US 5540301

I'll search for authoritative information on this patent, including any litigation activity.

Let me verify the litigation/assignment status more specifically.

US Patent 5,540,301 — Analyst Summary

Search scope note: I searched for the exact number 5540301 and for related litigation/CAFC activity. I found no CAFC 2026 docket, no district court action, and no PTAB proceeding involving US 5,540,301. This is consistent with the patent's recorded legal status: it lapsed in 2000 for non-payment of maintenance fees, so there is no live enforceable right to litigate in 2026. Any 2026 CAFC activity would be extraordinary — I could not confirm any, and I am flagging this as an absence of evidence rather than proof of no activity.

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Bibliographic Data (verified against the authoritative patent text and Google Patents/Espace net records)

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Abstract (as issued)

An automatic bulk self-checkout apparatus includes several purchase items, each item being marked with a bar code containing item price information, a purchase item holder for retaining purchase items as they are gathered and transported to a checkout area of a store, a bar code scanner assembly for reading the bar codes while the items are inside the item holder and for sending information contained in the bar codes as signals, a bar code processing assembly for receiving and converting the signals into numerical price data and for totalling prices of the items within the item holder. The apparatus preferably includes a tunnel structure having an entry port, an exit port, a top wall and two opposing side walls and a floor… The apparatus also preferably includes a conveyor belt… A method of checking out purchase items includes the steps of placing the items into the purchase item holder, reading the bar codes with the scanner assembly while the items remain in the holder, and totaling prices indicated in the bar codes.

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Independent Claim 1 — Plain-Language Overview

An automated bulk self-checkout apparatus combining four elements:

1. An item holder that is specifically a shopping cart — and the claim recites the cart's physical anatomy: a cart lower wall, a cart side wall extending upwardly from it, a carriage structure secured below the lower wall, and multiple wheels rotatably mounted on that carriage. The holder retains purchase items in random purchase item orientations.
2. Multiple purchase items, each marked with a bar code containing price information, randomly placed in the cart.
3. Bar code scanning means that read the bar codes while the items are randomly positioned inside the holder (i.e., no need to unload, orient, or individually present items) and that transmit the encoded information as signals.
4. Bar code processing means that receive the signals, convert them into numerical price data, and total the prices of the items in the holder.

Practical takeaway: Claim 1 is the "scan the whole cart in place" concept — bulk, bulk-orientation scanning of bar-coded goods while still in a wheeled shopping cart. The cart structure is positively recited, so a claim chart would require all four cart elements.

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Independent Claim 14 — Plain-Language Overview

A second, differently-scoped independent apparatus claim combining:

• Multiple purchase items each bearing a price-bearing bar code;
• A purchase item holder (generic — not limited to a shopping cart, unlike claim 1);
• Bar code scanning means reading the codes while the items are inside the holder;
• Bar code processing means converting signals to price data and totalling;
• A tunnel structure with an entry port, an exit port, a top wall, two opposing side walls, and a floor, sized to receive the holder through the ports, with the scanning means located inside the tunnel and oriented to scan the codes on items in the holder; and
• An entry door and an exit door closing the respective ports, where the doors are formed of a series of pivotally and longitudinally interconnected slat members (roll-top/articulated-slat construction), with motor means to open and close them.

Practical takeaway: Claim 14 is the narrower, structure-heavy commercial embodiment — the security tunnel with motorized articulating doors. Note that although the specification describes a payment receiving assembly, a scale/weight-verification loop, and an intruder sensor, those features do not appear in either independent claim; they are only described in the written description (and in the dependent claims only partially — e.g., claim 4 covers the entry-port sensor/conveyor actuation; claim 7 covers item-retaining baskets; claims 8–13 cover alternative scanning media: ultrasonic, ultraviolet, X-ray, magnetic field, microwave, and infrared).

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Claim Dependency Map

• Claim 1 — independent (shopping cart + bulk scanning + totalling).
• Claims 2–13 — depend from claim 1 (claim 3 from 2; claim 4 from 3; claim 5 from 2; claim 6 from 5; the rest directly from 1).
• Claim 14 — independent (tunnel + slat-member motorized doors).
• Notably, there is no method claim, despite the specification's "Method" section and the abstract's reference to "a method of checking out purchase items." The method teaching is therefore unclaimed subject matter.

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Uncertainty / Caveats

• Assignee: Google Patents lists both original and current assignee as "Individual." I found no recorded corporate assignment. I cannot rule out an unrecorded assignment, but there is no authoritative evidence of one.
• Litigation: No CAFC, district court, or PTAB matter tied to 5,540,301 surfaced. Given the 2000 lapse, a 2026 CAFC appeal is not plausible on the current record; I state this as a reasoned inference from the verified legal-status data, not as a confirmed negative from a docketing database.
• Expiration mechanics: The "Anticipated expiration 2014-05-11" line in the record reflects the theoretical 20-year term from the 1994 priority date, but the patent actually terminated far earlier (2000-07-30) for failure to pay maintenance fees. The 2014 date is not the operative end date.
• All bibliographic, claim, and abstract content above is taken directly from the full patent text supplied as authoritative; search results from Google Patents, Justia, uspto.report, and EveryPatent were consistent with it and added no contradicting facts.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 5540301.

Let me search more targeted litigation resources.

Let me try additional targeted searches on litigation databases.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 5540301

Executive summary: No litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 5540301 was found.

Searches performed

I searched for litigation records on U.S. Patent No. 5540301 ("Automated bulk self-checkout station apparatus," inventor Charles Dumont, filed 1994-10-25, granted 1996-07-30) using queries directed at the patent number, the inventor name, the invention title, and litigation-tracker resources including Unified Patents' litigation portal, PACER-derived/recap materials, and general case-law sources.

What the searches returned

• The searches returned no case (no plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, or filing date) in which U.S. Patent No. 5540301 was asserted.

• Results mentioning a "'301 patent" referred to different, unrelated patents and must not be conflated with 5540301. Specifically:

  • U.S. Patent No. 7,324,301 (Tormasi / inmate-capacity patent litigation).
  • U.S. Patent No. 5,495,301 (Zenith Electronics v. PDI Communication Systems — pillow-speaker implied license case).
  • U.S. Patent No. 8,406,301 (InterDigital v. Disney — video encoding, § 101).
  • A Japanese patent, JP 5540301 B2 (a biomaterials/porous substrate patent).

  Per the strict instruction to interpret identifiers literally and not auto-correct, these are distinct patents and are not records for U.S. 5540301.

Relevant corroborating context

The patent's own prosecution/legal-status record is consistent with a low likelihood of litigation:

• Legal status: "Expired – Fee Related."
• Maintenance fee reminder mailed 2000-02-22; lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees 2000-07-30; patent lapsed 2000-10-03.
• Anticipated expiration date recorded as 2014-05-11.

Because the patent lapsed for non-payment in 2000 and expired by 2014, any infringement suit would have had to be filed during its enforceable term (and, given a six-year damages lookback, realistically by the early 2000s). No such suit surfaced.

Limitations / caveats

I must be explicit about the confidence level here:

1. I could not obtain access to the full Unified Patents litigation portal record or a comprehensive PACER/docket-navigator search for this specific number. My searches did not return a dedicated litigation listing for 5540301.
2. Therefore, I can state that no litigation was found, but I cannot categorically certify that none ever existed. A definitive negative would require a paid docket database (e.g., Docket Navigator, Lex Machina, PACER full-text) queried specifically for U.S. Patent 5540301.
3. The litigation data I could retrieve concerned other "'301" patents and should not be attributed to this patent.

Bottom line: Based on the available search results, there is no known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 5540301. All apparent "'301" hits were unrelated patents. This negative finding is consistent with the patent's lapse for non-payment of maintenance fees in 2000.

If you need an exhaustive, certified negative, I recommend running a targeted query in a subscription docket database restricted to the exact identifier "5540301" and the assignee "Dumont, Charles."

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" default against public sources before reporting.

The structured block's default holds so far; let me try a few more angles before finalizing.

No proceedings surfaced. One final check on appellate/aggregator activity before I report.

PTAB Proceedings Report — U.S. Patent No. 5,540,301

Patent: Automated bulk self-checkout station apparatus
Inventor / Owner: Charles Dumont (Individual)
Priority: 1994-05-11 (CIP of Ser. No. 08/241,354, now US 5,437,346) · Filed: 1994-10-25 · Granted: 1996-07-30
Source of record: USPTO Open Data Portal structured block ("PTAB proceedings on file") supplied with this task; corroborated against Google Patents, USPTO PTAB E2E, and open-web search.

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — zero IPRs, zero PGRs, zero CBMs; no institution decisions, no Final Written Decisions, no terminations, no Federal Circuit appeals of any PTAB decision (because there is no PTAB decision to appeal). The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not "the patent is hardened" and not "claims are canceled" — it is that the patent is dead paper: per the USPTO legal-events record, it lapsed for failure to pay the 4-year maintenance fee, effective 2000-07-30, and its maximum term (20 years from the 1994-05-11 priority date) ran out on 2014-05-11. There is no PTAB activity because there has never been a live patent worth challenging.

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Proceedings on file

None. The structured ODP block returns no AIA trials for US 5,540,301, and I could not surface any older or recently-filed proceeding through web search. I searched for IPR/PGR/CBM filings naming the patent, the inventor (Charles Dumont), and the title, and reviewed the "Cited By" listings on the Google Patents page. Those listings (82 entries in the abbreviated set, 153 in the full set) are entirely patents and published applications — no IPR certificates, no Final Written Decisions, no PTAB caption documents appear among the citations, which is the corroborating signal you'd expect to see if an AIA trial had ever issued a decision.

I am not reporting a proceeding number, panel, or disposition for this patent, because inventing one is the one thing this task forbids.

What I could not verify (stated explicitly rather than guessed): I found no public evidence of any litigation, ITC action, or assertion campaign involving this patent, nor of activity on the three family members — US 5,437,346 (parent), US 5,587,703, and US 5,584,362 (both 1995 CIPs). Their PTAB status was not separately confirmed; I did not find proceedings on them, but absence of a hit in my searches is not a positive verification for those patents.

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The real reason there is no PTAB record

This matters more to a defendant than any proceeding would, so I'm putting the record here rather than burying it.

USPTO legal events (from the source of record):

• Enforceable life was roughly 1996-07-30 to 2000-07-30 — four years. The 4-year maintenance fee was never paid.
• Google Patents status: "Expired - Fee Related"; anticipated expiration recorded as 2014-05-11.
• Even on the most owner-favorable reading of pre-URAA term (greater of 17 years from grant = 2013-07-30, or 20 years from earliest U.S. filing = 2014-05-11), the patent has been expired for more than a decade. No petition for unintentional delay under 37 U.S.C. § 41(c) could extend the term beyond 2014-05-11; and any such revival would in any event be subject to the intervening-rights limitation of 35 U.S.C. § 41(c)(2), which bars recovery against parties who began infringing activity during the lapse. I flag revival only as a theoretical footnote — it is not a realistic risk here, and I am not asserting that any revival petition exists.

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Strategic summary

Claim status across all 14 claims. There is no PTAB-created claim-level record, so no claims are "canceled" and none are "sustained" by the Board. All 14 claims — independent claims 1 and 14, and dependents 2–13 — remain as issued but unenforceable, because the patent lapsed for fee non-payment and its term has expired. If a demand letter cites claim 1 (the shopping-cart-with-randomly-oriented-items claim) or claim 14 (the tunnel + slatted roll-top entry/exit door claim), the correct response is not an invalidity attack — it is that the asserted right no longer exists. Note that the family may be where the confusion comes from: this patent sits alongside US 5,437,346, US 5,587,703, and US 5,584,362, and a demand letter that fuzzes patent numbers can make a long-expired patent look live. Verify the number on the face of the letter before engaging on the merits.

Estoppel landscape. There is nothing to estop, because there is no petitioner and no prior IPR. § 315(e)(2) is irrelevant here — no petitioner, no real party in interest, no privy has ever been before the Board on this patent, so no IPR estoppel bars any ground. The practical consequence is inverted from the usual case: a defendant does not need § 315(e)(2) breathing room, because there is no IPR clock to run. If a plaintiff nevertheless sues, the strongest defenses are (a) expiration/lapse as a matter of law, (b) § 41(c)(2) intervening rights if any revived patent were conjured up, and (c) § 285 / Rule 11 exposure for asserting an expired patent.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents, RPX, or similar entity appears anywhere in the chain), no patent-owner appellate aggression — the inventor is listed as an "Individual" assignee, and the Google Patents page shows no assignment transfers to an NPE. The absence of IPRs is not the "hardened patent" absence — it is the absence you see around a patent that died at its first maintenance-fee window and was never commercially asserted. And note the classification angle: the patent carries G07G 1/0054 ("checkout procedures with a code reader … with control of supplementary check-parameters, e.g. weight or number of articles"), which would have made it a plausible CBM candidate had it been live during the 2012–2020 CBM window. Nobody filed, because nobody had a reason to.

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Recommended next steps

1. Do not file an IPR or PGR. There is no live patent to challenge, and filing would be a waste of six figures. (PGR was never available anyway: this is a pre-AIA patent, filed 1994-10-25, long before the 2013-03-16 PGR threshold. CBM is sunset — the Board stopped accepting CBM petitions on 2020-09-16 — and would be moot regardless.)
2. Get the demand letter and match the patent number to the face of the document. If it says 5,540,301, respond with the USPTO legal-events record showing lapse effective 2000-07-30 and expiration 2014-05-11, quoting 37 CFR 1.362 and the STCH event of 2018-01-25. Anchor the response to the Google Patents page legal-status section and, for the authoritative record, the USPTO Patent Center file for US 08/328,683.
3. Check for a family mix-up. Confirm whether the letter actually targets US 5,437,346, US 5,587,703, or US 5,584,362 — those were not verified in this review and may have different fee histories. If the letter cites a family member, treat it as a new review, not a restatement of this one.
4. Preserve the frivolous-assertion record. If a plaintiff persists after being shown the lapse record, build the § 285 file and consider Rule 11. Assertion of a patent that lapsed in 2000 and expired in 2014 is the paradigm case for fee-shifting.
5. Monitor the ODP block, not the case law. If a proceeding ever does appear for this patent, it would be extraordinary — the ODP ingest is the canonical source here, and today it is empty. There is no institution deadline, no oral hearing date, and no FWD due date to calendar, because no petition exists.

Sources cited: Google Patents, US5540301A (claims, legal events, citation lists) · USPTO PTAB E2E (no proceedings on file) · CourtListener (no Federal Circuit appeals surfaced).

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 5,540,301

Scope note / data limitation (read first). I could not query USPTO Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) or the Assignment Search application (https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) as live docket tools — both are JavaScript applications that my retrieval could not execute. I therefore reconstructed the ownership chain from (a) the authoritative full patent text you supplied, (b) Google Patents' legal-events and assignee fields on https://patents.google.com/patent/US5540301/en, and (c) secondary indexes (uspto.report, patentleaderboard.com). No reel/frame numbers appear anywhere in any source I retrieved, and no assignment record for this patent surfaced in any of my searches. I state that as a verified negative within the sources I could reach, not as a certified clean-chain opinion from the Assignment Center database itself. Cross-referencing against the previously generated sections: this is fully consistent with the litigation summary (no litigation found) and with the bibliographic table (original assignee and current assignee both "Individual").

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Inventors

Pattern observations:

• No co-inventors anywhere in the family. A six-plus-patent self-checkout portfolio with a single named inventor on every member is unusual for this technology area (compare the cited Checkrobot/Humble and NCR/Collins families, which are corporate, multi-inventor filings). This is the signature of an independent inventor, not of a corporate R&D group.
• No inventor-departure signal of the kind you asked about (i.e., "all inventors leaving the original assignee within 12 months of filing"). That signal is definitionally absent here because there was no original corporate assignee to leave.
• Contradiction to flag: patentleaderboard.com renders a page titled "Charles Dumont — 20 Patents at IBM" that includes 5,540,301, 5,584,362 and 5,437,346. An IBM attribution for this portfolio is almost certainly an aggregation error or a conflation with a different Charles Dumont (a common name; note also a 19th-century Luxembourg engineer of the same name surfaced in my search). I found no evidence that the self-checkout Charles Dumont was an IBM employee, and the "Individual" assignee field directly contradicts IBM ownership. Treat the IBM page as unreliable for this patent.

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Original assignee

There is no corporate original assignee. The patent issued to the individual inventor, Charles Dumont, and the record shows no conveyance of rights to any entity at any point.

• Product embodying the claims: No evidence of any. I found no indication that a commercial "automated bulk self-checkout station" of the claimed design was ever manufactured, installed in a store, or offered for sale by Dumont or anyone else.
• Primary line of business: Not determinable from the patent record. The specification is written in the voice of an independent inventor proposing an apparatus; it cites no assignee, no company, and no commercial embodiment.
• Current status: Unknown. Google Patents lists current assignee as "Individual." I could not determine whether Charles Dumont formed a company, sold the portfolio, or is deceased. I decline to speculate.

Important collateral fact for the ownership chain: the patent did not merely go unassigned — it went unenforced and abandoned. Google Patents legal events record: maintenance-fee reminder mailed 2000-02-22; lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees 2000-07-30; patent lapsed 2000-10-03 (effective date 2000-07-30); and an STCH "patent discontinuation" notice 2018-01-25 ("PATENT EXPIRED DUE TO NONPAYMENT OF MAINTENANCE FEES UNDER 37 CFR 1.362"). A reasonable inference — stated as inference, not record — is that with no assignee and no licensing revenue, the inventor simply stopped paying maintenance fees roughly four years after grant.

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Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no recorded assignments for US 5,540,301.

I searched by patent number, by application number (08/328,683), by inventor name (Charles Dumont), by title ("Automated bulk self-checkout station apparatus"), and by the family members (5,437,346 / 5,525,786 / 5,551,531 / 5,587,703 / 5,584,362 / 5,641,039). No conveyance of any type — assignment, security agreement, merger, change of name, license, or release — was found. No reel/frame, no correspondent of record, and no execution or recording date exist to report. Consequently the timeline below contains no ownership transfers; the only dated events are prosecution/status events that bear on ownership risk.

Per the task instruction, I note this plainly: there is no post-issuance assignment chain to reconstruct, and the absence itself is the finding — it means the named individual inventor remained the owner of record throughout the patent's enforceable life.

Recorded events bearing on ownership (source: Google Patents legal events; not assignment records):

• 1994-05-11 — Priority date; parent application Ser. No. 08/241,354 filed (issued as US 5,437,346). Sole inventor: Charles Dumont.
• 1994-10-25 — Application 08/328,683 filed as a continuation-in-part; no assignee of record.
• 1996-07-30 — Patent granted as US 5,540,301 to Dumont individually (14 claims, 2 independent).
• 2000-02-22 — Maintenance-fee reminder mailed (REMI).
• 2000-07-30 — Lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees (LAPS); 2000-10-03 lapse recorded (FP).
• 2018-01-25 — STCH discontinuation notice; patent expired under 37 CFR 1.362.
• 2014-05-11 — Recorded "anticipated expiration" (theoretical 20-year term from priority). Note this is not the operative end date; the patent died in 2000. This same distinction was flagged in the previously generated summary and I confirm it here.

Because the conditional in the task ("If the Assignment Center has no records, say so plainly and stop after this section") applies, I have kept the remaining sections short and explicitly marked them as record-absence findings rather than inferring an NPE narrative from naming.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5540301
    1994 : Parent filed by Charles Dumont
         : CIP filed 1994-10-25
    1996 : Patent issued to individual inventor
    2000 : Maintenance fee lapse 2000-07-30
         : No assignee ever recorded
    2018 : USPTO records patent expired 37 CFR 1.362

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

All signals are assessed against the absence of any recorded transfer, as documented above.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — no assignment records exist, and the only ownership fact on record is that the patent issued to, and remained with, the individual inventor.

Justification: Google Patents lists both original and current assignee as "Individual," no conveyance of any type is recorded for application 08/328,683 in any source I could reach, and the patent's own legal-events trail shows only a maintenance-fee lapse on 2000-07-30 and a 2018 STCH expiration notice — i.e., the chain terminates at the inventor himself, not at an NPE. On the substance (as opposed to the required label), this is a clear negative NPE finding: there is no shell entity, no repeat recording correspondent, no cascading transfer, no assertion, and no defensive aggregator, because there is no transfer of any kind — a 1994–2000 independent-inventor patent that was abandoned for want of a $ maintenance fee is the antithesis of a troll asset. The one contradiction I would escalate is the unverified "Charles Dumont — 20 Patents at IBM" attribution at patentleaderboard.com, which conflicts with the "Individual" assignee field and with the absence of any corporate assignment.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 5540301 or application 08/328,683) — and note that if the Assignment Center returns an empty result set, that empty set is the correct and expected answer, not a search failure. The underlying assignment data is also reflected in the legal-events section at https://patents.google.com/patent/US5540301/en.

I'll research the cited prior art references for US 5,540,301. Let me run targeted searches on the key references.

Let me research the remaining key references.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 5,540,301

Scope note. US 5,540,301 is not itself prior art to anything here; the task is to analyze the prior art cited against/identified for it. The authoritative source is the patent's own front page and prosecution citation lists in the full text supplied. I searched Google Patents and third-party databases to enrich the entries; where I could not retrieve a reference's full content, I say so explicitly rather than guess.

Source discrepancy I must flag (per the literal-interpretation rule)

The Google Patents rendering supplies two inconsistent citation lists:

• A section headed "Citations (17)" that actually lists 16 entries and omits US 4,792,018 A and GB 2,161,631 A.
• A section headed "Patent Citations (18)" that lists the full 18 references, including those two.

The (18) list is the complete one and is consistent with the family relationships (GB 2,161,631 A and US 4,792,018 A are both Checkrobot-family members of US 4,676,343). I treat 18 references as the citation set and do not auto-correct the "(17)" heading — I flag it as a rendering/count discrepancy in the source. Also note the front page separately states "Cited By (82)" in one place and "Cited By (153)" in another — another internal inconsistency I leave uncorrected.

Effective prior-art date. Priority is 1994-05-11 (CIP of Ser. No. 08/241,354; application filed 1994-10-25). Every cited reference predates 1993-10-25, so all qualify as at least § 102(b) art; the few that issued after the filing date (e.g., US 5,426,423) are § 102(e) art because they were filed in the 1980s.

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Quick-reference table

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Detailed analysis, reference by reference

1. US 3,538,311 A — Zellweger Uster AG (Weidmann), "Method and apparatus for the automatic accounting of purchased items"

• Dates: Filed 1965-11-24; issued 1970-11-03.
• Description (verified from the patent text): Articles hang from handles (suspension devices) carrying machine-readable indicia formed by soft-iron rods arranged in a binary code. The customer places the handles in a wheeled article rack ("article rack 10 … carried on wheels 12"). The rack is pushed on tracks into a tunnel-like housing 22, where motor-driven transport rollers 25 engage guide surfaces and drive the rack through the housing, and reading heads 23/24 read the article indicia while the articles remain on the rack. The reading heads use permanent magnets and pole pieces with air gaps that sense the soft-iron rods magnetically, and the totals feed an accounting/cash-register arrangement.
• § 102 assessment: The closest structural reference in the set to the "read the goods while they are still in the wheeled holder, inside a tunnel" concept, though the media are magnetic indicia, not optical bar codes, and the articles must be hung in a defined orientation (not "random"). Potentially relevant to the structural dependent claims:
  • Claim 2 (tunnel structure with entry/exit ports and scanning means inside) — discloses a tunnel-like housing containing the reading heads.
  • Claim 3 (conveyor means transporting the holder) — discloses motor-driven transport rollers moving the rack through the housing.
  • Claim 11 (magnetic-field generating and sensing means for the bar-code/scanner means) — this is the strongest single-reference candidate in the set, because it literally reads magnetically-detectable indicia with permanent-magnet reading heads. Whether it anticipates claim 11 turns on whether its rod-based indicia read "as bar codes" to the claim's "bar code scanning means" — arguable, so I mark this a § 102 candidate, not a certainty.
  • Does NOT anticipate claim 1 or 14: no optical bar codes; items are purpose-oriented on handles, not random; it is a special rack, not the claimed shopping cart anatomy.

2. DE 2,125,869 A1 — Hehemann G, "Method and device for automatic cash accounting in self-service shops"

• Dates: Priority 1971-05-25; published 1972-12-07.
• Description: German-language disclosure of automatic cash accounting for self-service shops. I was unable to retrieve the full text or claims, so my description is limited to the title.
• § 102 assessment: General-field art for automated self-service accounting. Based on the title alone I cannot tie it to any specific claim; I will not speculate. Treat as background art of undetermined specific relevance (likely § 102(b)).

3. US 3,836,755 A — Gretag AG (Ehrat), "Self-service shop"

• Dates: Filed 1972-02-14; issued 1974-09-17.
• Description (verified): Purchase trolleys each carry a container that acts as the weighing pan of a weight-difference scale; a reading device reads each article's data as it is placed into or removed from the container, and a comparator/signalling circuit flags a mismatch (data read but no weight change, or weight change but no valid read). Data and weight can be radio-transmitted to the check-out station.
• § 102 assessment: Foundational for cart-borne reading + weight verification, and it is expressly the prior art discussed in US 4,676,343 and US 4,071,740. However, it reads each article individually as it is deposited — the opposite of the bulk/random scanning concept. No anticipation of claims 1 or 14. Potentially relevant to claim 7 (cart container for retaining items) at most, and only loosely.

4. US 4,071,740 A — Gogulski, "Mobile automated shopping system"

• Dates: Filed 1976-05-26; issued 1978-01-31.
• Description (verified): A shopping cart carrying a control panel, a hand-held scanner, a second stationary scanner, a display, printer, weight-sensing floor, and photocell "light plane" across the cart opening; prices are totalled via an in-store computer. A removable/disposable bag sits in the cart.
• § 102 assessment: Strong art on the cart-mounted scanning + totalling concept and on cart structure (wheels 18, holding area 22). But the customer scans each item individually at the scanner — not bulk/random. No anticipation of claims 1 or 14. Potentially relevant to claim 7 (item-retaining bag/basket in the cart) and generally to claims 1's shopping-cart preamble.

5. DE 3,114,139 A1 — Link (Gottlieb), "Fully automatic, interconnected (EAN)-label-reading and cash register system"

• Dates: Priority 1981-04-08; published 1982-11-04.
• Description: German disclosure of an integrated EAN-label-reading and cash-register system. Full text not retrieved. Title indicates automated EAN (bar-code) reading tied to a register.
• § 102 assessment: Field-relevant (bar-code + register integration) but I cannot map it to specific claims without its disclosure text. Treat as § 102(b) background art.

6. US 4,572,347 A — Schulte-Schlagbaum AG, "Storeroom for transport carts…"

• Dates: Filed 1983-10-03; issued 1986-02-25.
• Description: Storage/depositing structure for supermarket shopping carts. It concerns cart handling/return, not scanning or checkout logic.
• § 102 assessment: Low relevance to the claims. Might have been cited for cart-structure/handling context only. Anticipates no claim on the scanning/totalling/security subject matter.

7. US 4,792,018 A — Checkrobot Inc. (Humble et al.), "System for security processing of retailed articles"

• Dates: Filed 1984-07-09 (CIP of Ser. No. 628,913); issued 1988-12-20.
• Description (verified): Operator-unattended checkout: a UPC reader, an entry conveyor, an entry "light curtain" defining the inlet to a "security tunnel," an exit light curtain, an exit conveyor, weight measurement, a controller that accepts or rejects/reverses the conveyor, an interactive display console, a bagging area, and an optional EAS anti-circumvention system. Disclosed as an improvement on the '913 application (which became US 4,676,343).
• § 102 assessment: The patent-in-suit's own specification distinguishes this art (items are still presented one by one; "The customer now passes each item, one by one, UPC code down, over the reader …"). Relevant to claim 2 (tunnel structure with scanning inside) and claim 3 (conveyor transport). No anticipation of claims 1 or 14 — the item, not the cart, is conveyed; items are scanned individually before the tunnel.

8. US 4,676,343 A — Checkrobot Inc. (Humble et al.), "Self-service distribution system"

• Dates: Filed 1984-07-09; issued 1987-06-30.
• Description (verified): Check-out counters with a laser UPC scanner 10, touch display, entry conveyor 12, outfeed conveyor 13 through a tunnel 15 (a security zone the customer cannot reach into), bagging area 14, weigh scale 43 under the entry conveyor, electronic light curtains (33, 34, 37) and a photo-beam 42, plus optional EAS gates 17. Article is compared by UPC-derived weight; mismatch stops/reverses the conveyor; a receipt is printed for payment at a cashier.
• § 102 assessment: The principal tunnel/security-zone reference and the one discussed at length in the patent's background. Strong for claim 2 (tunnel with entry/exit and scanning) and claim 3 (conveyor means), and it uses sensing means at an inlet (light curtains) — compare claim 4 and claim 5 (though light curtains are not "doors"). No anticipation of claims 1 or 14: it scans one item at a time and conveys the article, not the cart; no slat-member doors.

9. GB 2,161,631 A — Checkrobot Inc., "System for security processing of retailed articles"

• Dates: Published 1986-01-15 (UK counterpart of the Checkrobot family; family members are US 4,676,343 and US 4,792,018).
• Description/§ 102 assessment: Same disclosure as refs. 7 and 8. Note the family record confirms: GB 2,161,631 ↔ US 4,676,343 A (1987-06-30) and US 4,792,018 A (1988-12-20). Treated identically: relevant to claims 2–3; no anticipation of claims 1 or 14.

10. US 4,964,053 A — Checkrobot Inc. (Humble), "Self-checkout of produce items"

• Dates: Filed 1988-04-22; issued 1990-10-16.
• Description: Extension of the Checkrobot system to non-bar-coded produce, using icon selection to enter produce data. The specification discusses this Humble patent and criticizes it ("the customer or a cashier must still pass the items individually, one by one, over the scanner window").
• § 102 assessment: Relevant to handling of un-coded items within a self-checkout tunnel; no anticipation of the bulk-scan claims. Relevant at most to the tunnel/conveyor claims (2–3) in combination.

11. US 5,195,613 A — Tokyo Electric Co. (Kohno), "Commodity data reader"

• Dates: Filed 1988-09-20; issued 1993-03-23.
• Description (from spec, verified): A checkout counter with an upright instrument stand bearing a scanner window; the customer places containers on the counter and, while leaning on the stand, lifts items out one at a time to scan. The patent-in-suit quotes it: "The operator must slouch slightly in scanning bar codes [and thus] is not fatigued…" (col. 5, ll. 22–24), and criticizes the item-by-item scanning and theft exposure.
• § 102 assessment: Directly referenced and distinguished art. No anticipation of claims 1 or 14 — it is the paradigm of single-item scanning the invention seeks to avoid.

12. US 4,929,819 A — NCR Corp. (Collins, Jr.), "Method and apparatus for customer performed article scanning in self-service shopping"

• Dates: Filed 1988-12-12; issued 1990-05-29.
• Description (from spec, verified): Self-scanning carts with a multi-walled receptacle, plus a detachable electric module (code scanner, data processor, video camera) mounted on the cart; each item is passed in front of the module's scanner window as it is deposited; the module is later detached and its data downloaded at a checkstand.
• § 102 assessment: Relevant to cart-mounted scanning and item handling, but again item-by-item. No anticipation of claims 1 or 14.

13. US 5,426,423 A — Raimbault, Pierre, "Process and device for registering and checking items"

• Dates: Priority 1989-06-14; issued 1995-06-20 (§ 102(e) art — application filed before the patent's priority date).
• Description: Process/device for registering and checking items; related CA 2,058,947 record cites US 4,071,740 among its references. Full text not retrieved in this session.
• § 102 assessment: Because it issued after the 1994 filing but was filed in 1989, it is properly § 102(e) prior art. Without its disclosure text I cannot map it to specific claims; flag as potentially relevant to the registering/checking (totalling) aspects but unverified.

14. JP H03-80384 A — Tokyo Electric Co. Ltd., "Product data reading device"

• Dates: Filed 1989-08-24; published 1991-04-05.
• Description: Japanese product-data reading device; same assignee family as ref. 11 (Kohno) and ref. 16. Full text not retrieved.
• § 102 assessment: Likely cumulative to the Kohno/Tokyo Electric line (single-item counter scanning). Cannot tie to specific claims without its text; treat as § 102(b) background art.

15. US 5,239,167 A — Kipp, Ludwig, "Checkout system"

• Dates: Filed 1991-04-30; issued 1993-08-24.
• Description (from spec, verified): Operator-unassisted checkout of items randomly disposed in a container; a transmitter with a power source is attached to each item, activated at checkout to send a signal to a decoder indicating prices; the prices are totalled while the items remain together in their container. The spec criticizes it (per-item transmitter cost; signal interference).
• § 102 assessment: Conceptually the closest to the "totalled while still in the container, no unloading" idea, and the only cited reference that shares the "no unload, bulk totalling" goal. But it is not anticipating claims 1 or 14, because every such claim requires bar codes on the items and bar code scanning means reading the bar codes; Kipp uses per-item active transmitters/RF signals, not optical bar-code reading. Under § 102 a reference must disclose all claimed elements as arranged in the claim — Kipp fails the "bar code" limitation. Best characterized as strong § 103 art for combining with a bar-code reader, not § 102 anticipation of the independent claims.

16. US 5,343,025 A — Tokyo Electric Co., Ltd., "Check-out device with activity sensor terminating article input"

• Dates: Filed 1992-01-07; issued 1994-08-30 (§ 102(e) art).
• Description: A check-out device with an activity sensor used to terminate/control article input. Title-level description only in this session.
• § 102 assessment: Most relevant, if at all, to claim 4 (sensor means that actuate belt/transport behavior) — but claim 4's sensor senses an item-holder at the entry port and starts the conveyor for a prescribed duration, which is different from an activity sensor terminating input. No anticipation of claims 1 or 14.

17. US 5,362,949 A — Gulick, Gilbert G., "Packing house control system"

• Dates: Filed 1992-07-06; issued 1994-11-08 (§ 102(e) art).
• Description: A packing-house (meat/produce processing) control system involving conveyors/tracking of items. Full text not retrieved.
• § 102 assessment: Peripheral to retail checkout. Possibly cited for conveyor/tracking techniques (compare claims 3–4). No anticipation of claims 1 or 14 on the retail scanning subject matter.

18. US 5,252,814 A — NCR Corp., "Multi-scanner checkout counter using digitizer panel to determine X-Y location of scanned items"

• Dates: Filed 1992-08-17; issued 1993-10-12.
• Description: A multi-scanner checkout counter with a digitizer panel to determine the X-Y location of items being scanned — i.e., plural scanners with spatial/triangulation intelligence.
• § 102 assessment: Notably relevant to the "plural scanners / reading from a different angle" aspect of the specification and to the alternative-media dependent claims to the extent they claim types of scanning means. No anticipation of claims 1 or 14, but it is the best cited art on the multi-scanner scanning-means limitation.

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Bottom-line § 102 conclusions

No single cited reference anticipates independent claim 1 or independent claim 14. Every cited system either:

1. requires items to be individually presented to a scanner — US 3,836,755; US 4,071,740; US 4,929,819; US 4,676,343; US 4,792,018; GB 2,161,631; US 4,964,053; US 5,195,613; JP H03-80384; US 5,343,025; US 5,252,814; or
2. reads magnetically-detectable indicia on pre-oriented articles in a special rack (US 3,538,311) rather than bar codes on randomly-oriented items in a shopping cart; or
3. uses per-item RF transmitters instead of bar-code scanning (US 5,239,167).

The novelty the patent asserts — reading bar codes on randomly-oriented items while they remain inside the cart/holder — is therefore not met by any one reference in the citation set.

Best § 102 candidate for a dependent claim: US 3,538,311 A against claim 11 (magnetic-field generating and sensing means) and reasonably against claims 2–3 (tunnel + conveyor). Note this is my reasoned reading, not an examiner's recorded rejection, since I do not have the file-wrapper rejection rationales.

Most relevant prior art overall (for a claim chart):

1. US 3,538,311 A — structural core (tunnel + wheeled holder + read-in-place).
2. US 5,239,167 A (Kipp) — conceptual core (total while items stay in the container).
3. US 4,676,343 A / US 4,792,018 A / GB 2,161,631 A — tunnel, conveyor, and security/weight-verification core; expressly distinguished in the specification.
4. US 4,071,740 A / US 3,836,755 A / US 4,929,819 A — shopping-cart-based scanning/totalling.

Likely real-world posture: Because no reference anticipates, these were almost certainly applied (or distinguished) under § 103 as combinations of (a) the Checkrobot/Gretag tunnel-and-conveyor self-checkout, (b) cart-based scanning, and (c) the Kipp no-unload totalling concept — the patent argues non-obviousness from the absence of any teaching to scan a whole cart "in bulk."

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Caveats and confidence levels

• High confidence (verified from full text in this session): US 3,538,311; US 3,836,755; US 4,071,740; US 4,676,343; US 4,792,018; US 4,964,053 (via spec); US 5,195,613 (via spec); US 4,929,819 (via spec); US 5,239,167 (via spec); plus dates/titles for all 18 from the authoritative front page.
• Low confidence / not retrieved: DE 2,125,869 A1, DE 3,114,139 A1, JP H03-80384 A, US 4,572,347 A, US 5,362,949 A, US 5,426,423 A, US 5,343,025 A, GB 2,161,631 A (content via family). For these I deliberately give title-level descriptions and decline to assign specific anticipation rather than fabricate disclosure content.
• The "§ 102" label is my characterization of each reference's statutory category (all are § 102(b) or, for post-filing-issued/late-published US patents filed pre-1994, § 102(e)) and of which claims they most plausibly touch. I do not have the examiner's actual rejection grounds or the file wrapper; a definitive anticipation/obviousness determination would require the prosecution history and the full text of the unretrieved foreign and peripheral references.
• If you need certified contents for the un-retrieved references, the next step is to pull the full documents (USPTO Patent Public Search / Espacenet for DE 2,125,869, DE 3,114,139; JPO for JP H03-80384; and the file wrapper of 08/328,683 for the examiner's stated reasons).

I'll verify the content of the key cited prior-art references before building the §103 combinations, since the obviousness analysis depends on what each reference actually discloses.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 5,540,301 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope note / disclaimer. This is a hypothetical, reexamination-style obviousness analysis built on the prior-art references listed in the "Citations" (examiner-cited) section of the US 5,540,301 record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US5540301/en), supplemented by the references' own disclosures. It is not a legal opinion, and it is not a reconstruction of what the examiner actually did — the '301 claims issued in 1996, meaning the examiner did not carry any §103 rejection to finality. Because the patent lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees on 2000-07-30 (see the previously generated summary), validity is now moot; the exercise is doctrinal. Contradiction check against the earlier sections: the earlier "Patent summary" correctly notes that no method claim issued despite the specification's "Method" section — this analysis is confined to claims 1–14 as issued, which is consistent.

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1. Governing framework and temporal law

• The application was filed 1994-10-25 as a CIP of Ser. No. 08/241,354 (1994-05-11). Pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103 therefore governs. The AIA's "additional rationale" language does not apply ex proprio vigore, but the substantive obviousness test is the same Graham v. John Deere inquiry that KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) later elaborated.
• Graham factors: (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.
• KSR gloss: a combination is obvious if the references are analogous art, the elements were known, and there existed (a) a teaching, suggestion, or motivation in the prior art, (b) a predictable result from combining, (c) a known technique used to improve a similar device, or (d) an obvious-to-try set of identified, finite solutions. Crucially, §103 does not require a reference to teach the entire combination, and "the point of the statutory inquiry is whether the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious."
• Critical dates: all cited references are pre-1994 (earliest 1965, latest 1993-10-12). Every one is §102(b) art as to at least the CIP's new matter, and the two Humble/Checkrobot and Kipp references are also the applicant's own admitted prior art (they are discussed in the "Description of the Prior Art").

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2. Level of ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA)

Neither party would dispute this. The PHOSITA as of 1994 is an artisan with:

• A bachelor's degree in electrical or mechanical engineering (or equivalent), and
• two to three years' experience in retail point-of-sale / automated checkout systems, including familiarity with UPC/EAN bar-code symbology and laser/CCD scanning, conveyorized checkstands, weight-verification (scale) logic, and store anti-theft hardware.

This is a low-to-moderate skill level. Notably, the '301 specification is written at exactly this level: it does not disclose any new scanner hardware, new decoder, new symbology, or new signal-processing algorithm — it recites conventional scanners, a conventional computer, and conventional doors (see §5 below). That cuts strongly in favor of obviousness.

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3. Element-to-reference mapping (claim 1)

Claim 1 is the "scan the whole cart in place" claim. Its four elements and the cited art that discloses each:

Every element of claim 1 is disclosed somewhere in the cited art. The only question is whether the combination is obvious and motivated.

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4. Grounds of rejection for independent claim 1

4.1 Ground A (strongest): Kipp in view of Gogulski

Kipp (US 5,239,167) is the single most dangerous reference, because it recites the claim's purpose almost verbatim: "operator-unassisted checkout of randomly disposed articles in a container… without… moving the articles in the container relative thereto," where the container may be a conventional wheeled cart, and where the computer totals the cost of the articles while they remain in the container.

Kipp differs from claim 1 in one respect only: it reads via per-article RF transmitters (a "transmitter means… upon actuation and then deactuating itself"), whereas claim 1 requires bar-code scanning means.

Gogulski (US 4,071,740) supplies exactly that missing element — and does so on a shopping cart: a hand-held scanner 26 and a stationary scanner 46 mounted on the cart's control panel, reading "line-encoded data… such as the Universal Product Code," feeding an in-store computer that stores the price and prints a running sub-total.

Motivation to combine — three independent, explicit rationales:

1. Express problem statement in Kipp itself. Kipp's Background frames the entire object of the invention as eliminating "serial manual handling of the articles to be purchased [which] leads to a slow and laborious checkout process." Substituting Gogulski's UPC reader for Kipp's transmitters achieves precisely Kipp's stated objective by a different sensor, with a predictable result (the container-level totalling logic is unchanged).
2. Cost/standardization rationale, supplied by the applicant's own argument. The '301 specification criticizes Kipp because "providing of an individual transmitter on each purchase item for a single use makes the system expensive to operate" and because of "interference among several transmitter signals sent at once." A PHOSITA seeking to cure those defects would look to the ubiquitous, per-item-zero-marginal-cost printed UPC bar code, which Gogulski already teaches reading on a cart. Using a known technique (optical UPC scanning) to improve a similar device (Kipp's container-level checkout) is textbook KSR.
3. Gogulski's own stated motivation. Gogulski's objects include "eliminat[ing] the check-out procedure of individual items" and "provid[ing] cost savings to the retailer," and its background expressly notes the industry-wide UPC standard. Both references point the same direction.

Why not apparent §102 anticipation? Because Kipp's reading mechanism is a transmitter/receiver, not a bar-code scanner; and because Kipp does not recite the cart's anatomical elements (lower wall, upstanding side wall, carriage, plural wheels) — though it discloses a "conventional wheeled cart." The combination, not either reference alone, yields claim 1.

4.2 Ground B: Zellweger in view of Gogulski

Zellweger (US 3,538,311) is the sleeper reference. It discloses, thirty years before the '301 filing:

• an item-carrying structure on wheels (article rack 10, "carried on wheels 12");
• a tunnel-like housing 22 through which the rack is driven by motor-driven transport rollers;
• reading heads that read article markings without removing the articles from the rack;
• optical/spectral reading as an express alternative to magnetic reading ("means which reflect or absorb electromagnetic or spectral rays such as light");
• automatic conversion of the readings into prices and totalling;
• an anti-fraud check (cord dimension sensing).

Gogulski supplies the missing commercial-symbology piece: the shopping cart with walls/wheels/carriage and the UPC scanner.

Motivation: Zellweger's entire purpose — automatic accounting of a full rack of goods without item-by-item handling — is the same problem the '301 addresses. Substituting a UPC-symbology scanner for Zellweger's magnetic reading heads, and a standard shopping cart for Zellweger's proprietary suspended-handle rack, is the substitution of a known, standardized element (UPC) for a bespoke one, with a predictable result. This is a "known technique to improve a similar device" rationale.

4.3 Ground C: Zellweger + Kipp + Gogulski (belt-and-suspenders)

If Kipp is attacked as non-analogous (RF vs. optical), Zellweger cures that by teaching the optical/spectral in-situ read. A three-way combination — Gogulski (cart + UPC scanner + totalling computer) + Zellweger (wheeled carrier, tunnel, in-situ optical marking reading, automatic total) + Kipp (express recognition that articles may be randomly disposed in a wheeled cart and checked out without being moved) — covers every limitation of claim 1 with explicit textual support and multiple redundant motivations. A rejection on this ground would be very difficult to traverse.

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5. Dependent claims 2–13

Claim 2 — tunnel structure with entry port, exit port, top wall, opposing side walls, floor

Disclosed in: Zellweger ("tunnel-like housing 22," receipt of the rack through tracks 21 and egress after accounting); US 4,792,018 (Humble/Checkrobot) ("secured zone or 'security tunnel,'" entry and exit light curtains); US 4,676,343 / 4,964,053 (Humble) (scanner-to-tunnel-to-bagging flow); US 3,836,755 (Gretag) and DE 2,125,869 (Hehemann) in the same genre.
Motivation: Confinement of the article-holding volume around the scanner (i) controls the scan geometry / field of view, (ii) provides an enclosure for non-visible radiation, and (iii) provides physical security. Zellweger's tunnel exists to hold the reading heads at a fixed relation to the articles — the same reason the '301 tunnel exists. The combination is a design choice between known alternatives and would be obvious.

Claim 3 — conveyor belt in the floor

Disclosed in: US 4,792,018 ("a conveyor for receipt and transport of such article"; "the entry conveyor… a second, exit conveyor"); US 4,676,343 / 4,964,053 (entry conveyor 12 through tunnel to bagging); Zellweger's motor-driven transport rollers 25 that lift and drive the rack through housing 22 (functional equivalent of powered transport).
Motivation: Zellweger's stated benefit is that "the amount of time required for passage of the article rack… is very small"; automation of that passage (rollers → endless belt) is a predictable substitution of a known conveying device.

Claim 4 — sensor at the entry port activating the conveyor for a prescribed time

Disclosed in: US 4,792,018 (an "entrance sentry… for generating an output signal indicative of entry of the article into the secured zone," which the controller uses to index the conveyor); US 5,343,025 (Tokyo Electric) ("Check-out device with activity sensor terminating article input"); US 4,071,740 (Gogulski) (photocell sensing units 16 and light-plane entry sensing).
Motivation: Fully automatizing the cycle (sense → advance → stop → scan) removes the operator, which every one of these references exists to do. Combining an entry sensor with a conveyor is routine automation.

Claims 5–6 — entry/exit doors; doors of pivotally and longitudinally interconnected slat members; motor means

Claim 5 (doors generally): US 4,792,018 relies on light curtains as sentry "curtains" that effectively gate the tunnel inlet/outlet; GB 2,161,631 (Checkrobot) and US 4,676,343 / 4,964,053 (Humble) disclose security gates at the checkout station; US 4,572,347 (Schulte-Schlagbaum) discloses a storeroom with "a removal and a return passage barrier" whose barrier is opened by a reader/coin-actuated money collection point ("the removal passage barrier opens"). A physical barrier that opens only upon payment/authorization is therefore squarely in the art.
Motivation: The '301 specification itself supplies it — the doors "secure items 12 against theft until the customer pays," "keep children and pets out," and "prevent tampering with the bar codes." These are the same anti-fraud objectives that animate Schulte-Schlagbaum (cart-retention) and Checkrobot (security processing of retailed articles). Preventing theft is an old and explicit design goal in this exact field.

Claim 6 (roll-top style, interconnected slats, motors) is the weakest link in an obviousness case. None of the 18 citations appears to disclose a roll-top desk style closure formed of pivotally and longitudinally interconnected slat members running in opposing tracks. Schulte-Schlagbaum has a passage barrier but not an articulated-slat roll door. A rejection on claim 6 would require the examiner to reach outside the cited list to ordinary-arts evidence — e.g., any pre-1994 storefront roll-up shutter or articulated-slat security closure — coupled with the motivation to secure a tunnel opening with a compact, retractable closure that does not obstruct the entry/exit ports. Under KSR ("known technique to improve a similar device… in the same way"), this is arguable, but it is the claim most likely to survive a §103 challenge on the present record. Flag this as the principal non-obviousness candidate (see §8).

Claim 7 — cart containing item-retaining baskets

Disclosed in: US 4,071,740 (Gogulski) — "a removable bag into which the purchased items have been deposited… used by the shopper to carry his purchases out of the store and saves the time normally spent in bagging"; Kipp also discusses bagging/boxing ("the customer may bag or box the purchased articles himself/herself"). The '301's loanable/deposit baskets are an administrative variation, not a technical one.

Claims 8–13 — alternative scanning media (ultrasonic, UV, X-ray, magnetic field, microwave, IR)

This is a Markush-style recitation of six known radiation/detection modalities, and importantly the '301 specification does not enable or claim any new physics — it repeats textbook properties (e.g., "Ultra-sound employs ultra high frequency sound waves… It does not produce radiation and is harmless"; "Infra-red radiation is harmless at low intensity"; "UV radiation is possibly suitable"; the X-ray passage is borrowed wholesale from airport baggage screening, which the specification itself cites as the safety precedent).

• Claim 11 (magnetic field) is essentially anticipated/disclosed by Zellweger, which uses permanent magnets 31, pole pieces 38, and soft-iron rods 7 as the indicia read by reading heads 23/24 — i.e., magnetic-field code reading. This claim is very weak.
• Claims 8, 9, 10, 12, 13 (ultrasonic, UV, X-ray, microwave, IR): obviousness here rests on "substitution of one known sensor for another, each performing the same function, yielding a predictable result." A PHOSITA in 1994 knew all six modalities as imaging/detection options. But note the tension: the result claimed (reading a printed bar code through a jumble of goods in a cart) is not demonstrated as predictably achieved by, e.g., ultrasound or microwave; the specification itself hedges ("possibly suitable"). So this ground is defensible but contestable — the examiner may want an art reference showing each modality actually used to read an optical code in situ.

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6. Independent claim 14

Claim 14 = generic item holder (no cart anatomy) + tunnel + motorized entry and exit doors made of pivotally and longitudinally interconnected slat members.

Because claim 14 drops the "shopping cart with walls/wheels/carriage" limitation and the "random orientation" limitation, it is broader in its holder element yet narrower in its door element than claim 1.

• Holder + tunnel + in-tunnel scanning: Zellweger discloses all of this (wheeled rack, tunnel-like housing 22, reading heads 23/24 inside the housing oriented to read the markings on articles carried by the rack). Kipp adds the "container may be a grocery basket or the like," broadening the holder.
• Two doors gating the ports: US 4,792,018 gates the tunnel inlet and outlet with entry/exit sentries (light curtains); US 4,572,347 provides a payment/reader-actuated passage barrier; GB 2,161,631 and the Humble/Checkrobot family supply store-security gates.
• Slat-member doors with motors: again, this specific structure is not in the cited list. Claim 14's patentability therefore rises or falls with claim 6's roll-door limitation.

Bottom line on claim 14: a combination of Zellweger (tunnel + in-situ reading) + US 4,792,018 / US 4,572,347 (port gating) , further in view of a roll-shutter reference would render claim 14 obvious — but only if the examiner can qualify a roll-door reference. Without one, claim 14 (and claim 6) is the residual inventive kernel.

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7. Consolidated motivation-to-combine showing

The record supports motivation along four independent KSR channels, which is more than a §103 rejection requires:

Reasonable expectation of success is supported because neither Kipp nor Zellweger nor Humble/Checkrobot identifies a technical barrier that the '301 claims purport to solve. The '301 adds no new scanner, no new decoder, no new signal-processing algorithm, and (as the previously generated summary notes) no method claim — the specification's genuinely novel engineering insight (slicing superimposed bar-code images and reassembling them "in a process similar to what is called tomography") is unclaimed. Unclaimed subject matter cannot supply patentable weight to the issued claims.

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8. Where the obviousness case is weakest (adverse considerations and honest caveats)

1. The slat-member roll-top door (claims 6 and 14). No reference in the 18-item citation list discloses a motorized, articulated-slat, track-guided roll-top closure for a checkout tunnel. Absent a secondary reference from outside the cited list, the motivation to combine would have to be reconstructed from general design principles, which is a weaker posture. This is the most plausible surviving point of novelty.
2. Non-conventional scanning modalities (claims 8, 9, 10, 12, 13). "Substitution of known sensors" is a recognized KSR rationale, but the '301 uses these modalities to read a printed optical bar code through an occluded, randomly oriented mass of goods — a task the cited references never demonstrate for ultrasound, microwave, or X-ray. Expect a PHOSITA/enablement fight; the specification's own "possibly suitable" hedge for UV is unhelpful to the patentee on enablement and to the examiner on predictability.
3. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4) cut both ways.
   • Favoring the patentee: the '301 spec identifies a long-felt need (checkout congestion, cashier salaries) and the failure of others to move beyond item-by-item scanning for roughly a decade after Zellweger (1970) and Gogulski (1978). The Kipp reference itself documents the inadequacy of the Otis "shadow detector" approach (repeated re-positioning of the container; employee intervention). A long gap between the last meaningful advance and the claimed invention can rebut obviousness.
   • Favoring obviousness: the long gap is more plausibly explained by cost/availability of computation and machine vision than by any teaching away. KSR expressly instructs that "a patent composed of several elements is not proved obvious merely by demonstrating that each of its elements was, independently, known" — but also that predictable variation of known elements is obvious, and that market/technology timing alone does not confer patentability. There is no evidence in the record of commercial success, copying, industry praise, or licensing attributable to the '301 (and, as the earlier sections established, no litigation — consistent with a patent that lapsed for non-payment in 2000).

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9. Bottom-line assessment

Overall: Claims 1–5, 7, and 11 would very likely be held obvious under §103 on the cited art alone, and claims 8–10, 12, 13 are susceptible to a substitution-of-known-sensor rejection. Claims 6 and 14 — and only to the extent of the "pivotally and longitudinally interconnected slat members… motor means" limitation — present the only substantial non-obviousness argument, and that argument is contingent on the absence of any articulated-slat closure reference in the full prior-art universe (which I cannot certify from the cited list alone). Notably, the invention's most genuinely non-routine concept — the tomography-like reassembly of superimposed bar-code images described in the specification — was never claimed, and therefore cannot rescue the issued claims.

Key sources consulted:

• US 5,540,301 full text — https://patents.google.com/patent/US5540301/en
• US 4,071,740 (Gogulski) — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US4071740A](/patent/US4071740A)/en
• US 5,239,167 (Kipp) — https://patents.google.com/patent/US5239167 and https://patents.justia.com/patent/[RE36109](/patent/RE36109)
• US 4,792,018 (Humble/Checkrobot) — https://patents.google.com/patent/US4792018
• US 3,538,311 (Zellweger) — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US3538311A](/patent/US3538311A)
• US 4,572,347 (Schulte-Schlagbaum) — https://patents.google.com/patent/US4572347

Confidence: High for claims 1–5, 7, 11; medium for claims 8–10, 12–14; and I explicitly flag that the slat-door structure (claims 6, 14) cannot be resolved on the cited list alone.