984, machine-readable coupons/vouchers encoding redemption data were well known. It would be listed, but a challenger would not need it — Kaslow, Murphy and Lemon independently establish that. It adds essentially nothing to the § 103 case.

5. Closing the "common category" gap — the crux of the analysis

The "common category" limitation appears in both independent claims (1(c) and 6(b)) and is, in my assessment, the only limitation not squarely met by Combinations 1–3. A challenger would attack it on three independent fronts:

(i) It is a statement of intended use / data content, not structure. Claim 1(c) does not require any particular circuit to do anything differently based on category; it specifies what the stored messages are about. The system's structure is identical whether message store 36 (Fig. 2) holds a message for a complementary product or an unrelated one. The specification confirms the point unmistakably: the promotional scheme "will be implemented by entering the dog food UPC, the yogurt UPC and the diet soda UPC in categorizer 32 and by placing in store 36 messages promoting the sale of flea collars, vitamins and low calorie snacks" — that is, the category relationship is an administrative data-entry decision by a store manager, not a technical advance. Where a limitation recites only informational content or a result to be achieved, absent a new structural or functional cooperation among the elements, it does not distinguish an otherwise obvious apparatus. (The doctrine is nuanced — compare In re Gulack, 703 F.2d 1381 (Fed. Cir. 1983), which found patentable weight in printed matter where a functional relationship existed between the matter and its substrate; here the "common category" relation is not embodied in any such cooperating structure.)

(ii) It is a predictable commercial/design choice. Given a system that (per Murphy) generates an offer for a second product on detection of a first product, what second product to feature is a matter of merchandising strategy. Complementary-product and category-based cross-merchandising (the "tie-in") was among the oldest practices in retail marketing by 1986, and the reference set itself is saturated with the concept of a coupon/offer that rides on a purchase. Under KSR, "[i]f a person of ordinary skill can implement a predictable variation, § 103 likely bars its patentability," and market demand is a legitimate motivation. The specification's own examples (dog food → flea collar; yogurt → vitamins; diet soda → low-calorie snack) are not technical relationships; they are the trivially obvious associations any merchandiser would draw.

(iii) The prosecution history suggests this was the differentiator. The same inventor, same 1986-07-24 filing date, and the identical set of five cited references appear on the sibling patent US 4,825,045 ("System and method for checkout counter product promotion"), whose claim 1(c) omits the "other than"/"common category" language and instead recites "promotional messages relating to said products." (Source: the US 4,825,045 front matter reproduced in the Docket Alarm exhibit file.) The inference — flagged as inference, since I lack the file wrappers — is that the examiner found these five references sufficient to reject/allow as between the two siblings, and that the '308 claims were distinguished by the "other than"/"common category" narrowing. If so, the entire § 103 contest reduces to whether that one limitation is entitled to patentable weight. On the analysis above, a post-KSR tribunal would likely say it is not.

6. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4)

I have no reliable evidence on any of these, and I decline to fabricate it:

• Commercial success. The reassignment chain (Advance Promotion Technologies → Checkrobot, 1987-07-02 → back to Advance Promotion Technologies, 1988-06-20) and the 1991 GTE Interactive Services security interest show the portfolio was treated as commercially valuable. But value of a company is not commercial success of the claimed subject matter, and there is no evidence that any product practicing the '308 claims achieved market success. Absent nexus, this factor carries no weight. (Cross-reference: the litigation section reached a similar "suggestive but not probative" conclusion about the assignment history.)
• Long-felt but unsolved need. A real need (coupon misredemption and fraud, ~$100M–$350M/year) is well documented in the references themselves (Kaslow, Murphy, Lemon all recite it). That cuts against the patentee: the need was recognized and was being addressed by the art before the '308 filing.
• Failure of others / licensing / industry praise / copying. No evidence located. Note that the Lemon patent among the five was itself later asserted in litigation (Catalina Mktg. Int'l v. Coolsavings.com, N.D. Ill. 2001), where the court construed its "predesignated sites such as consumer stores" limitation narrowly — which confirms that the art was commercially deployed at POS sites, but says nothing about the '308 claims.

7. Why the claims nonetheless issued — and where a challenge could still fail

The strongest nonobviousness position for the patentee is a narrow, TSM-era one:

1. None of the five references is a "product-triggered promotion" reference. Kaslow is triggered by scanning a coupon, not a product, and its action is a discount on the same product. Lemon is triggered by customer selection, not by a scanned product. Murphy's core disclosure is coupon verification; its premium/voucher embodiment requires the consumer to present a sales voucher. So the combination requires one non-trivial insight: to make the scanned product UPC itself the trigger for a message about a different product, delivered before the transaction closes.
2. Under pre-KSR TSM, the examiner needed an express teaching, suggestion, or motivation to invert that trigger polarity and to add the interactive display. If none of the five expressly suggested it, allowance follows. This is the most plausible explanation for issuance, and it is also the weakest part of the patent today.
3. The "common category" limitation supplies a fallback hook, for the reasons discussed in § 5 — but its strength is only as good as the argument that data content/intended use can confer patentability.

Uncited art that could be decisive [flagged as needing verification]. I did not search beyond the five cited references per the task instruction, but the search results surfaced a material candidate that is not on the face of the '308 patent: US 4,723,212 (Mindrum et al.), described in the text of US 5,185,695 as "a coupon dispensing system for printing coupons at the retail outlet in response to the purchase of a product other than the one to which the coupon applies." That description is essentially the "other product" concept of claim 1(c). Mindrum issued 1988-02-02 (after the '308 filing), so its relevance would depend entirely on whether its effective filing date predates 1986-07-24 (which would make it § 102(e) art). I did not verify Mindrum's filing date and cannot assert it — but any serious § 103 challenge to this patent must resolve that question, because if Mindrum qualifies, the "other product" gap closes without needing the "common category" argument at all.

8. Bottom line

The entire § 103 case turns on the phrase "having common category with a respective such preselected product." If that limitation is a mere statement of what the stored messages are about — which is what the specification's own "a store manager may wish to identify associated products" passage indicates — then all six claims are obvious over the cited art. If a tribunal instead treats "common category" as a structural limitation on the second circuit means under § 112 ¶ 6, the claims survive on the narrower ground that none of the five references expressly links the triggering product to a same-category promoted product — though the uncited Mindrum reference, if its date qualifies, would collapse even that refuge.

I am not able to state a definitive conclusion because the two documents that would settle it — the examiner's reasons for allowance and the applicant's remarks distinguishing these five references — are not in my possession.