US 5940843

I'll search for the specific patent number in USPTO and CAFC dockets, then cross-reference with the authoritative patent text provided.

Let me check specifically for CAFC activity and get the claim text.

Let me attempt to retrieve the actual claim language.

Search results — patent‑number‑specific

Searched for: "5940843" / "5,940,843" specifically (not similar numbers), across patent databases and Federal Circuit 2026 docket material.

CAFC 2026 dockets: no hits for this patent. Every 2026 Federal Circuit document returned by my searches involved other patents and parties — e.g., Contour IP Holding LLC v. GoPro, Inc. (Fed. Cir. No. 2026‑2012), SpaceTime3D, Inc. v. Apple/Google, Stratasys v. Bambu, and YC Rubber v. Sutong (CIT appeal). I found no CAFC 2026 docket, appeal, or oral‑argument entry naming U.S. Patent 5,940,843.

⚠️ Uncertainty note: I queried via general web search, not a direct, authenticated PACER/CAFC docket lookup. So "no CAFC 2026 activity found" is a search result, not a certified negative. Two other "5940843" hits in my results are unrelated and should not be conflated with the patent: a Dutch municipal building‑permit file number and a Lithuanian registry publication notice. A third reference to "5940843" appeared only inside a prior‑art search string in a PTAB exhibit, which is not litigation activity against this patent.

Live status: Google Patents lists legal status "Expired ‑ Lifetime," with anticipated expiration 2017‑10‑08. No IPR/PGR/CBM or district‑court assertion of this patent surfaced.

Summary of US 5,940,843

Assignment chain (literal): Multex Systems, Inc. → MULTEX.COM, INC. (2000‑01‑27, change of name) → REUTERS RESEARCH INC. (2016‑03‑02, change of name) → THOMSON REUTERS (MARKETS) LLC (2016‑03‑02, merger/name change) → THOMSON REUTERS GLOBAL RESOURCES (2016‑07‑06) → THOMSON REUTERS GLOBAL RESOURCES UNLIMITED COMPANY (2017‑12‑01, change of name). A security interest by FLEET NATIONAL BANK (recorded 1998‑12‑21) was released 2018‑06‑27.

Abstract (as published)

Distribution of research documents over the WWW/other network to investors. A repository server receives research documents from contributors. A restriction subsystem server, selectively coupled to the contributor workstation, manages and stores "restriction" and "review" information of companies relative to contributors. A contributor identifies a restriction and/or review status of a company relative to that contributor. A company may be "RESTRICTED" if the contributor has a current banking/financial interest in it; "UNDER REVIEW" if the contributor believes its opinion may change based on a news event; and "UNDER EXTENDED REVIEW" if the contributor is not presently covering the company. Each time the repository server is queried for a list of reports/documents (titles/headlines), it determines whether to provide a given title based on the restriction status of the document's contributor relative to the restriction status of the company/companies associated with that document.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

⚠️ Important caveat on claim text. The authoritative full text I was given for this patent stops inside the "SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION" and does not include the claims section, and none of my searches returned verbatim claim language for 5,940,843. I therefore cannot give you verbatim independent‑claim text or a verified independent‑claim count. What follows is an overview of the claimed subject matter as supported by the abstract, specification and figures, not a quote of the claims — treat the claim numbers/wording below as unverified.

Based on the disclosure, the independent claims are understood to be directed to two coordinated inventions, one method‑type and likely one system/apparatus‑type:

1. Restriction/review‑status management claim (contributor‑facing). A contributor at a remote workstation electronically establishes, relative to that contributor, a status for a company — restricted, under review, or under extended review — with associated change date/time, stored in a restriction database (fields such as CtbID, ticker symbol, exchange, symbol name, restricted flag, restricted date/time, review flag, review date/time; FIGS. 11–16). The restriction database is maintained in high‑speed/in‑memory storage and flushed to disk, with subscribing servers notified and reloaded on change.

2. Controlled delivery/display claim (user‑facing). A repository server holding contributed documents (each with a document profile containing ticker symbols and a release date/time) retrieves the list of titles a user is entitled to; for each title it aggregates the restriction information across all ticker symbols associated with the document (taking the "most restrictive" status and the latest restriction/review date‑time and corresponding ticker); and then, based on that aggregate information, the user category (e.g., "Internal Private Client"), and a comparison of the document's release date/time against the restriction/review date‑time, decides whether to display the title only (marked "restricted"/"not retrievable"), display the title and permit access, or withhold the title and block access (headline marked "under review"/"under extended review"). FIG. 17 is the corresponding flow (steps 1710–1745).

Supporting but likely dependent subject matter includes: user entitlement via document groups, the anti‑concurrent‑use "mxauth" cookie mechanism, dual database searching (relational + full‑text), the authorization and sorted‑query optimizers, and the RAL templating language.

Confidence assessment

• High confidence: patent number, application number, title, inventor list, filing/issue dates, assignees/assignment chain, legal status, abstract, and the technical content of the specification (all from the authoritative full text provided).
• Low confidence / explicitly uncertain: the exact number, wording and scope of the independent claims — this is not present in my authoritative source, and I did not locate a reliable verbatim source. I recommend verifying against the USPTO Patent Public Search claims tab or the granted‑patent PDF before relying on any claim‑level conclusion.
• Search‑derived, not certified: the absence of CAFC 2026 activity involving 5,940,843.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 5940843 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases for this specific patent.

Let me check a few more specialized sources.

Litigation Search Report: U.S. Patent No. 5940843

Patent: U.S. Patent No. 5,940,843 — "Information Delivery System and Method Including Restriction Processing"

• Application No. 08/947,257; filed 1997-10-08; granted 1999-08-17
• Original assignee: Multex Systems, Inc.
• Current assignee: Thomson Reuters Global Resources ULC
• Status: Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 2017-10-08)

Result: No litigation identified

I searched litigation-focused sources (including the Unified Patents litigation/patent portal at portal.unifiedpatents.com, PlainSite profiles, Google Patents/patents.justia.com litigation data, and general web searches for the patent number and title). I found no district court case, CAFC appeal, ITC proceeding, or PTAB proceeding in which U.S. Patent No. 5,940,843 was asserted or challenged.

Accordingly, I cannot provide a table with plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, and outcome, because no case involving this patent was located.

What the searches did return (for transparency)

The sources surfaced only non-litigation material:

Note: Several search hits contained the digit string "5940843" in entirely unrelated contexts — a Chinese company's financial statements, a Brazilian state contract listing, a Dutch building permit, a Lithuanian business registry, and an Eastern District of Texas Realtime Data v. Citrix prior-art exhibit. None of these involve U.S. Patent No. 5,940,843, and I have not treated them as litigation against this patent.

Caveats (per your strict rules)

• I was unable to directly run a full-text query against the Unified Patents litigation case list (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) or confirm via PACER/CAFC records within my search session; I did not reach those specific case-list queries before my search steps were exhausted. My conclusion rests on the aggregated litigation/patent sources above.
• Because U.S. Patent No. 5,940,843 expired on 2017-10-08, and it is a 1997-priority business-method/financial-data patent now held by Thomson Reuters, the absence of any identified assertion is consistent with the record — but an expired patent can still appear in past litigation.
• This is not a legal conclusion or a guarantee that no such case exists. A definitive negative would require a documented PACER docket search (e.g., via Lex Machina, Docket Alarm, or the free USPTO OCE Patent Litigation Dataset, which covers district court cases 1963–2015) keyed to patent number 5,940,843.

Bottom line: Based on the sources searched, no known litigation involves U.S. Patent No. 5,940,843. If you want certainty, I'd recommend a direct PACER/Lex Machina docket search, which I could not complete here.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" signal against public web sources before writing the analysis.

No PTAB hits yet. Let me run targeted queries on the docket aggregators and the patent owner's litigation history.

PTAB / AIA Trial Activity on US 5,940,843

Bottom line up front: I found no AIA trial proceedings on US 5,940,843 ("Information delivery system and method including restriction processing," Multex Systems / now Thomson Reuters Global Resources ULC). The structured ODP block in the prompt reports zero, and independent web checks are consistent with it. There is therefore no FWD, no institution decision, no petitioner, no panel, and no Federal Circuit appeal to report for this patent.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 5,940,843: 0 — 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 claims-sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution-denied. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not "the patent is hardened by surviving IPRs" (it never faced one) — it is the weaker-but-still-useful posture of a long-expired patent (anticipated expiration 2017-10-08) that no competitor ever bothered to challenge at the PTAB, which is itself a signal about the patent's assertion value rather than a signal about its validity. Nothing here bars you from an IPR on estoppel grounds; but nothing here is available to shortcut a district-court invalidity fight, either.

No proceedings to itemize

The requested per-proceeding template (Type / Filed / Status / Judge panel / Grounds / Institution / FWD / Settlement / Appeal / Defensive value) has no entries. Rather than pad it, here is what I affirmatively checked, so the absence is documented rather than assumed:

False positives to ignore (do not conflate these with your patent):

• IPR2019-01002, Workspot, Inc. v. Citrix Systems, Inc. — U.S. Patent No. 8,135,843 (thin-client/web service directory). Different patent, different owner.
• IPR2017-01520 — U.S. Patent No. 8,566,843. Different patent.
• Arendi S.A.R.L. v. [Apple Inc.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Apple%20Inc.) (Fed. Cir. 2016) concerns U.S. Patent No. 7,917,843. Different patent.

Any of these could mislead a docket search on "843." None is your patent.

Strategic summary

Claim status: every claim of US 5,940,843 is UNTESTED, and all of them are EXPIRED. Because no AIA trial was ever instituted, there is no cancellation, no survivorship, and no claim-level adjudication to report — and I will not invent one. I also did not verify an independent/dependent claim listing: the record fetched for this analysis includes the specification, abstract, and prosecution-era description but not the claims themselves, so I cannot tell you which claim numbers carry the restriction-processing limitations. If a demand letter cites specific claims, pull the granted claims directly from the patent PDF (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/ac/be/14/89b100c87fcb59/US5940843.pdf) before responding.

Estoppel landscape: there is none to your benefit or detriment. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only to a petitioner who obtains an institution decision and then loses at FWD. With zero IPRs, no party — and no privy of any party — is estopped from anything. A current defendant retains the full § 102 / § 103 / § 112 invalidity toolkit in district court, unconstrained by any petitioner-side narrowing. Conversely, no petitioner has pre-built an invalidity record you could borrow, and there is no PTAB FWD to hand a judge as a ready-made invalidity roadmap.

Availability of new AIA trials is effectively foreclosed. Three independent gates are all shut or nearly shut:

1. The patent expired 2017-10-08 (20 years from the 1997-10-08 filing date, per the record's "anticipated expiration" entry). Board practice is to scrutinize — and often decline — institution against expired patents absent a live damages controversy, since there is no ongoing conduct to enjoin and amendment is unavailable.
2. The CBM transitional window closed 2020-09-16. This patent is the archetypal CBM candidate on subject matter (data processing used in the practice/administration of a financial product or service — SEC anti-solicitation compliance in investment research distribution, per the 1999-10-19 Multex press release), but a petition under AIA § 18 is no longer available, and in any event a CBM petitioner had to have been sued for, or charged with, infringement.
3. The § 315(b) one-year clock bars any defendant served more than a year ago, and the CBM/IPR retroactivity objection to applying the AIA to this 1997-priority pre-AIA patent is foreclosed by Celgene Corp. v. Peter (Fed. Cir. 2019), which sustained AIA review of pre-AIA patents against a Takings/retroactivity attack.

Pattern signals: no repeat petitioner (there is no petitioner at all); no PTAB appeal history; no defensive aggregator in the chain. That last point is diagnostically interesting: the '843 patent sat squarely in the path of the online investment-research distribution industry during the 2000s and 2010s, when CBM and IPR petitions were a routine cost of doing business. That no CBM was ever filed against it suggests would-be defendants either (a) concluded the patent was not worth challenging because it was never credibly asserted against them, or (b) found the invalidity exposure sufficient to settle quietly rather than fight. The record does not let me distinguish these. Note also the owner: the current assignee of record, Thomson Reuters Global Resources ULC, is a large operating company, not a patent monetization vehicle — relevant to how an assertion would likely be staffed and financed.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant: There is no FWD to link, because no FWD exists — the "quote the disposition" step is inapplicable here. Instead, the highest-value defenses run through the record's expiration data:

1. Attack recoverable damages first. With anticipated expiration on 2017-10-08 and ordinary § 286's six-year lookback measured from the filing of a complaint, a suit filed now reaches back only to roughly 2020 — entirely after the patent lapsed. Confirm against the USPTO maintenance-fee history at https://patents.google.com/patent/US5940843A/en and Patent Center whether the "Expired - Lifetime" status is a natural term expiry (consistent with the listed 2017-10-08 date) or a failure-to-pay event, and whether any § 154(b) term adjustment extends the expiration. If the term is confirmed, the practical damages exposure for a newly filed case is minimal, and a Rule 12 motion plus early claim-construction discovery aimed at the on-sale/public-use and pre-critical-date prior art may cost less than a full invalidity campaign.
2. Preserve invalidity, but budget it normally. With no § 315(e)(2) estoppel in play, your § 102/§ 103/§ 112 grounding is unconstrained. The Unified Patents page (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-5940843-A) lists the pre-1997 references the examiner considered — including U.S. 5,802,518 ("Information Delivery System and Method," cited in the record's own prior-art list) — a sensible starting point for a § 102 analysis of the restriction/review-aggregation limitations.
3. Get the claims. The claim numbers actually asserted determine everything. The fetched patent record omits them; pull them from the patent PDF before mapping a construction or invalidity theory.

If you are the patent owner or evaluating the patent's assertion value: The absence of any PTAB challenge is not a validity endorsement — it is a function of a patent that expired before the AIA trial regime matured around its technology and was never credibly asserted. Do not represent to a licensee or a court that the claims have "survived" anything; they have simply never been tested, and the last day of term was 2017-10-08.

Flagged uncertainty: I could not independently confirm from a primary USPTO PTAB E2E query within this session (the tooling here is web search, not a live PTAB API call), so my confirmation rests on the structured ODP block plus the consistency of the Google Patents and Unified Patents records. If you need a belt-and-suspenders docket check, search "5,940,843" directly in PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/home), the PTAB decisions library (https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/decisions), and CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%225%2C940%2C843%22) — if those return nothing, the zero-count conclusion is final.

I'll search for the specific assignment recording details — reel/frame numbers and correspondents — before assembling the report.

Good — I'm finding recorded assignment numbers and reel/frame data. Let me pull the remaining links in the chain and the correspondents.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 5,940,843

Source basis: The authoritative full text supplied for this patent, supplemented by indexed USPTO assignment records retrieved via PlainSite's USPTO Assignment mirror and Google Patents legal events. Critical data gap flagged up front: I could retrieve reel/frame data for only two of the eight recorded links, and I could not retrieve the correspondent of record for any link. The USPTO Assignment Center itself (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) is behind an interactive search UI that my queries could not render. Everything below is either (a) from the authoritative patent text/legal-events record or (b) quoted from an indexed USPTO assignment record; nothing is inferred from entity naming alone.

Inventors

All nine are named on the face of the patent and all nine appear as assignors on the founding assignment to Multex Systems, Inc. dated the filing date:

Employer determination: Derivable from the record, because the 1997-10-08 "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST" lists all nine individuals as assignors and MULTEX SYSTEMS, INC. as assignee (per the legal-events record in the authoritative text). Nine co-inventors on one filing, all assigning to the same employer on the same day, is the normal large-engineering-team pattern for a 1990s software startup — not a red flag.

Departure pattern: Unclear / not determinable from available data. I found no evidence of inventors departing Multex within 12 months of filing — but I also found no employment-tenure records at all, so I cannot affirmatively rule it out. Note the "george@1984" worked example in the specification (a Multex employee user ID) and the "MX Contributor"/"Multex Publisher" product names, consistent with a genuine in-house engineering team.

Original assignee

Multex Systems, Inc. — original assignee on the issued patent (later renamed Multex.com, Inc., then Reuters Research Inc., then folded into Thomson Reuters (Markets) LLC / Thomson Reuters Global Resources).

• Primary line of business: Internet-based distribution of investment research. The patent is the company's own product architecture — the specification describes the Multex Contributor™ indexing/transfer client and the Multex Publisher™ Research Viewer, both named as Multex Systems, Inc. products (New York, N.Y.). This is a product company, not a paper entity.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Yes, on the face of the disclosure — the specification expressly identifies the commercial Multex Contributor/Multex Publisher software as the implementation, and the figures (bulletin board, query form, results page) are product screenshots.
• Current status: The Multex entity itself no longer exists as an independent company. Its assets moved through a chain of corporate re-organizations, not sales out of the family: name change to Multex.com, Inc. (recorded 2000-01-27), then name change to Reuters Research Inc. (executed 2003-03-26, recorded 2016-03-02 — consistent with Reuters' absorption of Multex.com in 2003), then merger into Thomson Reuters (Markets) LLC (2016), then assignment to Thomson Reuters Global Resources (2016-07-06), then name change to Thomson Reuters Global Resources ULC (2017-12-01). No bankruptcy, dissolution, or third-party sale is evidenced in the record.
• ⚠️ Contradiction flagged: PlainSite's Multex.com, Inc. profile page states the company "has not filed any forms with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission." That conflicts with my general understanding that Multex.com was a public reporting company in the 1999–2003 window. I could not reconcile this and am not asserting an IPO as fact.

Assignment timeline

Records exist — this patent has a full recorded chain of eight events. Reel/frame is available for two of them; the rest are documented by date/party from the legal-events record and PlainSite index but their reel/frame numbers were not retrievable in this pass.

1. 1997-10-08 (executed) / recorded 1997-10-08 — Reel/Frame not retrieved

• Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
• Assignor: Zucknovich, Leisy, Kitain, Urazov, Baird, Blazek, Prohorov, Kolfman, Yackubovich (all nine inventors)
• Assignee: Multex Systems, Inc.
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Founding in-house assignment of the invention to the operating company, executed on the filing date.

2. 1998-12-21 (executed) / recorded 1998-12-21 — Reel/Frame not retrieved

• Conveyance: Security Interest / Security Agreement
• Assignor: Multex Systems, Inc.
• Assignee: Fleet National Bank
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Securitization / venture-debt collateral — the classic financing lien a venture-stage company grants over its IP.

3. 2000-01-27 (executed) / recorded 2000-01-27 — Reel/Frame not retrieved

• Conveyance: Change of Name
• Assignor: Multex Systems, Inc.
• Assignee: Multex.com, Inc.
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Change of name only — no change in beneficial ownership.

4. 2003-03-26 (executed) / recorded 2016-03-02 — Reel 37973 / Frame 0957 (verified via PlainSite USPTO mirror)

• Conveyance: Change of Name
• Assignor: Multex.com, Inc. (33 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038)
• Assignee: Reuters Research Inc. (New York, NY 10038)
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Change of name only on the recorded document, reflecting the real-world absorption of Multex.com into Reuters. Note the ~13-year gap between execution (2003) and recordation (2016) — a recordation-housekeeping signature, not an operational transfer.
• Source: https://www.plainsite.org/patents/assignment.html?id=[7040617](/patent/7040617)

5. 2016-03-02 (executed) / recorded 2016-03-02 — Reel/Frame not retrieved

• Conveyance: Merger and Change of Name
• Assignor: Reuters Research Inc. (and Thomson Reuters (Markets) LLC, both named)
• Assignee: Thomson Reuters (Markets) LLC
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Internal corporate merger / re-branding within the Thomson Reuters group.

6. 2016-07-06 (executed) / recorded 2016-07-06 — Reel/Frame not retrieved

• Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
• Assignor: Thomson Reuters (Markets) LLC
• Assignee: Thomson Reuters Global Resources
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Internal IP-consolidation — movement into the group's central IP-holding entity.

7. 2017-12-01 (executed) / recorded 2017-12-01 — Reel/Frame not retrieved

• Conveyance: Change of Name
• Assignor: Thomson Reuters Global Resources
• Assignee: Thomson Reuters Global Resources Unlimited Company (ULC)
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Change of name only — conversion to an unlimited company; this is the current assignee of record.

8. executed 1998-10-08 (per recorded document) / recorded 2018-06-27 — Reel 46215 / Frame 0186 (verified via PlainSite USPTO mirror)

• Conveyance: Release by Secured Party
• Assignor: Fleet National Bank
• Assignee: Multex.com, Inc. (33 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038); current holder of record listed as Thomson Reuters Global Resources Unlimited Company, Neuhofstrasse 1, 6340 Baar
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Collateral cleanup — discharge of the 1998 Fleet security interest (link 2). The release instrument covers a family of six Multex patents (5,802,518; 5,819,271; 5,864,871; 5,940,843; 6,912,529 and related apps).
• ⚠️ Anomaly flagged, reported literally: the recorded "paperwork executed" date on this release is October 8, 1998 — the same date as the patent's filing and before the security interest itself was recorded (1998-12-21). That date likely reflects the credit/security-agreement date recited in the release rather than the date of release. I am not correcting it.
• Source: https://www.plainsite.org/patents/assignment.html?id=[8347387](/patent/8347387)

Chain-of-title conclusion: Ownership never leaves the Multex → Reuters → Thomson Reuters corporate family. The only links involving a third party are links 2 and 8 (a bank security interest and its release) — i.e., collateral, not ownership.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5940843
    1997 : Nine inventors assign to Multex Systems Inc
         : Application filed
    1998 : Security interest granted to Fleet National Bank
    1999 : Patent issued
    2000 : Change of name to Multex.com Inc
    2003 : Change of name to Reuters Research Inc
    2016 : Reuters Research name change recorded
         : Merger into Thomson Reuters Markets LLC
         : Transfer to Thomson Reuters Global Resources
    2017 : Change of name to Thomson Reuters Global Resources ULC
         : Patent term expires
    2018 : Fleet security interest released

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT. No assignee in the chain is a single-purpose assertion LLC. Every transferee is a named subsidiary of an operating corporate group (Multex Systems Inc → Multex.com Inc → Reuters Research Inc → Thomson Reuters (Markets) LLC → Thomson Reuters Global Resources → Thomson Reuters Global Resources ULC). The nearest candidate, "Thomson Reuters Global Resources," is a group IP-holding entity — but it is a large-cap operating group's treasury vehicle, not a single-member Delaware/Texas shell, and no registered-agent address or single-purpose-LLC fact supports a shell finding. Reels 37973/0957 (2003/2016 name change) and 46215/0186 (2018 release) show the chain running only between corporate affiliates.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT. I checked every assignee against the listed NPE set (Acacia, Marathon, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities). No match. No Unified Patents or RPX high-frequency-plaintiff listing surfaced for any assignee in this chain.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR (data gap, not a finding). I could not retrieve the correspondent of record for any of the eight recordings. The indexed USPTO assignment records I surfaced exposed assignor/assignee/date/conveyance but not the filing attorney. This signal therefore cannot be scored either way, and I decline to infer it. Verification requires opening each reel (37973/0957 and 46215/0186 plus the six un-retrieved reels) in USPTO Assignment Center.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT as an NPE pattern. There are multiple transfers, but they span 20 years (2000, 2003, 2016, 2016, 2017) and stay inside one corporate family. There is no run of chained LLCs in <24 months, and no shared-principal pattern. The one compression worth noting is recordation, not ownership: the Multex.com→Reuters Research name change was executed 2003-03-26 but recorded only 2016-03-02 (reel 37973/0957) — a 13-year lag typical of corporate housekeeping cleanup, the opposite of rapid assertion-driven flipping.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT. No infringement suit naming US 5,940,843 was found in any of my searches (and the prior analysis found no IPR/PGR/CBM or district-court assertion). With no suit, there is no transfer within six months of one. The most recent transfers (2016, 2017) predate the patent's 2017-10-08 term expiry.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. No Chapter 7/11, no 363 sale, no assignment to a liquidating trust. The Multex→Reuters event was recorded as a change of name (reel 37973/0957), consistent with an acquisition/absorption, not a distress sale. No bankruptcy of any assignee surfaced.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT. No transfer to a third-party assertion vehicle, and no SEC-filing or press evidence that any assignee is funding outside assertions on its behalf. The patent simply retired inside the family.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — NOT PRESENT. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at Thomson Reuters Global Resources ULC, an operating-group IP holder. So the patent was not deliberately "neutralized" by an aggregator — it simply expired with its corporate owner.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion — with one explicit caveat on the assertion prong.

The entire recorded chain stays inside a single operating-company lineage: the nine inventors assigned to Multex Systems, Inc. on 1997-10-08, and ownership passed only through internal change-of-name and merger recordings (2000-01-27; 2003-03-26 executed / 2016-03-02 recorded at reel 37973/0957; 2016-03-02; 2016-07-06; 2017-12-01), with the sole third-party involvement being Fleet National Bank's collateral interest (1998-12-21) and its 2018 release at reel 46215/0186. The current owner, Thomson Reuters Global Resources ULC, is the IP-holding entity of a global operating information company that ships research-distribution products — the same business Multex built.

Caveat: I found no evidence of any infringement assertion involving this patent, and it expired on 2017-10-08. If the framework treats the "suing actual competitors" prong as mandatory, the technically accurate characterization is non-asserting operating-company ownership — i.e., not an NPE. Either way, no NPE/troll pattern is present, and the single most important evidentiary gap in this analysis is the unretrieved correspondent of record (signal 3), which should be pulled from each reel before any correspondent-recurrence conclusion is drawn.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (or https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) — search by patent number 5940843 / application 08/947,257; confirm reels 37973/0957 and 46215/0186 and pull correspondents for the six un-retrieved recordings. Supporting indexed records: https://www.plainsite.org/patents/assignment.html?id=7040617 and https://www.plainsite.org/patents/assignment.html?id=8347387.

I'll ground this in the authoritative patent text and verify each cited reference against live sources.

⚠️ Read First — Two Blocking Limitations

Before the analysis, three things you need to know, because they materially bound what I can responsibly deliver:

1. I do not have the verbatim claims of US 5,940,843. The authoritative full text supplied for this patent ends mid‑sentence inside "SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION" (at "…the contributor believes its opinion about the company may change based on a") and contains no claims section. My searches did not return claim text either. A § 102 anticipation analysis is, by definition, a claim‑by‑claim mapping. Without the claims, I cannot truthfully tell you "Reference X anticipates claim 1." Anything that purported to do so here would be invention.
2. My per‑reference searches returned noise, not records. For the individual cited‑reference numbers, the search engine returned largely irrelevant documents from unrelated fields (chemistry, mechanical, PCT/EPO search‑report annexes) and never a usable bibliographic record. I will not backfill with guesses.
3. Date discrepancy (flagged, not corrected): this task header states the current date is April 26, 2026, while my operating context states September 25, 2026. I note the conflict and make no automatic correction, per your literal‑interpretation rule.

1. USPTO/database search for the specific number 5940843

I searched the specific number 5940843 / 5,940,843 — not similar numbers. Confirmed hits:

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5940843A and https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-5940843-A.

No conflation with near numbers. A search result referencing "US 8,244,594" (a PTAB Exhibit 594‑03 addressing WO2008/142828) and a "594‑" exhibit number are not this patent and are excluded.

2. Critical distinction: "patent citation for 5940843" is ambiguous

Your instruction — "look at each patent citation for 5940843" — can mean two opposite things, and the databases return different sets for each:

The Unified Patents page I retrieved returned 381 "Referenced By" entries — that is category (B), forward citations, e.g. US‑10873856‑B2 (Flexiworld), US‑8849716‑B1 (JPMorgan Chase, Preventing Identity Theft … by Restricting Access), US‑9251519‑B1 (Google, Monetizing Subscription and Archival News Content), US‑20070174167‑A1 (Credit Suisse, Derivative Relationship News Event Reporting). Forward citations postdate '843 and can never be § 102 prior art against it. I list them only to show what the databases returned and to prevent their misuse.

The references you actually want are the backward citations, and I could not obtain that list from a verified source in this session.

3. Status of the cited‑artifact list

The previously generated section of this analysis listed a backward‑citation set for '843:

US5727156; US5784562; US5819301; US5509074; US5802518; US5822539; US5802530

Two cautions:

• These are not present in the authoritative full text I was given. The text supplied omits the front‑page "References Cited" block entirely. So this list is carried over from the earlier generated section and is unverified against the authoritative source — a potential contradiction I am flagging, not resolving.
• My attempts to verify each number returned no usable record. Results were dominated by unrelated art (e.g., a hair‑treatment device family, EPO/PCT annexes listing US 3,164,346 / US 5,004,386 / US 6,089,544 in truck‑restraint art, and chemistry families). None of that is the cited reference.

Additionally, my search of the Justia assignee page for Multex Systems returned a different, apparently related Multex patent worth flagging as a candidate prior‑art lead (not as a confirmed citation of '843):

"An integrated computer‑implemented corporate information delivery system… a database stores research reports produced by and received electronically from brokerage firms… filed October 29, 1996, patented October 6, 1998, assignee Multex Systems, Inc., inventors John J. Mahoney, Mary Ellen McCarthy, James M. Tousignant, Isaak Karaev, George Baird, Paul Blazek."

Its title reads like Multex's corporate‑information‑delivery patent (the Justia listing also carries the '843 abstract verbatim). The search result did not return this patent's number, so I am not supplying one — assigning a number from memory would violate your no‑auto‑correction rule. Flag for verification.

4. Reference table — what I can and cannot state

Honoring your requested fields, with unavailable cells explicitly marked rather than filled by inference:

I want to be direct about why the description column is empty rather than approximate: I have only low‑confidence training‑data recollections of several of these numbers (web/document‑delivery era art). Your operating rules and the strict rule in this task both require that search results override training data and that I not fabricate. Supplying confident‑sounding descriptions I could not verify would be precisely the fabrication you asked me to avoid. Treat the seven numbers above as an unverified candidate list pending front‑page confirmation.

5. § 102 framework you'll need (not a substitute for claim mapping)

US 5,940,843 was filed 1997‑10‑08, so it is governed by pre‑AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102, not the AIA version:

• § 102(a) — known/used by others, or patented/published before the applicant's invention date (the '843 invention date is presumptively 1997‑10‑08, rebuttable by an earlier date of invention).
• § 102(b) — patented or described in a printed publication, or in public use/on sale, more than one year before filing → the critical date is 1996‑10‑08.
• § 102(e) — an earlier U.S. patent granted on an application filed before the '843 invention date. This is the provision most likely to matter here: several of the candidate numbers are U.S. patents issuing 1998 while claiming earlier filing dates, which puts § 102(e) and pre‑AIA § 103 (in view of § 103(c)) in play rather than § 102(a)/(b).

Anticipation requires a single reference disclosing every limitation, arranged as in the claim — hence the impossibility of step (4) of your request without the claim text.

6. What I recommend to complete this task reliably

Once the front‑page reference block and claim set are in hand, the § 102 mapping becomes mechanical: for each backward citation, compare its disclosure element‑by‑element against each independent claim, and check whether its U.S. filing date predates 1997‑10‑08 (for § 102(e)) or its publication date predates 1996‑10‑08 (for § 102(b)).

Bottom line

• US 5,940,843 identity: confirmed (Multex Systems → Thomson Reuters; filed/granted 1997‑10‑08 / 1999‑08‑17).
• The specific prior‑art references: not verified in this session. The seven numbers carried over from the earlier section could not be corroborated by live search, and the patent's own front‑page citation block was absent from the authoritative text I was given.
• § 102 claim mapping: not possible without (a) the claims of '843 and (b) verifiable content of each reference. I have deliberately left those fields marked unverified rather than supplying low‑confidence recollections as fact.
• One contradiction flagged: the previously generated "cited prior art" list is not present in the authoritative full text — verify before relying on it.

I'll research the prior art references cited on this patent's page so the § 103 analysis is grounded in what those references actually disclose.

Let me pull details on the remaining cited references, which are central to the delivery-side claims.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 5,940,843 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Building on the earlier Patent summary and Litigation summary sections (which I won't repeat), this section analyzes whether the claimed subject matter would have been obvious over the references appearing in the Prior Art / Citations section of the Google Patents page for US5940843.

0. Threshold caveats (read before relying on anything below)

1. Claim text is unverified. As flagged in the Patent summary, the authoritative full text supplied for this patent stops inside the Summary of the Invention and does not contain the claims, and my searches did not return verbatim claim language. A rigorous § 103 analysis is limitation-by-limitation against the actual claim language; I cannot do that here. What follows is an obviousness analysis at the level of the disclosed subject matter (specification + figures), and the mapping below should be treated as provisional until the claims are pulled from the USPTO Patent Public Search claims tab or the granted‑patent PDF.

2. Governing law. Application 08/947,257 was filed 1997‑10‑08, before the AIA first‑inventor‑to‑file changeover (2013‑03‑16). The analysis therefore proceeds under pre‑AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a), applied through the Graham v. John Deere factors and the KSR Int'l v. Teleflex (550 U.S. 398 (2007)) refinement of the teaching‑suggestion‑motivation test.

3. Practical posture. The patent expired 2017‑10‑08 with no litigation identified in the prior section. This is therefore most likely a retrospective/defensive validity exercise rather than a live invalidity contention.

4. Prior art set used. The references listed on the patent page are:
   US5727156; US5784562; US5819301; US5509074; US5802518; US5822539; US5802530. I verified disclosures for US5802518, US5784562, US5819301, and US5509074 and could not fully verify US5727156, US5822539, or US5802530 within reach of this session — those three are treated below by their listing/title and flagged accordingly.

1. The seven cited references and what they contribute

Key structural observation: US5802518 and US5940843 read as sibling disclosures from the same shop (Multex Systems). US5802518 covers the delivery architecture generally; US5940843's stated point of novelty is the title itself — "including restriction processing." That framing drives the entire § 103 analysis below: the delivery side is squarely anticipated/obvious over the cited art, and the restriction/review engine is the only meaningful battleground.

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

For the 1997 priority date, a PHOSITA would be a software engineer/systems architect with roughly a B.S. in computer science or electrical engineering and 2–4 years' experience in client/server and Internet (HTTP/HTML/CGI) application development, including networked database retrieval and web‑based authentication. This is the ordinary artisan to whom the "motivation to combine" question is addressed.

3. Combination 1 — The delivery/entitlement architecture (strongest challenge)

References: US5802518 (primary) + US5784562 + US5819301, optionally + US5509074.

Mapping (subject‑matter level):

• Repository server receiving documents from remote contributor workstations; web server front end; relational + full‑text databases → US5802518 (verbose disclosure of the same repository‑server/contributor‑workstation/web‑server topology and multi‑database querying).
• Password/entitlement control ensuring information reaches only authorized users; restriction of information types to user classes → US5802518 (explicit) and US5509074 (secure access to published materials).
• Preventing concurrent use of one ID from multiple browsers, with the "stale cookie" allowance → US5802518 (its "secure sign‑on [that] prevents multiple users using the same identification code and allows an authorized user to move to another computer or browser program") in view of US5784562 (session identifier + user‑context database maintaining context across HTTP disconnects).
• Template‑driven page generation (the RAL template forms) → US5784562 (generic document templates customized by stored user context and replace‑instruction substitution).
• Convert to a common viewing format (PDF) and view via a helper/plug‑in → US5819301 (PDF over the Internet, Acrobat/Acrobat Exchange; multi‑page download).

Motivation to combine: All three sit in the same technical field (networked, browser‑delivered electronic documents), address the same recognized problems, and are complementary rather than overlapping — US5802518 supplies the delivery/entitlement architecture, US5784562 supplies the stateless‑HTTP session mechanism the architecture needs, and US5819301 supplies the portable document format the architecture serves. KSR holds this is enough; a PHOSITA designing an Internet document‑delivery system in 1997 would have had predictable results combining a session‑context engine and a PDF viewer into an existing repository architecture.

Assessment: Everything in '843 other than restriction/review processing — FIGS. 1–10 and the RAL/templating, dual‑database, optimizer, sign‑on and PDF‑distribution material — is, at minimum, strongly suggested (and arguably disclosed) by US5802518 alone, with the remaining mechanics supplied by the other three.

4. Combination 2 — Adding ticker‑symbol document indexing

References: Combination 1 + US5727156 (Internet‑enabled portfolio manager).

'843's document profile includes "a list of ticker symbols of the companies that are related to the subject matter of the document," and query building keys on ticker. US5727156, as an Internet‑enabled portfolio manager, is addressed to ticker‑symbol‑keyed financial data delivered to users over the Internet. A PHOSITA building an Internet research‑distribution system (US5802518) would plainly be motivated to index contributed documents by ticker symbol, because (a) US5727156 demonstrates that ticker symbols are the natural key for securities information and (b) US5802518 already teaches category/field‑based querying of a relational database with a per‑user restricted subset. Predictable result, same field, articulated rationale. Caveat: this mapping depends on US5727156's actual disclosure, which I could not verify here.

5. Combination 3 — The crux: restriction/review status (the weak point for the challenger)

This is where '843's asserted advance lives: a per‑contributor "restriction"/"review"/"extended review" status for a company, stored with change date/time, maintained in memory and flushed/reloaded across servers (FIGS. 11–16); and, at delivery time, the aggregation across all ticker symbols of a document ("most restrictive" status; latest restriction/review date‑time and its ticker), followed by a release‑date‑vs‑‑status‑date comparison producing three outcomes — display‑title‑only ("not retrievable"), display‑and‑permit‑access, or withhold‑title‑and‑block‑access (FIG. 17, steps 1710–1745).

None of the seven cited references discloses a restriction/review status that is (i) defined relative to a contributor, (ii) tri‑state (restricted / under review / under extended review), (iii) timestamped, or (iv) aggregated across ticker symbols and compared against document release date to gate title‑display vs. document‑access. The cited art teaches who may access what (entitlements, cryptography, classes of users); it does not teach conditional, time‑sensitive suppression of a provider's own publication about a company because of the provider's own business relationship or changing opinion about that company.

A challenger can therefore only reach this subject matter in one of three ways, each with a distinct weakness:

(a) "Compliance requirement" argument (regulatory design consideration). Because the SEC‑compliance motivation is the patent's own stated driver (the spec recites that when a provider has a current banking/financial interest in a company, "the research provider may be required by law to restrict its private internal clients from accessing the report"), a challenger may argue: given a known legal obligation to withhold certain research from certain clients, it would have been obvious to add a status flag and a gate to an otherwise‑known delivery system. Under KSR, a known problem with an obvious solution can defeat patentability.

• Counter‑argument (strong): The reference set contains no teaching of how to represent the relationship, and the specific mechanics — relating status to the contributor, the tri‑state review taxonomy, the timestamp, the cross‑ticker aggregation rule, and the release‑date‑vs‑‑status‑date comparison with three distinct downstream behaviors — are non‑trivial design choices, not the mere "flag" the argument assumes. A general legal obligation does not supply these limitations; this risks an impermissible "obvious to try"/hindsight showing rather than a reasoned combination.

(b) "Crypto/secure‑publishing" argument (US5509074). Choudhury teaches restricting access to electronically published material over a network — so a challenger may argue combining it with US5802518 yields policy‑based access control generally.

• Counter‑argument: US5509074 protects the material itself via cryptographic protocols against unauthorized copying; it says nothing about the publisher's own evolving, company‑specific, time‑stamped suppression of titles and documents based on the publisher's relationship with, or opinion about, a subject company. There is no articulated rationale that would have led a PHOSITA to the tri‑state, contributor‑relative data model.

(c) "Client‑classification" argument (US5802518). US5802518 does teach restricting "certain types of information to certain classes of users" — so a challenger may argue that "Internal Private Client"‑specific treatment (the user category '843 applies its rules to) is supplied.

• Counter‑argument: Class‑based access control is content‑categorical (this class may see this category of information), whereas '843's rule is relationship‑and‑time‑conditional (this company's status relative to this contributor, compared to when the document was released). The reference does not bridge that gap.

6. Combination 4 — Ancillary UI/hyperlink features

References: Combination 1 + US5822539 (cross‑references/hyperlinks) + US5802530 (web‑document‑based GUI).
These map to the browser‑rendered bulletin board, query form and results pages (FIGS. 2–4) and the hyperlink/RL generation. Even accepting both references at face value, they are redundant to US5802518's disclosure of web‑server‑generated, user‑customized pages — they would be cited to bolster, not to carry, an obviousness case.

7. Motivation‑to‑combine summary (articulated rationales)

Applying KSR, the following rationales support the combinations in §3–§4 and §6:

1. Same field / common problem — all references address delivering electronic documents to remote users over a network; combining them is the work of a PHOSITA, not an inventor.
2. Complementary, non‑overlapping teachings — architecture (US5802518) + stateless‑HTTP session (US5784562) + portable document format (US5819301) + secure publishing (US5509074) + ticker‑keyed financial data (US5727156) each fill a distinct gap with a predictable result.
3. Design incentive / known need — an Internet research‑distribution system needs per‑user restriction; US5802518 already frames "restrict[ing] access to certain types of information to certain classes of users" as the goal, supplying the incentive to add restriction fields and gates.

But — critically — rationale (3) reaches only generic restriction. It does not supply a rationale to arrive at the specific contributor‑relative, tri‑state, timestamped, cross‑ticker‑aggregated, release‑date‑compared restriction engine recited in (and apparently claimed by) '843 without hindsight reconstruction from the specification.

8. Bottom line and confidence

Overall: The delivery‑side subject matter of '843 is highly vulnerable on the cited art — US5802518 in particular appears to be a closely related, earlier‑filed disclosure covering most of the system, with US5784562, US5819301 and US5509074 supplying the residual mechanics. The restriction‑processing subject matter — the patent's stated point of novelty (FIGS. 11–17) — is not rendered obvious by the cited references alone; defeating it would require either a non‑cited reference/prior public use (e.g., Multex's own pre‑filing product materials) or a well‑supported regulatory‑requirement/design‑choice argument, which carries a meaningful hindsight risk.

Required verification before any of this is actionable

• Pull the actual claims (USPTO Patent Public Search / granted‑patent PDF) — every conclusion above is at the disclosure level, not limitation‑mapped, and the independent‑claim scope is currently unverified.
• Verify US5727156, US5822539, US5802530 disclosures (I could not within this session) before citing them in any combination.
• Confirm US5802518's assignee/priority relationship to '843 (its verified disclosure strongly parallels '843's specification) — a same‑family/common‑ownership relationship materially affects how it may be used as prior art.
• Run a non‑patent‑literature/public‑use search on Multex Systems' 1995–1997 products; the regulatory‑requirement theory in §5(a) is only persuasive if coupled with evidence that such restriction logic was already known or in use.