US 5979757

I'll search for this specific patent number and any related 2026 litigation activity.

Let me verify litigation activity and the claim set.

Search notes (what I actually ran and found)

• I ran live web searches for the exact string 5979757 / 5,979,757, and separate searches targeting a 2026 Federal Circuit docket. The Google Patents record for US5979757A was returned and is treated as authoritative below (it is reproduced in your prompt).
• CAFC 2026 docket search: returned no results. I found no authoritative indication of any 2026 Federal Circuit appeal or docket naming US 5,979,757. I did not hit a CAFC docket database directly, so treat this as "nothing found," not as positive proof of absence.
• Secondary sources (insight.rpxcorp.com, FreePatentsOnline, Justia) corroborate the bibliographic data and supply the full claim text. Historical litigation I did find involving Symbol Technologies is not specific to this patent — e.g., Symbol Techs. v. Metrologic, No. 2:05-cv-509 (E.D. Tex.) asserted U.S. 5,479,002; 6,631,845; 5,646,390; 5,521,366; 5,591,952; 6,854,655 — not 5,979,757. I will not attribute those suits to this patent.

Bibliographic summary — US 5,979,757 A

Priority chain. This application is a continuation-in-part of U.S. Ser. No. 08/706,579, "DEVICE AND METHOD FOR SECURE DATA UPDATES IN A SELF-CHECKOUT SYSTEM," filed Sep. 5, 1996 (which issued as US 5,825,002), and is stated to be related to the then-pending application "INTRANET SCANNING TERMINAL SYSTEM" filed Dec. 20, 1996 (the later family text identifies it as Ser. No. 08/780,023, issued Jul. 4, 2000 — I flag the patent number there as not confirmed from the authoritative text, which was truncated).

Continuation/divisional family (per Google Patents priority links). 08/771,463 → US 6,199,753 B1 (via Ser. No. 09/435,883, filed 1999-11-04), US 6,550,672 B1 (via Ser. No. 09/434,052, filed 1999-11-04), US 7,107,221 B1 (via Ser. No. 09/692,402, filed 2000-10-19) and US 7,725,326 B1 (via Ser. No. 11/460,579, filed 2006-07-27).

Abstract (verbatim): "The present invention relates to an improved portable shopping system. The system is provided with improved data presentation system for presenting customer desired data on a portable terminal. The portable terminal includes audio as well as video presentation means which are used to provide customer specific marketing files to promote the sale of identified items."

The independent claims (16 claims total; independents are 1, 14, 15)

Claim 1 — system for presenting item information to a customer.
Components: (a) a product information file holding information keyed to the selected product; (b) a portable terminal with an integrated machine code reader, a display, and a wireless radio; (c) a "product information discriminator" that selects the matching information from the file and delivers it to the terminal's display upon the reading of the machine coded label, so scanning itself triggers presentation; and (d) a deactivation controller that can deactivate the discriminator from delivering information to the display. In plain terms: scan a product with a handheld wireless scanner-terminal and the system automatically pulls up that product's information on the screen — with a switch to turn that behavior off.

Claim 14 — portable terminal for a self-checkout system.
Directed to the handheld device itself: it is a portable terminal used in a self-checkout system whose product information distribution system sends a plurality of in-aisle marketing messages to the terminal in response to reading a machine coded label of a customer-desired product, and the terminal is provided with a marketing message deactivation command allowing the presentation of marketing messages to be turned off. In plain terms: the shopper's scanner/terminal must be able to block in-aisle marketing messages.

Claim 15 — self-checkout system with message tracking.
Directed to the system side: a product information distribution system transmits a plurality of in-aisle messages to a selected portable terminal having a bar code reader when the reader is used on a predetermined product associated with each message; the system includes a marketing message controller that (i) records the identification of messages delivered to the selected terminal and (ii) records a message transmission count of how many times the message was transmitted. In plain terms: tracking which promotional messages went to which handheld and how often they fired.

Dependent claims, briefly (2–13, 16): claim 2 adds a customer data file with prior-purchase history stored on a central controller coupled to a radio access point; claim 3 puts the discriminator as software on the central controller delivering over the wireless network; claim 4 moves the data file, product file and discriminator onto the terminal with periodic wireless updates; claim 5 adds customer name/address/telephone; claim 6 makes the information a reminder to buy a past-purchase item; claim 7 adds a kiosk data-entry device to modify the customer data file; claims 8–10 specify the information as a nutritional value, a discount coupon, or a related-product notice; claim 11 specifies a spread-spectrum radio in the 2.4 GHz band; claims 12–13 specify bar-code label / bar-code reader / laser scanner; claim 16 adds a record of how many times the prompted (non-selected) product was subsequently scanned in.

Plain-language technical overview

The patent describes a retail self-shopping/self-checkout architecture in which a handheld terminal with an integrated bar-code reader, a graphic display (touting a DOS/Windows browser-type GUI), audio in/out, and a wireless radio (Symbol SPECTRUM24™, IEEE 802.11 Draft D5, PCMCIA type II) acts largely as a "dumb terminal" against an in-store controller/host. On scanning an item, the host (or a local file) pushes item-specific content — price, nutritional data, coupons, alternates ("Best Buy" comparisons), rebate/contest prompts, cross-sell reminders — over the wireless link, with HTML-style hyperlinks and a dynamic page builder that reformats for small displays. The disclosure also covers a telephony subsystem (PCM CODEC/CT8015 DSP/6805 processor, TCP/IP stack, each terminal having a unique IP address) for voice help and broadcasts, customer loyalty cards and dispenser-based terminal assignment, marketing message suppression via an on/off control, coupon/rebate tracking and logging, EAS-tag activation/deactivation on scan, restricted-item (e.g., alcohol/age) blocking, and home-delivery shopping-list workflows.

Two wording cautions, per the literal-interpretation rule: the specification says the coded labels carry "uniform resurrect locators ('URLS')" — I am quoting it as written and not correcting it; and figures referenced as "FIG. 4" in the text are also cited descriptively as a self-scanning system (the numbering in the specification is internally inconsistent in places, e.g., the text cites "FIG. 4" for both a terminal drawing and a system diagram).

Uncertainty flags

1. No 2026 CAFC docket activity located. Searches returned nothing. Given the stated status (Expired – Lifetime, anticipated expiration 2016-09-05), live 2026 appellate activity would be unusual, but I cannot positively exclude it.
2. Legal-status discrepancy. One search snippet showed legal events including "PATENT EXPIRED FOR FAILURE TO PAY MAINTENANCE FEES ... Effective date: 20230215." On inspection that event table appears to belong to a different document (US 2008/0263461, which merely cites US5979757A), not to US 5,979,757. The Google Patents record for US5979757A states "Expired – Lifetime" with anticipated expiration 2016-09-05 (20 years from the 1996-09-05 priority date). I am treating the 2016 date as governing and flagging the 2023 date as likely misattributed.
3. Assignee naming. Google Patents lists the current assignee as Symbol Technologies LLC while the original assignment record names SYMBOL TECHNOLOGIES, INC.; the 2015-07-08 record is a change-of-name. Both appear in the record as given, and I have not normalized them.
4. I did not query USPTO PatentCenter/Public PAIR or the Federal Circuit's own docket system directly — results here come from live web search plus the authoritative Google Patents text supplied in your prompt, so docket-level completeness is not guaranteed.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 5979757 specifically.

The first searches returned false matches (different "’597" patents). Let me search litigation-specific databases for the exact number.

The searches keep surfacing unrelated "’597" patents. Let me target the specific number and docket databases.

Answer: No confirmed litigation identified for US 5,979,757

I was unable to identify any lawsuit that asserts U.S. Patent No. 5,979,757 ("Method and system for presenting item information using a portable data terminal," Symbol Technologies / Symbol Technologies LLC, filed Dec. 20, 1996, issued Nov. 9, 1999, priority to Sep. 5, 1996 via U.S. App. Ser. 08/706,579).

Bottom line: as of my searches, I have no verified plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome for this specific patent. I will not invent them.

Important caution about the searches (why this is not just "no results")

Every keyword search I ran for 5979757 / 5,979,757 returned documents about different patents that are colloquially also called "the '597 patent." Specifically:

• Arista Networks, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc. (Fed. Cir.) — the "’597 patent" there is a Cisco patent (David Cheriton inventorship; IPR2015‑00978). Wrong patent entirely.
• Idenix Pharmaceuticals LLC v. Gilead Sciences, Inc. — the "’597 patent" there is an HCV nucleoside patent. Wrong patent entirely.
• Pentair Water Pool and Spa v. Hayward Industries — the "’597 Patent" there is a pool/spa patent. Wrong patent entirely.
• A search hit referencing Intermec v. Symbol / Symbol v. Intermec (D. Del., 2005) is a real patent dispute but the results did not tie U.S. 5,979,757 to it, and I cannot confirm it from what I retrieved.

This is exactly the auto-correction trap your instruction warns about: hit counts and "’597" snippets are misleading and must not be treated as evidence of litigation on 5,979,757.

What the authoritative patent page shows

The Google Patents record for US5979757 that I retrieved contains an extensive assignments/security-interest history (Symbol Technologies, Inc. → JPMorgan Chase security interest 2005 → release 2010 → Morgan Stanley collateral agent 2014 → Symbol Technologies, LLC name change 2015 → release 2015) and a "Discuss" link, but no litigation section and no litigation entries. That is consistent with — though not proof of — an absence of notable infringement suits. Security-interest and name-change assignments are not litigation.

Relevant family members (worth checking if you are running a broader clearance)

If your real question is whether this family was litigated, the continuations/related cases are the better search targets:

• US 5,825,002 (parent, App. Ser. 08/706,579)
• US 6,199,753 (App. Ser. 09/435,883, filed Nov. 4, 1999)
• US 6,550,672 (App. Ser. 09/434,052, filed Nov. 4, 1999)
• US 7,107,221 (App. Ser. 09/692,402, filed Oct. 19, 2000)
• US 7,725,326 (App. Ser. 11/460,579, filed Jul. 27, 2006)

Search limitation disclosure

My research was cut short by a tool/step limit: my last three targeted queries ("5979757" patent case docket Justia, Symbol Technologies "5,979,757" infringement suit, "5,979,757" portable data terminal patent asserted defendant) returned no usable results before I was stopped. So this answer reflects an incomplete search, not an exhaustive one.

Recommended verification steps before you rely on "no litigation"

1. CourtListener / RECAP and PACER — search the full text of complaints for the literal strings 5,979,757 and 5979757 (quote the number; do not rely on party-name searches alone).
2. Unified Patents litigation portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) — enter the patent number directly.
3. PTAB / USPTO PTAB Center — check for IPR/PGR/CBM and ex parte reexam filings against 5,979,757 (post-grant challenges often accompany or precede suits).
4. Docket Alarm / Justia Dockets — party searches for Symbol Technologies, Inc. and Symbol Technologies, LLC as plaintiff, then filter by patent number.
5. Lex Machina / RPX / MaxVal — patent-level docket filtering.
6. Google Patents — use the "Similar" / litigation links on the US5979757 page and on the family members listed above.

If you can share the party names you suspect (e.g., a specific NPE or retailer), I can re-run a narrower check — but I will not report a case as "involving 5,979,757" unless a source literally cites that number.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 5,979,757 — the USPTO Open Data Portal structured block reports no IPR, PGR, or CBM involving this patent (0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials) — so there is no PTAB-driven claim cancellation to hand a defendant, but there is also no PTAB-driven hardening: the patent's real defensive lever is that it is expired (anticipated expiration 2016-09-05, status "Expired - Lifetime"), which moots most of what an IPR would have bought you.

No proceedings to report (and why that is the finding, not an omission)

The canonical list is empty

The "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied with this prompt — sourced from the USPTO Open Data Portal — contains no AIA trial entries for US 5,979,757. There is therefore no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, institution decision, or Final Written Decision to report. I will not invent one.

That block is consistent with the rest of the patent record: the Google Patents/ODP prosecution-and-assignment timeline for US 5,979,757 shows only prosecution events, assignments/security interests (JPMorgan Chase 2005-01-05; release 2010-12-03; Morgan Stanley 2014-10-31; release 2015-08-17), a change of name to Symbol Technologies, LLC (2015-07-08), continuations feeding off it (US 6,199,753; US 6,550,672; US 7,107,221; US 7,725,326), and the anticipated expiration on 2016-09-05. No trial-practice filings appear.

Web-search cross-check — only false positives

I ran searches for the patent number plus "inter partes review," "PTAB," "CBM," and "IPR petition." Every hit was a different patent with a confusable number, and I am flagging them so nobody downstream mistakes them for activity on this patent:

• US 11,700,597 — Samsung v. Wilus Institute of Standards & Technology, IPR2025-00936 (instituted; IEEE 802.11ax BSS-color claims). Unrelated patent, unrelated technology.
• US 8,137,757 — Fast Felt v. Owens Corning, Fed. Cir. No. 2016-2613 (2017-10-11) (roofing nail tabs). Unrelated.
• US 8,862,757 — Cellspin Soft v. TikTok, IPR2024-00759 (Fintiv discretionary-denial fight). Unrelated.
• US 6,928,757 — Douglas Dynamics v. Meyer Products (Fed. Cir. § 315(e) estoppel case). Unrelated.
• An unrelated Cisco "'597" patent appears in Arista Networks, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc., 908 F.3d 792 (Fed. Cir. 2018). Unrelated.

None of these involve US 5,979,757, Symbol Technologies' portable-terminal self-shopping patent, or its claim set.

Caveat on completeness. The ODP block captures AIA trial proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM). It does not capture ex parte reexamination or reissue, and I could not locate evidence of either on this patent in the sources available to me. I therefore cannot affirmatively state "no reexamination ever occurred" — only that no AIA trial is on file and no ex parte reexamination surfaced in search. Verify against the patent's file wrapper in Patent Center if that distinction matters to your case.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all 16 claims UNTESTED at the PTAB — and now unlitigable in any practical sense. Claims 1–16 (system claims 1–13; portable-terminal claim 14; self-checkout system claims 15–16) were never construed or adjudicated by the Board. Nothing is CANCELED; nothing is SUSTAINED by the Board. For an IPR petitioner, "untested" normally means opportunity. Here it does not, for two reasons.

First, the patent is expired. The ODP/Google record lists "Anticipated expiration 2016-09-05" and legal status "Expired - Lifetime." An expired patent can still be the subject of an IPR (the Board applies Phillips claim construction and no amendments are available), but a petitioner generally has no commercial reason to spend the money: no injunction, no ongoing royalties. The more consequential effect is on damages. Under 35 U.S.C. § 286, recovery reaches back only six years before the filing of the complaint. A complaint filed after 2022 (six years past the 2016-09-05 expiration) sweeps in a window that is entirely post-expiration, which means potentially no recoverable damages period at all unless there is an earlier-filed action or an earlier tolling event I have not found. Treat that as a fact-pattern question to run down, not as a conclusion — I have not located the litigation history (see below).

Second, an IPR-based defense buys you nothing you don't already get from § 282 in litigation — and the invalidity case is still fully available there. Because no IPR was ever filed, there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel against anyone. A defendant today may raise any § 102/§ 103 ground, including art that "reasonably could have been raised" by a hypothetical petitioner, without restriction. The entire prior-art universe cited in the specification — Dutch Patent Application No. 9002296, U.S. Pat. No. 5,468,942 (Oosterveen), and the "The Wireless Store" Symbol brochure (Jan. 1992, p. 15, cited of record) — plus everything else is unrestricted. Practically, the § 102(b) art available against a 1996-09-05/1996-12-20 priority date is deep: self-scanning portable-terminal systems were well developed by the mid-1990s, and the Oosterveen and '296 references in the Background are the patent owner's own admission of the crowded field.

Pattern signals: none, because there is no pattern. No repeat petitioner, no serial petitioner (Unified Patents, RPX, or any defensive aggregator) appears in the record; the patent's ownership history is a straight corporate chain — Symbol Technologies, Inc. → Symbol Technologies, LLC — with no assignment to a non-practicing entity and no litigation-driven transfer. There is no PTAB appeal history to evaluate, and no Federal Circuit appeal of any FWD, because there is no FWD. That is unusual for a patent of this vintage and claimed value (third-party estimates place it in the multi-million-dollar range) and suggests it was monetized through product rather than assertion — the classic profile of an operating-company patent that never attracted a validity challenge because competitors built around it rather than licensing it.

Recommended next steps

1. Do the expiration math before anything else. Confirm the expiration date and any patent term adjustment/extension in the Patent Center file wrapper, then compute the § 286 six-year damages window against the actual complaint filing date. If the asserted complaint postdates 2022-09-05 with no earlier-filed action, the damages exposure is likely nil and the case is largely about past-sales accounting only. Confirm whether any earlier suit, covenant, or tolling agreement exists.
2. Build the § 282 record, not an IPR budget. With no § 315(e)(2) estoppel and no Board claim construction on the books, you have full freedom to run Phillips-style constructions in district court. Attack the two limitation families that carried the claims: (a) the "deactivation controller / marketing message deactivation command" of claims 1 and 14, and (b) the marketing-message-tracking limitations of claims 15–16 (recording message identification plus a "message transmission count" and, in claim 16, a record of subsequent selections of the non-selected product). Claims 15–16 are the most vulnerable to § 103: they recite measurement/logging functionality that a POS-controller record would naturally implement.
3. Mind the family. US 5,825,002 (parent), US 6,199,753, US 6,550,672, US 7,107,221, and US 7,725,326 all descend from or relate to this disclosure. A demand letter citing "the '757 patent" should be checked against the actual asserted patent number — the later continuations have later expiration dates and are not covered by anything in this report. Verify their status independently before assuming the expired '757 dates end the dispute.
4. If you nonetheless want a Board ruling (e.g., to kill a willfulness narrative or to obtain a clean invalidity adjudication), an IPR remains statutorily available against the expired claims, but note the current procedural landscape: under Director Squires' 2025-10-16 memorandum, institution decisions in IPR/PGR are now made by the Director after consultation with at least three APJs, and the October 2025 proposed rules would bar IPRs against patents that have survived a prior validity challenge. Neither changes the economics here.
5. Flag the negative finding appropriately. "No IPR was ever filed on this patent" is a genuine signal, but read it correctly: it is weak evidence of strong claims and strong evidence of a patent that was never worth attacking because it was never asserted. Do not let opposing counsel convert the absence of PTAB activity into a presumption of validity.

Verification trail

• USPTO Open Data Portal "PTAB proceedings on file" block (canonical source provided in prompt) — no AIA trial entries for US 5,979,757.
• US 5,979,757 bibliographic, assignment, and legal-status record: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5979757/en (priority 1996-09-05; filed 1996-12-20; granted 1999-11-09; anticipated expiration 2016-09-05; "Expired - Lifetime"; assignee Symbol Technologies LLC).
• Claim set reproduced from https://www.sumobrain.com/patents/us/Method-system-presenting-item-information/[5979757](/patent/5979757).html (claims 1–16).
• Prior-art references of record cited in the specification/Background: Dutch Patent Application No. 9002296; U.S. Pat. No. 5,468,942 (Oosterveen et al.); "The Wireless Store" (Symbol Technologies brochure, Jan. 1992, p. 15); U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/919,410 (EAS activation/deactivation, assigned to Symbol Technologies).
• Negative cross-check searches run on 2026-09-17 for "5979757" + IPR/PTAB/CBM returned only unrelated patents (11,700,597 / IPR2025-00936; 8,137,757; 8,862,757; 6,928,757; Cisco '597).

Confidence statement: High confidence that no AIA trial proceeding exists on US 5,979,757. Moderate confidence that no ex parte reexamination exists — that proceeding type is outside the ODP AIA-trial block and I could not confirm it either way; check the Patent Center file wrapper. The litigation-history analysis in the Strategic Summary is a framework, not a finding: I did not locate a docket for an assertion of this patent, so the § 286 damages conclusion must be verified against your actual complaint date.

I'll start by verifying the assignment records and looking for litigation/assertion history.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 5979757

Data limitation (read first). I could not pull the Assignment Center record set (reel/frame numbers and the correspondent of record) for this patent in this session — the USPTO Assignment Search UI is not machine-retrievable here, and Google Patents' legal-events table (which is in the source text I was given) exposes the conveyance type, parties, and dates but not reel/frame or correspondent. Everything below is grounded in the Google Patents legal-events chain for US 5979757 and in public corporate-history sources. No reel/frame numbers or correspondent names are stated anywhere in this report because none could be verified — fabricating them would be worse than leaving them blank. Verification should be run manually at the Assignment Center (search by patent number 5979757).

Inventors

Seven named inventors, per the face of the patent: William X. Tracy, Thomas K. Roslak, Judith Murrah, Francis Riso, Robert Beach, Robert Sandler, John Klein.

• Employer at time of filing: Symbol Technologies, Inc. (Holtsville, NY). All are named as assignors of "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST" to Symbol Technologies, Inc. on the 1996-12-20 filing record — contemporaneous with filing, confirming employee-inventor status for the six listed below.
• Record inconsistency worth noting (not a legal conclusion): the 1996-12-20 assignment entry lists only Roslak, Sandler, Tracy, Murrah, Riso and Beach — John Klein does not appear in that recorded assignor list, even though he is a named inventor. This is either (a) an indexing/abridgment artifact of the legal-events table, or (b) a genuinely separate or later-filed assignment instrument for Klein. It cannot be resolved without the reel/frame view. It is a data-quality flag, not evidence of anything.
• Unusual-pattern check (inventor departures within 12 months of filing): Unclear / not determinable. There is no inventor-level employment or departure data in the assignment chain, and Symbol's 1996–1997 workforce records are not in the public record I could reach. No inference should be drawn.

Original assignee

Symbol Technologies, Inc. (Holtsville, New York) — the entity named on the issued patent, via the 1996-12-20 assignment of inventors' rights.

• Line of business: Manufacturer and supplier of mobile data capture and delivery equipment — laser bar-code scanners, handheld/mobile computers, RFID systems, wireless LAN infrastructure. The PPT 4100 / PPT 4600 pen terminals are named in the patent's own background as the assignee's products in this space.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Yes — highly likely, though I cannot tie a specific SKU to specific claims with high confidence. The patent is a component of Symbol's self-scanning / self-checkout program (the specification describes the FIG. 4 terminal 100 with scanner 120, "plus/minus/equals" keys, wireless radio, and dispenser/loyalty-card checkout flow, and the application is a CIP of Symbol's 1996 self-checkout application 08/706,579). Symbol commercialized this exact product concept. Treat "products ship embodying the claims" as well-supported at the portfolio level, not established claim-by-claim.
• Current status of the original corporate family: acquired, not dissolved. Symbol Technologies, Inc. → merged into Motorola, Inc. (2007, ~$3.9B) → Motorola Solutions (2011 spin) → enterprise business, including Symbol, sold to Zebra Technologies (October 2014, $3.45B cash) → Symbol Technologies, Inc. renamed Symbol Technologies, LLC (2015-07-08). Symbol Technologies LLC is today a Zebra Technologies subsidiary headquartered in Holtsville, NY.
• Note on Symbol's history: the company was the subject of a major accounting-fraud scandal (early 2000s, CEO Tomo Razmilovic). That is a securities/management event; it did not produce a bankruptcy sale of the patent portfolio, which matters for signal 6 below.

Assignment timeline

Chronological, from the recorded legal-events chain. Reel/frame and correspondent cannot be supplied — see the data limitation above. Each entry is labelled with the conveyance type exactly as recorded.

• 1996-12-20 (executed) / recorded 1996-12-20 — Reel not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest
  • Assignor: Roslak, Thomas K.; Sandler, Robert; Tracy, William X.; Murrah, Judith; Riso, Francis; Beach, Robert (Klein, John — absent from this entry; see Inventors section)
  • Assignee: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — flag: cannot be assessed
  • Context: standard employee-inventor assignment to the operating company at filing; no third party involved.

• 2005-01-05 (executed date not distinguishable from recording date in this source) — Reel not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Security Interest
  • Assignor: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
  • Assignee: JPMORGAN CHASE BANK, N.A.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — flag: cannot be assessed
  • Context: securitization — blanket collateral grant (mortgage/security interest) under Symbol's senior credit facility, not an ownership transfer. This is a lien, not a sale.

• 2010-12-03 — Reel not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Release by Secured Party
  • Assignor: JPMORGAN CHASE BANK, N.A.
  • Assignee: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — flag: cannot be assessed
  • Context: securitization unwind — release of the 2005 lien; confirms Symbol (by then inside Motorola Solutions) retained ownership throughout.

• 2014-10-31 — Reel not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Security Agreement
  • Assignor: Laser Band, LLC; Symbol Technologies, Inc.; Zebra Enterprise Solutions Corp.; ZIH Corp.
  • Assignee: MORGAN STANLEY SENIOR FUNDING, INC., as Collateral Agent
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — flag: cannot be assessed
  • Context: securitization — cross-collateralized grant by the whole Zebra borrower group securing the debt used for Zebra's October 2014 acquisition of Motorola Solutions' enterprise business. Multiple affiliated obligors on one instrument = a financing, not a portfolio transfer. (ZIH Corp. and Symbol both sit in the Zebra family.)

• 2015-07-08 — Reel not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Change of Name
  • Assignor: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
  • Assignee: Symbol Technologies, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — flag: cannot be assessed
  • Context: internal reorg / change of name only — the corporate form converted from Inc. to LLC inside Zebra; no change in ultimate ownership or control. This is the link that a naive name-scan would misread as an "LLC" red flag; it is not one.

• 2015-08-17 — Reel not retrievable

  • Conveyance: Release by Secured Party
  • Assignor: MORGAN STANLEY SENIOR FUNDING, INC.
  • Assignee: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — flag: cannot be assessed
  • Context: securitization unwind — release of the 2014 security agreement after refinancing; ownership unchanged.

• 2016-09-05 — Anticipated expiration (legal status: Expired – Lifetime)

  • Context: term expiry on the 1996-09-05 priority date. The patent is dead and cannot be asserted by anyone.

Related-but-not-assignment events (do not mistake for conveyances): the priority trail on this docket points to US 08/706,579 (1996-09-05, the CIP parent, US 5825002) and to several continuation/divisional children that claim priority to 5979757 — US 6199753, US 6550672, US 7107221, US 7725326. Those are family relationships, not ownership transfers.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5979757
    1996 : Filed by Symbol Technologies Inc
         : Inventors assign rights to Symbol
    1999 : Patent issued
    2005 : Security interest to JPMorgan Chase
    2010 : JPMorgan releases security interest
    2014 : Security agreement with Morgan Stanley
    2015 : Name change to Symbol Technologies LLC
         : Morgan Stanley releases security interest
    2016 : Patent expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. The only "LLC" in the chain is Symbol Technologies, LLC, created by a Change of Name conveyance (2015-07-08) from Symbol Technologies, Inc. — i.e., the operating subsidiary renamed, not a new licensing vehicle. There is no transfer to an entity with "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" in its name at any point in the 1996–2016 record. The other non-operating names in the chain (JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley Senior Funding) are lenders acting as secured parties, identifiable as such by the conveyance labels "Security Interest" / "Security Agreement" / "Release by Secured Party."

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No recorded assignee in this chain matches any of the listed NPE directories (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities) or any entity I can find surfaced by Unified Patents or RPX as a high-frequency plaintiff. The chain begins and ends inside one corporate family.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / not assessable. This is precisely the signal the Assignment Center export would settle, and I could not retrieve correspondent data. I am recording it as unresolved rather than guessing. Note that even if a single firms handled all six recordings, that would be expected here: five of the six are routine financing lien filings and releases handled by corporate/credit counsel, and one is an in-house name change — recurrence by a corporate-side firm would not be probative of NPE activity. The definitive test is whether the correspondent is a litigation/assertion-side filer; that requires the reel view.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. Six recorded events over nineteen years (1996 → 2015), and the four post-2005 events are two lien/release pairs that net to zero ownership change. There are no consecutive assignments through chained LLCs in under 24 months, no shared registered-agent pattern, and no common-principal transfers. Nothing resembling the rapid shell-to-shell hop pattern.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. I found no infringement suit naming US 5979757 in the searches performed. Accordingly there is no assignment dated within 6 months of a first suit. (Two adjacent facts, useful for calibration: Symbol as plaintiff asserted wireless/Wi-Fi patents against Intermec in Delaware in March 2005, and Zebra/Symbol have been active in ITC § 337 scanner proceedings in the 2020s — but none of those matters is grounded on this patent, and this patent expired 2016-09-05.)

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Symbol Technologies had a well-documented accounting-fraud crisis in the early 2000s, but the exits were mergers and asset acquisitions, not Chapter 7/11 proceedings: Motorola's 2007 merger (~$3.9B) and Zebra's October 2014 purchase of the Motorola Solutions enterprise business ($3.45B cash). No trustee sale, no §363 auction of this patent.

7. Privateering — not present. Every transfer in the chain is to (i) the original operating company, (ii) a lender taking collateral, or (iii) a name-change successor of the same operating company. There is no transfer to a third party that then asserts against the transferor's competitors. Nothing in the record supports an SEC-filing or Patent Progress/EFF-style privateering narrative.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present (and note the inverse: the chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN). I have not verified current LOT Network membership for Zebra Technologies or Symbol Technologies LLC and will not assert it. Ownership remains with the Zebra-affiliated operating company.

Additional neutralizer not on the list: the patent expired 2016-09-05 and its status is Expired – Lifetime. Whatever the assignment history, the asset is unassertable today, which strongly disfavors any NPE-acquisition thesis.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

The chain never leaves the original corporate family: inventors → Symbol Technologies, Inc. (1996-12-20), whose only other recorded counterparties are secured lenders — JPMorgan Chase (security interest 2005-01-05, released 2010-12-03) and Morgan Stanley Senior Funding as collateral agent for the Zebra borrower group (security agreement 2014-10-31, released 2015-08-17) — followed by a pure Change of Name to Symbol Technologies, LLC (2015-07-08). That is the profile of a large operating supplier (Symbol → Motorola 2007 → Zebra 2014) financing itself, not of a patent monetization vehicle; there is no licensing-only assignee, no asserter from any public NPE list, and no cascading LLC transfers. Caveat I will not paper over: the "assertion" limb of this verdict is unproven for this patent — I found no suit naming US 5979757, and the patent expired 2016-09-05, so it cannot be asserted now. The correct reading is "operating-company-owned, never NPE-touched, now expired," and the most valuable next step is a manual Assignment Center pull to fill in the reel/frame and correspondent fields this report had to leave blank.

Verify at: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 5979757); alternate interface https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html . Patent record: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5979757/en .

I'll search for the specific patent's citation records before analyzing prior art.

Let me pull the specific citation lists for this patent from multiple sources.

Prior-art analysis — US 5,979,757 (Tracy et al.)

Tool-status disclosure: my tool budget was exhausted partway through this task. I completed the citation-list retrievals quoted below, but was cut off before I could open the Google Patents "Patent Citations" table for US5979757A directly and before I could run confirmatory lookups on individual references. Everything below states what I actually retrieved. Where I am inferring rather than confirming, I say so.

1. USPTO-database search for the exact number 5979757

No other patent number was accepted as a hit. I did not substitute 5,979,753 (Roslak), 5,979,757-adjacent numbers, or any other near-identical number in place of 5979757; where a near-number appears below (e.g. US 5,979,753) it is because it genuinely appears inside a citation list, and it is labeled as such.

2. ⚠️ Critical sourcing caveat — read before using the tables

I could not retrieve the "References Cited" list printed on the face of US 5,979,757 itself. The sumobrain record for 5979757 surfaced only its foreign references and one "Other Reference," and then truncated:

Foreign References: EP0619662A2 | 1994-10-12 | Protocol for packet data communication system … EP0697793A2 | 1996-02-21 | Multimedia service access apparatus and method … EP0744856A2 | 1996-11-27 | Apparatus for and method of utilizing product identifier codes to establish communication connections … NL9002296A | 1992-05-18 … WO1990016033A1 | 1990-12-27 | HAND-HELD DATA CAPTURE SYSTEM WITH INTERCHANGEABLE MODULES
Other References: The Wireless Store, The Strategic Enviroment for Retailing's Future (Symbol Technologies Brochure) Jan. 1992, p. 15.
— sumobrain.com/patents/us/Method-system-presenting-item-information/5979757.html

The full U.S.-patent reference lists I did recover come from same-family continuations that share the 5,979,757 specification: US 7,725,326 B1 and US 7,107,221 ("METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR PRESENTING ITEM INFORMATION USING A PORTABLE DATA TERMINAL"). Those lists are the best available proxy, but they are not identical to the 1999 face list — a 2006/2010 continuation cites later-issued documents (e.g. US 6,199,733 (2001), US 7,040,541 (2006)) that could not have been cited against a 1999 patent. Treat the proxy list as superset-plus-subset: reliable in flavor, unreliable in boundary.

What this means for the deliverable: the per-reference claim mapping below is my own screening-level §102 analysis, not an examiner's rejection. I do not have the full text of most of these references in front of me.

3. References cited (family list), with dates and relevance

3.1 U.S. patent documents

Note on the "Rosiak"/"Roslak" variants and the "Curbeb"/"Uncada" names: these appear with the spellings shown in the retrieved lists. Per the literal-interpretation rule I have not normalized them.

3.2 Foreign patent documents

Discrepancy flag (not auto-corrected): the US 7,725,326 PDF renders two of these as "EP 2276258 9/1994" and "NL 9020206 10/1990," whereas the US 7,107,221 listing renders them "GB2276258A 1994-09-21" and "NL9002296A 1992-05-18." The NL 9002296 reading is consistent with the 5,979,757 specification's own citation of the '296 Application. I record both renderings as found.

3.3 Non-patent literature ("Other References")

4. Date gate — which of these can actually anticipate

Pre-AIA analysis governs (filed 1996-12-20, priority 1996-09-05):

• Art dated before 1996-09-05 (e.g. NL 9002296, WO 90/08440, WO 90/16033, WO 92/20030, EP 0 619 662, EP 0 697 793, US 4,071,740 through US 5,490,060, US 5,250,789, US 5,469,242, the Symbol brochure and the Discount Store News/Kiosk items) is available under §102(a)/(b) for claims entitled to the 1996-09-05 parent date.
• Art published between 1996-09-05 and 1996-12-20 — this is exactly where EP 0 744 856 A2 (1996-11-27) and the 1996-11-03 Newsbytes item fall, and the Straits Times item falls just before the window at 1996-09-04. These are available only against claim subject matter that is new matter first supported in the 1996-12-20 CIP, not against subject matter carried over from Ser. No. 08/706,579. That distinction is decisive for any claim that recites the hyperlink/URL/remote-file-retrieval feature specifically.
• Art dated 1997–2007 (US 5,595,264, 5,608,786, 5,729,697, 5,761,648, 5,820,062-era, all the 6,xxx and 7,xxx documents) cannot anticipate US 5,979,757. Their presence in the family list is an artifact of the continuations, not evidence they were cited in 1999. I flag this explicitly because it is the most likely way a reader would mis-use the table above.

5. Screening assessment by independent claim

Given the above, and stated as my analysis rather than examiner findings:

Claim 1 (product info file + portable terminal with integrated reader/display/wireless radio + "product information discriminator" that delivers matching information on reading the label + deactivation controller). No single listed reference appears to disclose all of elements (a)–(d). The closest are US 5,250,789 (Johnson), WO 90/08440, US 5,047,614 (Bianco) and EP 0 744 856 — but as between them, the wireless-radio and deactivation-limitation elements are the likely points of novelty. I cannot confirm any of these as a §102 anticipation without reading their full texts, and a §103 combination against claim 1 is the more realistic exposure.

Claim 14 (portable terminal for self-checkout receiving a plurality of in-aisle marketing messages in response to reading a label of a customer-desired product, with a marketing-message deactivation command). Anticipated-in-substance art for the self-scan terminal half is strong: NL 9002296, US 5,469,242 (Oosterveen et al.), US 5,469,206 (Strubbe et al.), US 4,929,819 (Collins), US 4,940,116 (O'Connor et al.), US 1,559,264 (i.e. US 5,595,264 — date-gated as noted). The deactivation command element is the distinguishing hook and I have found no listing squarely on it.

Claim 15 (message distribution + message controller recording messages delivered to the selected terminal + a message transmission count). I found no listed reference that clearly discloses the transmission-count element. This is the claim most likely to survive cited art on the record as retrieved.

Dependent claims with defensible §102 grounding:

• 8 (nutritional/product value displayed) — US 4,973,952 and US 5,490,060 (Malec et al.); US 5,047,614.
• 9 (discount coupon) — US 4,949,256 (Humble); US 5,173,851 (Off et al.); WO 92/20030; US 5,250,789.
• 10 (notice of a related product) — US 4,833,308 (Humble); US 5,173,851.
• 11 (spread-spectrum radio in the 2.4 GHz band) — EP 0 619 662; WO 90/16033.
• 12 / 13 (bar-code label; bar-code reader / laser scanner) — US 4,071,740; US 4,634,845; US 4,929,819; US 5,469,242; NL 9002296.
• 2 / 5 (customer data file with prior-purchase history; name/address/telephone) — US 4,947,028 (Gorog); US 5,072,380 (Randelman et al.).
• 16 (record of how many times the prompted product was subsequently scanned) — no listed reference; likely a genuine point of novelty.
• 3 / 4 (discriminator located on host vs. on terminal, with periodic wireless updates) — none confirmed; 4 in particular reads as a deliberate distinction over the dumb-terminal prior art.

6. Contradictions with the previously generated sections

1. Oosterveen patent number. The prior section records the specification as citing "U.S. Pat. No. 5,468,942 to Oosterveen et al." The family reference list contains "5,469,242 A — 11/1995 — Oosterveen et al." These are different numbers and I am not auto-correcting either; both are recorded as they appear. This should be resolved against the printed face of US 5,979,757 before it is relied on.
2. Reference-list provenance. The prior section did not present a reference list at all. The list in §3 above is drawn from continuation-family documents (US 7,725,326 and US 7,107,221), which is not the same as the 1999 face list. If the 5,979,757 face list is materially shorter, several 1997–2000 entries above must be struck.
3. No conflict with the prior section's priority-chain, assignee, or expiration findings.
4. Unchanged uncertainty flag: I still found no 2026 CAFC docket activity for 5,979,757, and I still have not queried USPTO PatentCenter or the Federal Circuit docket system directly.

7. What I would do next, if the tool budget allowed

1. Open https://patents.google.com/patent/US5979757A/en and read the "Patent Citations" table verbatim — that is the only authoritative statement of what was cited in 1999.
2. Pull the USPTO PatentCenter "References Cited" tab for application 08/771,463.
3. Retrieve full texts of US 5,250,789, US 5,469,242, WO 90/08440 and EP 0 744 856 A2 to test the claim-1 and claim-14 mappings.
4. Check whether the prosecution history contains any §102 rejection — none of my searches surfaced one.

I'll pull the actual prior-art reference lists for this patent before analyzing.

Let me get the complete U.S. and foreign reference lists from multiple sources.

Now let me retrieve the U.S. patent references and the key foreign references.

Obviousness Analysis — US 5,979,757 under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a)

0. What I could and could not confirm from the "Prior Art" section of this page

Before the analysis, a rule-required disclosure. The authoritative Google Patents text supplied in your prompt is truncated before the "References Cited" tables, and my live searches returned the foreign and non-patent reference lists but not the U.S. Patent Documents list. So I will ground the analysis in what I can actually confirm and explicitly flag anything else.

Confirmed from the record (sumobrain's reproduction of the printed patent's front page, cross-checked against Google Patents):

Also confirmed as "Prior art keywords" on the Google Patents page: customer, portable terminal, information, item, product. ⚠️ These are Google's algorithmically generated topical keywords, not references. I treat them as evidence of the art's topical scope only, never as prior art.

Explicitly not confirmed. I could not verify which U.S. patents appear in the front-page "U.S. Patent Documents" list. I therefore do not name candidate U.S. numbers (e.g., the Bianco/Johnsen/Hillary/Fitch/Blonstein class of 1990–1995 POS and portable-shopping patents) as being on this list. Where I use such art below, I label it as training-data knowledge, not confirmed from this page, per the operating rules. I note the practical consequence: a rigorous § 103 challenge should be run from the actual ITS/IDS record, not from my reconstruction.

1. Governing framework

Pre-AIA § 103(a) applies (filed 1996-12-20). The analysis proceeds under Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) — scope/content of the prior art, differences, PHOSITA level, secondary considerations — as elaborated by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) (a combination of known elements is obvious where it yields no more than predictable results; a "finite number of identified, predictable solutions" makes it "obvious to try"). In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413 (CCPA 1981) supplies the combination test (each reference need not teach the whole combination; it is enough that the claimed subject matter as a whole would have been obvious). MPEP §§ 2141–2144 govern.

Effective filing date — a date sensitivity that matters here. US 08/771,463 is a continuation-in-part of 08/706,579 (filed 1996-09-05, issued as US 5,825,002). Claims supported by the parent get the 1996-09-05 date (so the § 102(b) critical date is 1995-09-05); claim scope resting on new matter gets only 1996-12-20 (critical date 1995-12-20). Consequence:

• EP 0619662 (1994-10-12) and WO 90/16033 (1990-12-27), NL 9002296 (1992-05-18) → clean § 102(b) art either way.
• EP 0697793 (1996-02-21) → within the one-year grace period → § 102(a) art (known/published before invention), not § 102(b).
• EP 0744856 (1996-11-27) → published six days before the parent's priority date but after it for grace purposes; it is § 102(a) art only, and only against claims not entitled to the 1996-09-05 date. A Rule 131 / benefit showing would knock it out for supported claims.
• US 5,468,942 (issued 1995-11-21 per my recollection — date not confirmed from the page) is likewise within the grace period; however, because the '757 specification expressly cites it as describing the state of the art, it is admitted prior art and usable regardless of its § 102 category.

Commonly-owned family is not art. US 5,825,002 (the CIP parent) and the co-pending "INTRANET SCANNING TERMINAL SYSTEM" application share the inventive entity/common ownership and cannot be used against the '757 claims (§ 103(c) pre-AIA).

PHOSITA. A person with a B.S. in electrical engineering or computer science and 2–3 years' experience in portable data-collection terminals, wireless LANs, or retail POS systems — familiar with the Symbol PPT 4100/4600 line, PCMCIA radios, TCP/IP, and HTML-era browser UIs.

2. The most important prior art is the patent's own Background and Summary

In re the Graham "scope and content" factor, the '757 specification makes damaging admissions:

1. "The use of data collecting portable computing terminals such as the PPT 4100 and the PPT 4600 manufactured by Symbol Technologies… has been adopted in many commercial applications. These terminal systems may include integrated bar code readers… [and] **may also be provided with wireless communication radio systems such as… 'SPECTRUM24™'." → admits (b) of claim 1 (portable terminal + integrated code reader + wireless radio).
2. "The SPECTRUM24™ radio network system permits hand-held terminals to share and retrieve data in the proximity of local area networks with a central host." → admits the wireless-to-host retrieval architecture.
3. "'296… and the Oosterveen Patent describe systems in which an authorized customer is issued a terminal having an integrated bar code scanner to record merchandise purchases." → admits the self-scan premise of claims 1, 14, 15.
4. "Commercially available prior art self-checkout systems have employed relatively simple and unsophisticated consumer systems which have generally been limited to providing simple pricing and product identification information." → admits that scanning an item caused item identification/pricing to be presented to the consumer — i.e., a "product information discriminator" in substance, if not in name.
5. SPECTRUM24™ is described as frequency-hopping in 2 to 2.5 GHz with >70 non-overlapping frequencies, and the radio as "a Symbol SPECTRUM24™ PCMCIA type II card… conforming to Draft D5 of IEEE proposed standard 802.11," incorporated by reference → admits nearly all of claim 11.
6. The EAS activation/deactivation circuit is admitted as "described in pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/919,410… assigned to Symbol Technologies, Inc."

Point 4 is the pivotal admission: the only meaningful delta between claim 1 and the admitted art is (i) wireless delivery of that already-presented information to the handheld's display upon reading, and (ii) the deactivation controller.

3. Claim-by-claim obviousness

Claim 1 — system for presenting item information

Bottom line: claim 1 is the broadest claim in the patent and the easiest to invalidate. A combination of (admitted prior art = Oosterveen/NL '296/PPT-class terminals) + EP 0744856 + a conventional suppression control renders it obvious. Its own written description supports this reading: the disclosure describes the suppression function as an "on/off button 79" and even an "off button [that] will not disengage… urgent messages" — a design choice, not an inventive discovery.

Claim 14 — portable terminal with in-aisle marketing messages + deactivation command

Caveat on the reference date for EP 0697793 (1996-02-21): it is § 102(a) art only, and only absent a successful antedating showing for claims entitled to 1996-09-05. The Wireless Store brochure (1992) has no such problem and independently supplies in-store wireless retail marketing.

Claim 15 — system with delivery recording + message transmission count

Claim 15 is the most exposed to a "routine data processing" rejection: its distinguishing feature is a tally of transmissions, which is arithmetic on data the system already handles.

Dependent claims 2–13, 16 (grouped)

4. Enumerated combinations with explicit motivation

Combination A (core, attacks claims 1, 12, 13).
Oosterveen '942 + NL 9002296 + EP 0744856A2 + the PPT 4100/SPECTRUM24 admissions.
Motivation: same field (self-scanning retail terminals); both references teach scanning an item and presenting that item's information; EP 0744856 supplies the express teaching that scanned product identifier codes establish the communication connection to the associated information; the wireless radio and integrated reader are admitted as known. Predictable result, no functional change.

Combination B (claims 1(d), 14).
Combination A + The Wireless Store (1992) + EP 0697793A2 for in-aisle marketing + a conventional user-operable suppression control.
Motivation: the brochure evidences an existing commercial objective to push targeted promotions to in-aisle terminals; once messages are pushed, a user "off" control is an obvious accommodation responding to an admitted consumer-relations problem. KSR "design incentive, market demand."

Combination C (claims 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 15, 16).
Combination B + a loyalty-card customer database on the admitted IBM 4680/90-class host POS controller (which the spec itself says "maintains statistical data as to purchases, discounts, inventory, and promotional information") + conventional impression/redemption counting.
Motivation: measure and bill advertising, target offers, drive basket size — all standard retail-marketing objectives, achieved with conventional database and arithmetic operations.

Combination D (claim 11).
EP 0619662A2 + IEEE 802.11 Draft D5 (incorporated by reference in the spec) + the admitted SPECTRUM24™ characteristics (frequency hopping, 2–2.5 GHz, >70 non-overlapping frequencies, PCMCIA II).
Motivation: the standard was published and expressly available; using a standardized spread-spectrum radio in the band the system already occupied is the very definition of a predictable variation.

Combination E (claims 4, 8–10).
Combination C + symmetric thin-client/thick-client deployment + EP 0697793A2 content types.
Motivation: trade-off between terminal battery/memory cost and network latency; a finite, identified set of design options (KSR "obvious to try").

5. Where an obviousness challenge is weakest (and strongest)

Weakest attack — claims 1(d) and 14's "deactivation" limitation, if the defendant reads the claim narrowly to require a hardware/software "controller" that disables the discriminator's delivery function rather than merely muting output. A patent owner would argue the references show only message routing/formatting, not suppression of the retrieval pipeline. Counter: the specification's own FIG. 2 description of "on/off button 79" and the reconfiguration key does not describe disabling retrieval, only transmission to the consumer — so the narrow reading may be unsupported by the written description, creating a § 112 written-description problem for the patentee. Either way the patent owner loses ground: broad reading = invalid; narrow reading = unsupported / not infringed.

Weakest attack — claim 15's "message transmission count." Anticipate argument that a purpose-specific counter tied to which terminal received which message is not routine. Rebut with: (a) conventional logging in the admitted host POS controller; (b) advertising impression counting is an old, well-documented practice; (c) no unexpected result is disclosed.

Strongest attack — claim 11 (spread spectrum 2.4 GHz) is nearly dead on the specification's own admissions, and claims 12–13 are anticipated by the admitted Oosterveen/'296/WO 90/16033 art. Claims 2, 5, 7 are close to de facto admitted conventional.

Secondary considerations. Under Graham/KSR, look for: (i) commercial success of Symbol's self-shopping deployments (patentleaderboard.com estimates a ~$7.07M value for this patent — a valuation signal, not evidence of nexus); (ii) long-felt need for richer product information in self-scanning; (iii) failure of others — but Oosterveen/'296 were commercialized, weakening this; (iv) licensing/industry praise (eWEEK/NCR-class interest in handheld shopping). Each requires a nexus to the claimed features, and the Wireless Store brochure (1992) tends to defeat any claim that in-store wireless marketing was a novel insight of the '757 inventors.

Practical posture. The patent is Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 2016-09-05), and a challenge filed on today's date (April 26, 2026 — note this differs from the 2026-09-17 date used earlier in this analysis) would be non-monetary: 35 U.S.C. § 286 limits back damages to six years, i.e., to roughly April 2020 — after expiration. An IPR on a lapsed patent is legally available but commercially pointless absent a collateral estoppel or defensive-publication objective.

6. Contradictions and uncertainty flags (per the strict no-auto-correct rule)

1. Contradiction with the earlier section's date. The previously generated sections state today's date as 2026-09-17; this task states April 26, 2026. Flagged, not reconciled. It changes nothing material here.
2. No 2026 CAFC docket activity (carried over) — and I add that the 2016 expiration makes such litigation unlikely.
3. U.S. reference list not verified. As stated in § 0, I did not retrieve the front-page "U.S. Patent Documents" list. Any U.S. patent numbers a litigant would rely on must be confirmed against the printed patent / IDS.
4. US 5,468,942 issue date (1995-11-21) is from my recollection, not confirmed from this page; its status as § 102(b) vs. § 102(a) art therefore cannot be fixed. Its value as admitted prior art (spec text expressly cites it) is unaffected.
5. EP 0744856A2's prior-art status is date-dependent (§ 102(a) only; antedatable via the 1996-09-05 parent for supported claims). Do not treat it as ordinary § 102(b) art.
6. "Uniform resurrect locators (URLS)" — quoted exactly as written in the specification; I have not corrected it to "uniform resource locators," per the literal-interpretation rule. Note it appears in the Summary/Definitions text drawn from the Google Patents record.
7. Google Patents "Prior art keywords" are not references — they are ML-generated topical tags and carry no evidentiary weight.