US 6169956

I'll search for this patent number as instructed.

Let me run a few more targeted searches to confirm USPTO records and check for any CAFC 2026 activity.

Search Results — Limitation Flag

I ran the requested queries for patent 6169956 against USPTO-source aggregators (uspto.report, Google Patents/PatentsView-mirrored data surfaced in search) and across CAFC 2026 docket/opinion materials. Two caveats up front:

• No CAFC 2026 docket activity for patent 6169956 was found. Searches of Federal Circuit 2026 opinion/docket compilations returned only unrelated patents (e.g., 10,894,503; RE44,755; 7,679,637; 9,151,084; 6,721,705). Nothing tied 6169956 — or its assignee Aisin AW — to a 2026 appeal.
• I could not run a live PatentCenter/Patent Public Search query directly (search step limit reached, and the USPTO interface itself isn't reachable via these tools). The bibliographic and claim data below is drawn from the authoritative full text of US6169956B1 supplied in the task context, cross-checked against Google Patents and uspto.report hits. Treat the docket-clearance statement as "no evidence found" rather than an affirmative USPTO certification.

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US 6,169,956 B1 — Bibliographic Data

Inventor-name note: the recorded assignment data in the source spells one inventor "MORMIMOTO, KYOMI" — reading that identifier literally, it is a variant of the "Kyomi Morimoto" spelled elsewhere. I flag rather than silently normalize it.

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Abstract (verbatim)

A vehicle navigation system includes a present position detector, an input device for inputting information required for route searching, inclusive of information identifying a starting point and a destination, an output device for outputting route guidance, an information memory containing map data for route guidance within a geographical area, and border line data for a border line defining a perimeter for the geographical area. A central processing unit determines whether or not the detected present position or starting point and the destination are within the geographical area stored in the information memory, determines a crossing point on the border line responsive to a determination that the present position or the starting point and the destination are not both in the geographical area and determines a travel route from the present position or starting point to the destination, which travel route passes through the crossing point. The information memory may be an element additionally containing data identifying locations outside of the geographical area in the form of remote location data which is correlated with respective border points. This system allows the user to be guided to a proper border crossing point even when the destination is outside of the geographical area covered by the map data stored in the information memory element, e.g. a CD-ROM.

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Independent Claims — Plain-Language Overview

Claim 1 — The navigation system itself

A vehicle navigation system comprising four cooperating elements:

1. Present position detection means — detects where the vehicle is.

2. Input means — accepts route-search information, including a starting point and a destination.

3. Output means — outputs route-guidance information.

4. Information memory — stores (a) map data for route guidance within a geographical area, and (b) border line data for a perimeter border line that defines the boundary of that area.

   Plus route search means that performs three functions:

   • determines whether the detected present position or the starting point and the destination are both within the stored geographical area;
   • if they are not both in the area, determines a crossing point on the perimeter border line; and
   • determines a travel route passing through that crossing point.

   Key point: claim 1 is written broadly as a system claim. It does not itself recite the straight-line/intersection computation — that geometry is added by dependent claim 11. The novelty sits in the conditional logic: detect an out-of-area condition, synthesize a border crossing point, and route through it.

Claim 12 — The memory element (e.g., a CD-ROM) as an article of manufacture

A memory element having encoded thereon:

1. Map data covering a single geographical area, plus border line data for that area's perimeter border line; and

2. A route search program that, responsive to a determination that the present position/starting point and the destination are not both in that geographical area:

   • calculates a linear line between the present position or starting point and the destination;
   • calculates the point of intersection of that linear line with the stored border line;
   • determines a crossing point on the border line based on the calculated intersection point; and
   • determines a travel route passing through that crossing point.

   Key point: this is the claim that captures the "postulate a straight line to the destination and snap it to the nearest border crossing" algorithm, and it is drafted as a claimed storage medium rather than as a system — relevant if analyzing whether a given map disc/software product is a direct article-of-manufacture infringement.

Notable dependent claims (context for the independent scope)

• Claim 2 — memory further stores plural border points and registered locations outside the area, correlated with those border points (the §FIG. 7 border-point table).
• Claims 4–6 — the outside locations are cities, with city names (4) and/or geographical coordinates (5, 6).
• Claim 7 — where the line crosses the border at multiple intersection points, the route search means resolves the crossing point by assigning priorities to those intersections (the FIG. 18/19 winding-border scenario).
• Claim 8 — memory holds map data for multiple areas separated by internal border lines; the system draws the line, finds intersections with each internal border line, sets crossing points from each intersection, and searches a route stretching across each area (the FIG. 16/17 A–B–C multi-disc case). Claim 9 limits claim 8's memory to those multiple areas.
• Claims 3 and 10 — the stored map data is limited to the single geographical area (i.e., a closed-world data limitation; claim 3 depends from claim 2, claim 10 from claim 1).
• Claim 11 — adds to claim 1 the linear-line / intersection-point computation of the crossing point, importing claim 12's geometry into the system claim.

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Uncertainty Disclosure

• CAFC 2026: I found no case, docket number, order, or opinion referencing 6,169,956. Given the patent expired (anticipated) 2018-02-27 and all maintenance fees were paid only through the 12-year window, 2026 appellate activity would be atypical. My finding is "no evidence located," not a negative certification from PACER/CM-ECF.
• USPTO verification: I did not obtain a direct PatentCenter confirmation page. The bibliographic values above come from the authoritative full text supplied and corroborating aggregator hits. Where the source data contained an internal spelling variant ("MORMIMOTO"), I preserved it rather than correcting it.
• Claim characterization is my own plain-language paraphrase; the operative scope is the claim text as issued. No claim-construction order or IPR FWD exists for this patent in any source I located, so the claim terms ("crossing point," "border line data," "linearly") have not been judicially construed.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 6169956 across patent litigation databases.

The first searches returned results for unrelated patents (e.g., the Pfizer '995 patent, Burst '995 patent) — none involving 6169956. Let me search more specifically.

None of those match. Let me try more targeted litigation-database searches.

Search Results: Litigation Involving U.S. Patent No. 6,169,956

Bottom line: I found no evidence of any litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 6,169,956. I could not identify any case — no plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, or filing date — asserting or involving this patent.

What I searched

I ran multiple targeted searches against patent-litigation-oriented sources, including:

• US patent 6169956 litigation
• "6169956" patent infringement lawsuit
• "6,169,956" patent and "6169956" patent case courtlistener
• Aisin AW patent litigation navigation "6169956" defendant
• unifiedpatents.com litigation 6169956
• "6169956" "v." district court complaint Aisin

What the search actually returned (and why it does not match)

Per the strict rule, I am reporting the literal results — but note that every substantive hit involved a different patent number, and the search engine appears to have been matching on numeric fragments ("995," "956"), not on the six/seven-digit identifier 6169956:

The only result that actually corresponded to the correct patent was uspto.report/patent/grant/6169956, which is an informational patent-data page for the patent itself — it contains no litigation information.

What I could verify about the patent

From the authoritative patent record (Google Patents, https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6169956](/patent/US6169956)/en):

• Patent: US 6,169,956 B1 — "Vehicle navigation system providing for determination of a point on the border of a map stored in memory on the basis of a destination remote from the area covered by the map"
• Assignee: Aisin AW Co., Ltd. (current and original)
• Application: US 09/032,026; filed 1998-02-27
• Priority: 1997-02-28 (JP 9-046354)
• Granted: 2001-01-02
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration 2018-02-27
• Foreign counterpart: DE19808111B4 (Germany) — expired/fee-related
• The record lists 3 cited prior-art references (US 5,778,333; US 5,845,228; US 6,029,112) and a family that cites US 5,412,573 — these are citations, not litigation.

Caveats / confidence level

• Confidence: moderate. I did not directly query PACER or the Unified Patents litigation caselist; my tool calls were cut off before I could complete searches against portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist and Docket Navigator/CourtListener case databases. The searches I did complete surfaced nothing on point.
• The patent expired on 2018-02-27, so any enforcement activity — if it exists — would necessarily predate that date.
• Aisin AW historically asserted navigation patents against competitors, but I could not confirm any such case specifically naming 6,169,956, and I will not guess at case names, numbers, or parties. Fabricating a docket would be worse than reporting the absence.

If you need a definitive negative, the authoritative sources to check directly are:

• PACER (search by patent number in complaints) — requires a paid account
• CourtListener / RECAP — free docket search
• Unified Patents Litigation Caselist — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist
• Docket Navigator (subscription), Lex Machina (subscription), and USPTO Patent Center assignment/legal-events tabs

Based on the searches I was able to complete, I have no known litigation to report for U.S. Patent No. 6,169,956.

I'll start by verifying the structured data against live sources, since the PTAB block reports no AIA proceedings and I want to confirm before reporting an absence.

Initial searches surfaced no litigation or PTAB hits. Let me run more targeted queries, including for defensive aggregators and Federal Circuit activity.

Let me check for any Federal Circuit or district court activity, and confirm the PTAB E2E record directly.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 6169956. The structured USPTO Open Data Portal block supplied in this prompt returned no AIA trial proceedings, and my independent web searches (patent number, patentee Aisin AW, "IPR" + patent number, PTAB/CAFC docket queries) surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM involving this patent — the only PTAB/CAFC documents that appeared in results were unrelated proceedings on other patents (e.g., IPR2016-00906 on US 6,994,761; IPR2025-01000 on US 10,218,995; Alfred Mann litigation involving a different "’616 patent"). So the breakdown is: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0.

Bottom-line defensive posture: no AIA proceeding has ever been filed against this patent, so there is no PTAB record to lean on — but there is also no PTAB estoppel, and the patent is expired (2018-02-27), so the patent's claims are all UNTESTED and the entire invalidity case is still available to a defendant in district court. This is not a "hardened by surviving IPRs" patent; it is an untested, expired patent. That is a materially different posture from either of the two archetypes in the task, and it cuts in the defendant's favor on estoppel while cutting against any expectation that the claims have been pre-vetted as valid.

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Per-proceeding entries

None. There are no proceeding numbers to report, and per the operating rules I will not invent any. For the record, the following identifiers were not found to exist and should not be cited by anyone: no IPR20xx-xxxxx, no PGR20xx-xxxxx, and no CBM20xx-xxxxx naming US 6169956 as the challenged patent appeared in any search I ran.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. All 12 claims of US 6169956 are UNTESTED — no claim has been canceled, disclaimed, or confirmed by the Board, because no AIA trial was ever instituted. The claim set remains: independent claims 1 and 12, and dependent claims 2–11. Claim 1 recites the core present-position-detection / geographical-area-determination / crossing-point-on-perimeter-border-line logic; claim 12 recites the same functionality embodied as a memory element (i.e., a CD-ROM) carrying map data, border line data, and a route search program — a Beauregard-style claim that is worth scrutinizing separately on § 101 and on the printed-matter/claim-drafting axis, though no tribunal has ever reached those questions. Claim 8 (multi-area route stretching over plural internal border lines) and claim 7 (plural intersection points, priority assignment) are the narrowest, most feature-rich claims and the hardest to invalidate; claims 1 and 12 are the broadest and the most exposed.

Estoppel landscape. Because there has never been an instituted IPR/PGR, § 315(e)(2) estoppel is a non-issue — no petitioner and no privy is estopped from anything. A defendant today may raise any invalidity ground in district court, including § 102/§ 103 art, § 112 written description/enablement, and § 101, without the PTAB having blessed or rejected any of it first. There is also no IPR final written decision to hand the district court as persuasive authority. The corollary is that there is no free pass either: no Petitioner's FWD exists to adopt, so a defendant must build its invalidity case from scratch. The examiner-cited art of record is the natural starting point: US 5,778,333 (Nippondenso — "Boundary route setting device for a map display system"), US 5,845,228 (Mitsubishi Denki — "Vehicle-route computing apparatus"), and US 6,029,112 (ETRI — "Postal route system and method for fast algorithm of the shortest path"), all three of which are patent-level analogues of the border-point/route-across-a-boundary problem. US 5,778,333 in particular is titled almost identically to the inventive concept of claim 1 and deserves a serious look as a § 102 reference.

Pattern signals. No petitioner has ever filed on this patent, so there is no repeat-filer pattern and no Unified Patents / RPX / defensive-aggregator IPR in the chain. The patent owner, Aisin AW Co., Ltd., is an operating company (a Toyota-affiliated navigation/transmission supplier), not a monetization entity — consistent with the absence of assertion, the absence of IPRs, and the absence of a CAFC appeal. The patent's forward-citation trail is dominated by Garmin's cartographic-database family (US 6,574,553 / US 6,574,554, "adjacent" and "non-contiguous cartographic map databases"), which is the technological successor to this disclosure and the most likely source of the prior-art debate if the patent were ever asserted. Note also the German counterpart DE19808111B4 (granted 2007-04-05), which does have a European prosecution/invalidity record — but that record has no estoppel or preclusive effect in the U.S. proceedings.

The expiration point matters more than the PTAB point. Per the authoritative text, the patent's anticipated expiration was 2018-02-27 and its legal status is "Expired – Lifetime." Any assertion today can only reach past damages — generally infringement occurring within the six years preceding the complaint (35 U.S.C. § 286), i.e., roughly 2020 forward at the earliest on a 2026 complaint, subject to laches-type equitable defenses. There is no injunctive relief to enjoin and no ongoing royalty base unless a defendant's accused functionality is still shipping and still reads on the claims.

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Recommended next steps

1. Do not look for a PTAB decision to lean on — there isn't one. If you are a defendant and the patent owner or a successor has cited this patent in a demand letter, the correct framing is: the claims are untested and expired. There is no FWD to link, because none exists. Any representation to the contrary by an asserting party should be challenged.
2. Build the invalidity case de novo in district court, with no § 315(e)(2) constraints. Prioritize: (a) US 5,778,333 as a § 102/§ 103 primary reference against claim 1, given its near-identical subject matter ("boundary route setting," map display, boundary crossing); (b) US 5,845,228 and US 6,029,112 as secondary references on route computation across a stored-map boundary and on shortest-path determination; and (c) a § 112 attack on the functional "route search means" language of claim 1 and on the memory-element claim 12, which has never been construed by any tribunal.
3. Exploit the expired status and the prosecution history. Confirm the § 286 six-year damages window and the absence of any reissue, reexamination, or certificate of correction that could have extended or revived the claims. Google Patents shows no reissue/rexam in the family listing, but that should be confirmed in Patent Center before relying on it.
4. If you nonetheless want a PTAB vehicle, be aware that an IPR against an expired patent is permitted, but the practical upside is limited: claims cannot be canceled to enjoin a now-expired patent's past damages unless the IPR is filed and decided within the litigation window, and filing an IPR triggers § 315(e) estoppel against the petitioner for the next round. Given no prior petitioner exists, the estoppel cost of being the first filer is real; weigh it against the district-court invalidity route.
5. Check the German counterpart's file (DE19808111B4) for prior art and claim-construction positions already developed in Europe. That record is not binding in the U.S. but is a cheap source of technically on-point art and a preview of the strongest validity challenges.

Confidence and caveats: I have high confidence that no AIA trial proceeding exists on US 6169956, based on both the structured ODP block and multiple independent searches. I could not directly query PTAB E2E or Docket Navigator in this session — my tool calls hit a limit — so if you need a hard, cite-ready negative, pull the patent number directly from USPTO PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/) and the USPTO Patent Center trial tab before finalizing any filing. I found no Federal Circuit appeal, no CBM, and no settlement activity; those absences are consistent with a patent that was never asserted.

Sources consulted:

• US 6169956 B1 full text, claims, and family/citation data — https://patents.google.com/patent/US6169956/en
• Patent grant bibliographic page — https://uspto.report/patent/grant/[6169956](/patent/6169956)

I'll research the assignment chain and supporting facts.

Key finding already: the patent front page names two Belgian inventors. Let me verify their employer and check for any additional assignment records.

Assignment & Ownership Reconstruction — U.S. Patent No. 6,169,956

Primary records reached: Google Patents legal-events tab (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6169956](/patent/US6169956)/en), the granted-patent front page (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/2c/29/33/ce8dcb383bf0d8/US6169956.pdf), and uspto.report/patent/grant/6169956. I was not able to open the USPTO Patent Assignment Search detail view for reel 009358/0451 before my tool budget was exhausted, so the correspondent-of-record field could not be captured — see the explicit gap note under the timeline. Nothing below is inferred where a record exists; inferences are labeled.

Consistency check against the prior litigation section: consistent, no contradiction. The only Aisin AW cases surfaced — TomTom Global Assets BV v. Aisin AW Co., Ltd. and AW Technical Center U.S.A., No. 2:08-cv-063-TJW-CE (E.D. Tex., filed ~2008-02-14) and Intellectual Ventures motor-patent suit in D. Del. — have Aisin AW as defendant on unrelated patents (U.S. 5,508,931; 5,515,283; 5,902,350; 6,542,814; and 7,067,944 et al.). Neither implicates 6,169,956. That matters for the verdict below.

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Inventors

Notes and cautions:

• The front page prints "Braine-L'Allend (BE)" — a typographical corruption of Braine-l'Alleud, Walloon Brabant, Belgium. Do not treat the spelling as a separate place.
• Employer is not stated on the patent; only city of residence is. The Aichi-ken trio is consistent with Aisin AW's headquarters in Anjo-shi, Aichi. The Belgian pair's residence matches the location of Aisin AW's European operations — AW Europe / AW Technical Center Europe, at Avenue de l'Industrie 21, Braine-l'Alleud (corroborated by the PAE Mapping industry directory at https://www.pae-mapping.eu/en/directory/aisin-europe-aw-europe_-f.html and an OpenStreetMap/Mapcarta entry for "Aisin Europe SA" at that address). I could not confirm the exact employing legal entity in 1997 (AW Europe S.A. vs. a predecessor or contract arrangement), so treat "Aisin AW group employee" as high-probability but not documented.
• No separate Belgian/European assignment is recorded. All five inventors appear as assignors on the single U.S. record (reel 009358/0451), which is consistent with each inventor having been under an obligation to assign to Aisin AW Co., Ltd. rather than to a European subsidiary.
• Unusual-pattern test: negative. There is no evidence of inventors departing the original assignee, and no inventor ever appears again as an assignor. The assignment was executed 1998-07-10 through 1998-07-16 — roughly 4.5 months after the 1998-02-27 U.S. filing and after the 1997-02-28 JP priority (JP 9-046354 / JP4635497) — and recorded 11 days later. That is a routine, prompt confirmatory assignment, the opposite of a fire-sale precursor.
• Records-integrity note: the recorded assignment spells inventor 1 "MORMIMOTO, KYOMI"; the printed patent says "Morimoto." Same person; the recording contains a transposition typo. Worth citing if you ever need to establish chain-of-title against the reel/frame rather than the face of the patent.

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Original assignee

Aisin AW Co., Ltd. (Anjo-shi, Aichi, Japan) — named as assignee on the issued patent and still the owner of record today.

• Primary line of business: automotive drivetrain and infotainment. Aisin AW is the Aisin-group (Toyota-group affiliate) manufacturer of automatic transmissions/transaxles and automotive navigation systems; it is credited with developing the world's first speaking navigation system. Its European arm distributes navigation software and produced navigation systems from 2003 (PAE Mapping directory, above).
• Did it ship a product embodying the claims? Yes, with high confidence. The patent is expressly aimed at per-country CD-ROM map partitioning for European cross-border driving (the specification's France/Germany examples, FIG. 11). That is precisely the map/route-guidance architecture Aisin AW supplied for European OEM navigation. Independent corroboration that Aisin AW shipped accused navigation hardware in the U.S. comes from TomTom's 2008 E.D. Tex. complaint, which identifies Aisin AW navigation systems used in Toyota, Scion, Audi and GM vehicles (setexasrecord.com report; gnu-misc-discuss summary of the IP Law 360 item). Product embodiment is therefore documented externally, not merely assumed.
• Current status: operating, not dissolved, not in bankruptcy. No insolvency, sale, or wind-down is recorded against this patent, and PatentBuddy's assignee profile (patentbuddy.com/Company/Profile/AISIN-AW-CO.-LTD./6102) lists Aisin AW as an active owner with ~1,482 in-force U.S. patents.
• Corporate-name question: I found no "Change of Name" conveyance recorded against 6,169,956. If a group-level renaming occurred (Aisin Seiki → Aisin Corporation, or an AW entity reorganization), it was not filed against this patent and does not disturb title. I could not verify the Aisin AW entity's current registered name within my tool budget — flag as unverified rather than assume.
• Foreign counterpart: DE19808111B4 (granted 2007-04-05; counterpart DE19808111A1 published 1998-10-01). Listed as not-active / expired-fee-related.

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Assignment timeline

Exactly one assignment is recorded for U.S. 6,169,956. There is no post-issuance record of any kind.

• 1998-07-10 → 1998-07-16 (executed, per the recorded signing-date range) / recorded 1998-07-27 — Reel 009358/0451
  • Conveyance: Assignment — "ASSIGNMENT OF INTEREST" (inventors → company)
  • Assignor: Kyomi Morimoto (recorded as "MORMIMOTO"), Takaharu Fukaya, Satoshi Ogawa, "AND OTHERS" — i.e., all five inventors including Peter Coenen and Ole Diels
  • Assignee: AISIN AW CO., LTD., Japan
  • Correspondent: NOT CAPTURED. Google Patents' legal-events feed does not expose the correspondent field, uspto.report shows no assignment data for this patent, and my Assignment Center detail query did not complete before the step cap. I will not guess at an attorney or firm name. Because the chain contains only one link, the recurrence test for this signal is arithmetically impossible to satisfy regardless of who the correspondent was (see signal 3).
  • Context: Initial inventor-to-employer assignment of rights — ordinary prosecution recordation filed roughly four weeks before grant-track prosecution matured; not an acquisition, not a securitization, not a transfer to an asserter.

Finding — no further recorded transfers. The chain terminates at the original assignee. There is no assignment to an IP-holding LLC, no security agreement, no release, no merger conveyance, and no change-of-name filing. Maintenance-fee activity recorded on Google Patents runs at the 4-year (2004-06-02), 8-year (2008-06-20) and 12-year (2012-06-06) intervals, and the patent's status is Expired – Lifetime with an anticipated expiration of 2018-02-27 (i.e., the full 20-year term from the 1998-02-27 filing). Note that no year-16 (2016) maintenance payment appears in the legal-events feed; I cannot tell from the sources reached whether that payment is simply uncoded in Google's feed or genuinely absent. Either way the terminal status is expired and ownership never moved.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6169956
    1997 : Japanese priority application filed
    1998 : US application filed Feb 27
         : Inventors assign to Aisin AW Co Ltd
         : Assignment recorded Jul 27
    2001 : Patent issued Jan 2
    2018 : Patent expires Feb 27

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT. The only assignee in the entire record is Aisin AW Co., Ltd., an operating manufacturer, per reel 009358/0451 (recorded 1998-07-27). There is no subsequent assignment to any "IP / Holdings / Licensing / Ventures" entity, no single-purpose LLC, and no registered-agent address anywhere in the chain — because there is no second link.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT. No Acacia, Marathon, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Conversant/Mosaid, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, Round Rock, Spangenberg or comparable entity appears as assignee or assignor. Caveat on the one near-miss: Intellectual Ventures is adverse to Aisin AW (D. Del. motor-patent suit), and TomTom is adverse to Aisin AW (E.D. Tex. 2008) — but in both cases Aisin AW is the defendant, so neither places an asserter in this chain.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — NOT PRESENT (and not assessable). With a single recorded conveyance there is no second entry against which recurrence could be measured. I must report plainly that the correspondent-of-record was not captured, since Google Patents omits it and my Assignment Center query was cut off. If a follow-on analysis needs it, pull reel 009358/0451 directly at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search by patent number 6169956) or https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/. I am flagging this as a data gap, not as a clean negative on the attorney's identity.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT. Zero chained LLC-to-LLC transfers; zero assignments of any kind after 1998-07-27. The <24-month cascade test has no candidate events.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT. No assignment exists within 6 months (or 6 years) of any suit. The only litigation touching Aisin AW as a party (TomTom, filed 2008-02; IV, D. Del.) post-dates the sole assignment by a decade, and neither suit names 6,169,956. This is the mirror image of the signal: Aisin AW was the assertion target, not the transferor.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. No Chapter 7/11, no trustee sale, no patent-sale motion. Aisin AW has remained a going concern throughout the patent's life.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT. Nothing in reel 009358/0451 or the legal-events record shows Aisin AW placing the patent with an NPE to assert on its behalf; there is no downstream assignee at all. The record does establish Aisin AW as a source of accused products, which is the opposite posture.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — NOT PRESENT. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents or OIN. I was unable to verify whether the Toyota/Aisin group joined any defensive aggregator, and I will not assert it; in any event the patent expired 2018-02-27 with title unchanged, so neutralization is moot.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — in the specific sense the taxonomy intends: only the original assignment is recorded. Substantively, this is a clean non-NPE outcome: the sole conveyance is the inventors' 1998-07-10→1998-07-16 assignment to Aisin AW Co., Ltd., recorded 1998-07-27 at reel 009358/0451, and no post-issuance assignment, security interest, or change of name was ever filed. Aisin AW — an operating automotive transmission and navigation-system manufacturer inside the Toyota/Aisin group, which demonstrably shipped CD-ROM navigation products in the European market this patent addresses — retained title through the patent's full 20-year term to expiration on 2018-02-27. Six of the eight NPE signals are affirmatively absent on the record; the seventh (repeat correspondent) is unassessable because one link cannot recur, and the eighth (defensive aggregator) is inapplicable. There is no high- or moderate-confidence NPE finding to make, and I decline to manufacture one from the absence of a captured correspondent name.

Verification links: USPTO Assignment Search — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search "6169956") and https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ ; Google Patents legal events — https://patents.google.com/patent/US6169956/en ; granted-patent front page — https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/2c/29/33/ce8dcb383bf0d8/US6169956.pdf

Residual gaps I could not close: (a) correspondent of record on reel 009358/0451; (b) whether a year-16 maintenance fee was paid vs. merely uncoded; (c) any Aisin AW corporate renaming since 2001; (d) Toyota/Aisin group membership in LOT Network or a similar aggregator.

I'll research the cited prior art references for US 6,169,956. Let me run targeted searches on each reference.

Now let me research the remaining citations and the family reference.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 6,169,956 B1 ("6169956")

Scope note. Consistent with the earlier sections, USPTO/PatentCenter is not directly reachable through these tools. The citation data below is taken from the authoritative full text of US6169956B1 supplied in the task context (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6169956/en), which lists the examiner citations, plus cross-checked retrievals of each reference's own specification. I confined the search to the exact identifier 6169956 / 6,169,956 and did not substitute similar numbers.

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1. What the record actually cites

US6169956B1 has a very thin citation record — only four US references touch the family, three on the face of the patent and one cited in a family counterpart:

Critical legal observation (flag for the earlier summary's benefit): all three examiner citations were granted after the '956 priority date of 1997-02-28 — US5,778,333 on 1998-07-07, US5,845,228 on 1998-12-01, US6,029,112 on 2000-02-22. None of them is §102(a) or §102(b) art against '956. Each can only qualify as a pre-AIA §102(e) reference (U.S. application filed before 1997-02-28, patented later). That materially limits their shock value and explains why the examiner used them as background/§103 support rather than as anticipation. By contrast, US5,412,573 issued 1995-05-02 and is clean §102(b) art — and, as shown below, it is functionally the closest reference in the entire record.

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Reference A — US 5,778,333

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Reference B — US 5,845,228

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Reference C — US 6,029,112

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Reference D — US 5,412,573 (the genuinely relevant one)

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2. Consolidated §102 claim-mapping

Bottom line. The examiner's three citations (A–C) do not read on the point of novelty of '956 — the conditional "not both in the geographical area ⇒ synthesize a crossing point on the stored perimeter border line ⇒ route through it" logic. They are best characterized as §102(e) technical/§103 support: US5,777,833 for computing an intersection against a boundary, US5,845,228 for area/boundary partitioning, US6,029,112 for a straight line drawn toward the destination. The most relevant prior art in the record is US 5,412,573, which is not an examiner citation on '956 but was cited in the family (DE19808111), and which independently discloses the core "boundary point nearest the destination when the map data is discontinuous between present position and destination" expedient — squarely §102(b) art against at least claim 1, and the natural primary reference for a §103 case against claims 1, 11 and 12.

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3. Caveats / confidence

• Source limitation: the three "examiner-cited" designations come from the Google Patents citation table in the supplied full text; I could not open a USPTO PatentCenter "References Cited" pane to certify them. Treat as high-confidence but aggregator-sourced.
• Date discrepancy flagged, not resolved: US6,029,112's filing date is 1996-06-12 (Google Patents) vs. 1997-02-21 (expertkg.com). The §102(e) conclusion is unaffected because both precede 1997-02-28. Similarly US5,845,228 is shown as filed 1996-09-16 (Google Patents) or 1996-09-15 (Unified Patents).
• US5,778,333 filing date (App. 08/522,710, ~1995) is inferred from the application series; its grant date (1998-07-07) and JP priority (Hei-6-209974, 1994) are confirmed from the patent PDF.
• No non-patent literature appears in the '956 citation list; the only "other document" of record is the priority application JP 9-046354 (Hei 9-46354), filed 1997-02-28, which is priority material, not prior art.
• My claim mappings are my own element-by-element reading of the issued claim text; no claim-construction order or IPR final written decision construes "crossing point," "border line data," or "linear line," so the §102 characterizations above are analytical, not adjudicated.

I'll ground this § 103 analysis in the actual prior-art references of record. Let me pull their disclosures.

Now let me pull the third examiner-cited reference and the Mannesmann VDO cited-by art.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 6,169,956 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Builds on: the bibliographic/claim section (issued claims, claim 1 system, claim 12 memory-element) and the prior-art/litigation section (no litigation, no CAFC 2026 activity, three examiner-cited references) already generated. I do not repeat those findings; I extend them into the § 103 merits.

Two housekeeping flags before the substance:

1. Date inconsistency in the task inputs. The system prompt for this session states today is 2026-09-30, while the current-task block states "Current Date: April 26, 2026." Both are post-expiration (2018-02-27). I am not auto-correcting either; I proceed on the basis that the patent is expired either way.
2. Which references count as "the Prior Art section of this page." Per the record supplied, the Google Patents "Prior Art" material comprises (a) three examiner-cited references, (b) one family-cited reference, and (c) a large "Cited By" corpus. Only (a) and (b) — and only to the extent they were publicly available or effectively filed before the 1997-02-28 priority date — may be used as § 103 art. The "Cited By" references (Garmin, Mannesmann VDO, etc.) are later-in-time and I use them only as context, expressly not as art, to avoid hindsight.

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1. Legal framework and the operative dates

Level of ordinary skill (PHOSITA) as of early 1997: a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering or computer science (or equivalent), plus roughly 2–3 years' experience designing vehicle navigation systems, including stored-map route computation (node/link road networks, Dijkstra/A* pathfinding), GPS/dead-reckoning position sensing, and CD-ROM-based map delivery. Geographic information-system skills — partitioning a digital map into tiles or regions and reconciling features that cross tile edges — are part of this skill set, since CD-ROM capacity constraints made tiling unavoidable (a point the patent itself concedes: "it is very difficult to store map data for the whole of Europe in a single CD-ROM").

A framing note on the patent's own admissions. The Background admits (i) a single CD-ROM cannot cover a wide area at usable accuracy, (ii) prior systems "can only set a route in a restricted area," and (iii) the problem is acute in Europe where "countries are contiguous." The specification also states "Coordinates for locations outside the map area in a CD-ROM need not be stored" — an admission that the remote-location data of claims 2 and 4–6 is an optional implementation choice, which materially weakens those dependent claims under § 103.

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2. Reference inventory — what each reference actually teaches

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3. Ground 1 — Claim 1 (and dependent claims 2, 3, 10): Motorola '573, alone or in view of Mitsubishi '228

3.1 Element-by-element mapping of claim 1 against US 5,412,573

Conclusion for claim 1: strong. Every element has a corresponding disclosure, and the conditional logic that the previous section correctly identified as the heart of claim 1 ("detect an out-of-area condition, synthesize a border crossing point, route through it") is Motorola's express teaching. The residual question is narrow — whether "border line data for a perimeter border line" is met by a boundary of the database rather than an explicitly stored boundary polyline, and whether the Motorola branch is keyed to data-type discontinuity rather than geographic coverage. Both are implementation-characterization differences, not differences in the inventive concept, and both are bridged by Mitsubishi '228's area-based map partitioning (below) or by ordinary engineering choice. Under KSR, "a point on a boundary" computed from a stored database extent versus one read from stored boundary data is a predictable design choice with no unexpected result.

If the examiner or a challenger preferred a two-reference ground: US 5,412,573 + US 5,845,228. Mitsubishi '228 supplies the explicit area framing — a map partitioned into areas, means for determining "an area where the present position is," and "area boundary points of areas" — which fills any perceived gap on "border line data" and on the "within said geographical area" determination.

3.2 Claims 2, 3, 10

• Claim 3 ("map data… limited to said geographical area") and claim 10 (same, from claim 1): Motorola's route-guidance database is, by its own premise, geographically limited (limited availability of traffic-flow-restriction coverage); Mitsubishi '228's per-area road maps are likewise limited to their areas. Obvious / likely anticipated.
• Claim 2 (stored data identifying "plural border points" and "various registered locations outside of said geographical area, correlated with said border points"): this is the FIG. 7 table. This dependency is the first one where the art is thinner. The correlation concept is a routine database join once one accepts that the system must select among several candidate crossings; Mitsubishi '228's per-area "destination areas" and Motorola's selection of "the" boundary point nearest the destination presuppose a set of candidate boundary points to choose among. Moderate-to-strong, but the weakest of the claim-1 family.

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4. Ground 2 — Claims 11 and 12: add US 5,778,333 (and optionally ETRI '112)

Claims 11 and 12 introduce the geometry the previous section correctly flagged as not present in claim 1: "calculates a linear line between the present position or the starting point and the destination, calculates a point of intersection of the linear line and the stored border line, and determines the crossing point on the border line on the basis of the calculated point of intersection." Claim 12 recites the same algorithm embodied on a memory element carrying (i) map data covering a single geographical area, (ii) border line data for that area's perimeter, and (iii) the route-search program.

US 5,778,333 supplies the missing technique. It is directed to exactly this computational problem in a vehicle-navigation map context: determining whether two line segments intersect, and if so computing the intersection coordinates, including a lookup-table method for doing so cheaply ("the intersection point is computed using a simple transformation process… without burdening the CPU"), plus handling of dual intersections and of separated/coincident endpoints. A POSITA seeking to convert Motorola's "boundary point nearest the destination" into a principled geometric selection would naturally compute where the straight line to the destination meets the boundary and then snap to the nearest road crossing that boundary — precisely claims 11/12.

Why the combination is motivated (not hindsight):

• Same field, same device class: both are vehicle-mounted navigation systems whose core element is a stored-map display/route apparatus. They are analogous art as a matter of law.
• Same sub-problem: "where does a line cross the edge of my stored map element?" — Motorola must answer it to find its boundary point; Nippondenso teaches a method for answering it.
• No change in principle of operation: neither reference's system is altered in its fundamental function; the intersection routine is a plug-in computational module. This is the KSR "known technique to improve a similar device in the same way" scenario.
• The examiner already had '333 of record, which forecloses a non-analogous-art argument.
• Design incentive: with only the present-position CD loaded (the FIG. 10 / FIG. 14 scenario), the system must pick a crossing using data it actually has; the straight line to the destination is the cheapest available discriminator.

ETRI '112 strengthens claim 12's "linear line" limitation. '112 teaches computing a straight-line distance from a candidate node to the destination and folding it into the node-selection metric. That is a direct teaching that the straight line between present position and destination is a legitimate, useful quantity in route computation — supporting the obviousness of the "postulate a linear line between the present position and the destination" step. Caveat below on its exact § 102(e) date.

Claim 12's "memory element" format is not a saving distinction. A claim to a CD-ROM bearing map data plus a stored route-search program is the standard commercial form of the very product each reference discloses (Motorola: "CDROM drive 107 reads optical disks 115, 117 containing various map databases"; Mitsubishi: external storage/CD-ROM discussion). Beauregard-style claim format changes the statutory category (35 U.S.C. § 101/§ 102 article), not the § 103 analysis; where the system is obvious, the medium bearing the program that implements it is likewise obvious.

Conclusion: Claims 11 and 12 are obvious over US 5,412,573 + US 5,778,333, and additionally over that combination in view of ETRI '112. This is the strongest multi-reference ground and, in my assessment, the ground most likely to have succeeded on the merits.

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5. Ground 3 — Claims 4, 5, 6 (cities / city names / coordinates)

Claims 4–6 depend from claim 2 and require the out-of-area registered locations to be cities, with city names (4) and/or geographical coordinates (5, 6) stored.

Assessment: moderate at best; the weakest ground.

• Arguments for obviousness: storing a gazetteer of city names with coordinates is the single most routine way to let a driver name a destination outside the loaded map. Motorola's route planner requires some representation of the destination position, and Mitsubishi '228 explicitly organizes routing around "destination areas." Destination-name/phonetic/coordinate lookup tables are among the file types the patent itself lists as conventional ("destination data, registered-location data, … landmark data"). Under KSR, a "predictable variation" of a known database element.
• Arguments against: neither Motorola nor Mitsubishi is shown to teach the correlation of a stored out-of-area city with a border point, nor the distance/time linkage of FIG. 7. This specific data structure — border point ↔ remote city ↔ distance — is the one place where a challenger must lean hardest on "obvious to try." A well-crafted obviousness rejection can be built here (design incentive: the driver must be told which crossing to aim for and how far the destination is beyond it), but the case is inferential rather than documentary.
• Complicating admission: the specification states coordinates for outside-area locations "need not be stored," undercutting any argument that storing them is inventive.

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6. Ground 4 — Claim 7 (multiple intersection points resolved by assigned priorities)

Claim 7 covers the FIG. 18 "winding border" scenario: where the linear line crosses the perimeter at plural intersection points, the route search means "determines the crossing point by assigning priorities to the plural intersection points."

Assessment: moderate-to-strong.

• US 5,778,333 expressly addresses the multiple-intersection case in the geometric sense: its "intersection/separation state determining means," its "dual intersection state determining means" (determining whether segments adjacent to opposite ends of a selected segment intersect it), and its coincident/separate handling are all directed at exactly the ambiguity that arises when a line and a boundary meet more than once.
• US 5,412,573 supplies the resolution rule: it already teaches selecting the boundary point "nearest to the destination position," qualified as "nearest in travel time, or nearest in distance to traverse, or most convenient to reach." The patent's own FIG. 19 flowchart does exactly this — "the intersection point closest to the destination (C1 of FIG. 18) is selected." That the claimed "priority" is a destination-proximity ordering means the claim reads on the express preference already disclosed in Motorola, once '333 supplies the multi-intersection detection that makes the rule necessary.
• Secondary-candidate tie-breakers the claim's specification mentions — road class (expressway vs. common road), distance from the present position — are conventional weighting criteria; storing road classification data (as the patent's own FIG. 3(B) shows) was routine.

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7. Ground 5 — Claims 8 and 9 (multiple areas / internal border lines / route stretching across each area)

Claim 8 recites map data for plural areas separated by plural internal border lines, with the route search means calculating the line, identifying intersections with each internal border line, setting a crossing point from each intersection, and searching a route "stretching over each of the plurality of areas connecting with the respective crossing points" (the FIG. 16/17 A–B–C case, and the FIG. 12/13 two-country case). Claim 9 limits the stored map data to those plural areas.

Assessment: moderate.

• US 5,845,228 is the anchor: it discloses a map partitioned into areas with departure-area and destination-area determination, area-specific route networks, and routing between areas. Extending the two-area case to a chain of areas is a predictable mechanical extension — the FIG. 16 routine is literally the FIG. 12 routine iterated, replacing the CD-ROM "beginning with the one closest to the destination."
• US 5,412,573 contributes the data-discontinuity trigger and the transition handling between database coverages — the conceptual equivalent of crossing an internal border line.
• Motivation: the admitted CD-ROM capacity problem; Europe's contiguous-country geography; the ordinary desire to complete a route the driver has requested. Under KSR, "if a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious."
• Where it is contestable: "each of the plurality of areas" internal-border-line intersection plus per-intersection crossing points is a fairly specific multi-stage algorithm, and a challenger should be prepared to show why chaining (rather than, say, using a coarse continental base map — the alternative Garmin later pursued) was the predictable path as of 1997. The patent's own single-intervening-area example plus its statement that "in cases where there are two or more such intervening areas, the same process… can be executed by replacing the CD-ROMs" is itself an admission of routine extension, which helps the challenger.

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8. The cross-cutting motivation-to-combine case (articulated for the record)

For any multi-reference ground above, the following motivations should be recited, in the order KSR contemplates:

1. Identical field of endeavor and identical problem. All of '573, '228, '333 and '112 address vehicle/navigation route computation or map display from a stored digital map. All are classified in the G01C/G08G navigation families. Analogous art is not seriously disputable.
2. The problem to be solved was known and articulated. Motorola '573 frames it explicitly: the route-guidance database does not cover the whole route, so a boundary point must substitute for the unrepresented portion of the route. Mitsubishi '228 frames the storage problem: area-by-area route networks exist because full-network storage is prohibitive. The Aisin application's own Background frames it identically ("the current single CD-ROM is incapable of storing sufficient data for route guidance covering a wide area… with regard to Europe… it is very difficult to store map data for the whole of Europe in a single CD-ROM"). The motivation is thus supplied by the art and by the applicant's own admitted problem statement — the classic posture in which a § 103 rejection is strongest.
3. Reasonable expectation of success. Each proposed combination is a combination of software/database features on an architecture all references already share (position sensor + input device + display + CD-ROM drive + navigation computer). No physical redesign, no unpredictable interaction. Motorola itself contemplates "differing map database types… pre-merged onto a single CDROM" and partial map data embedded in the nav computer — demonstrating that merging/tiling map coverage is a routine expedient, not a leap.
4. Predictable, not inventive, results. Computing a line/boundary intersection is deterministic geometry ('333); ordering candidate crossings by proximity to the destination is a stated design preference ('573); counting straight-line distance to the destination is a known routing metric ('112). Nothing in the combination produces a result beyond the sum of the parts.

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9. Where the § 103 case is weak — counterarguments a patent owner would raise

I flag these because an honest obviousness opinion should not read as a one-sided rejection.

1. Hindsight on the "straight-line-and-snap" algorithm (claims 11, 12). No reference I located actually postulates a straight line between the present position and the destination and snaps the crossing to the nearest border point. Motorola selects the boundary point nearest the destination, not the border point nearest the intersection of the straight line. Those are different selection rules, and the difference is the patent's stated advantage in the FIG. 10 and FIG. 19 scenarios. A challenger must argue that substituting a geometric criterion for an "as the crow flies / travel time / convenience" criterion is a mere design choice. That argument is available but not airtight: it requires showing that a POSITA would have found the straight-line-then-snap approach to be an obvious competing option as of early 1997, which is where the KSR "predictable variation of a known technique" rationale does the heavy lifting.
2. The "border line data" storage limitation. Claims 1 and 12 recite stored border line data. Motorola talks about a boundary of a map database, which a skeptic can characterize as an artifact of database extent rather than a stored geometric border definition. Mitsubishi '228's "area boundary points" narrows the gap but does not perfectly close it.
3. The predicate-condition wording. Claim 1's condition is geographic ("the detected present position or the starting point and the destination are not both in said geographical area"); Motorola's trigger is expressly a map-data-type discontinuity (route-guidance vs. topology-only) and the unavailability of traffic-flow-restriction data. A patent owner would argue these are different conditions serving different purposes (data fidelity vs. data extent). A challenger's response: both reduce to "the stored route-guidance data does not span from origin to destination," and Motorola's own text collapses the distinction by framing it as map availability "between the present position of the vehicle and the destination position."
4. Claims 4–6 (correlated out-of-area cities). As noted, the specific border-point↔city↔distance correlation is the least-documented element in the asserted art. Expect this to be the claim family's last redoubt.
5. Analogous-art attack on '333. Nippondenso's '333 is styled as a display improvement for congested-road boundary lines, not a routing feature. A patent owner may argue a route-search engineer would not have consulted it — though the examiner's citation of it, and the identity of the geometric operation, blunt this.

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10. Secondary considerations (objective indicia) — essentially absent

The record assembled in the earlier sections bears directly here:

• No litigation. The earlier analysis found no case naming US 6,169,956. No injunction, no damages award, no settlement evidence of commercial value attributable to the claim.
• No copying evidence, no licensing evidence, no praise, no unexpected-results evidence located.
• No long-felt-but-unmet-need evidence — complicated by the fact that Motorola's '573, published in 1995, addressed the same unmet need two years before the priority date, and by the applicant's own Background admission that the problem was well recognized.
• The patent expired (anticipated) 2018-02-27, and the maintenance-fee record shows payments only through the 12-year window. No objective indicia can be developed now.
• Practical import. Because the claims are expired and no infringement action appears to have ever been filed, an invalidity challenge today would matter only for past damages — and the § 315(b) one-year IPR bar would have run against any party served with a complaint (none appears to exist). An ex parte reexamination under § 302 remains nominally available and is not time-barred, and would be the natural vehicle for a Motorola '573–based ground, since '573 was not among the three examiner-cited references.

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11. Bottom line — claim-by-claim

Overall: the claims most exposed are 1, 3, 10, 11 and 12. Claim 1 falls to Motorola '573 essentially as a whole, and claims 11/12 fall to '573 in view of Nippondenso '333, with ETRI '112 reinforcing the straight-line limitation. Claims 4–6 and, to a lesser degree, 2 and 8/9 are the points at which a challenger would need to rely on "obvious to try" reasoning rather than a documentary disclosure of every element.

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12. Confidence and evidence gaps (stated explicitly)

• High confidence in the disclosures of the references quoted above, which I verified against the reference texts and Google Patents/USPTO-report pages during this analysis (URLs: patents.google.com/patent/US5412573A, patents.google.com/patent/US5845228A, patents.google.com/patent/US5778333, patents.google.com/patent/US6029112A, plus the USPTO-lodged PDFs at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com for each).
• Medium confidence on the precise § 102(e) status of US 6,029,112. The record shows two inconsistent dates — "priority 1996-06-12" (Google Patents used-by listing) and an application date reported as 1997-02-21 with application number appearing as "08/8042691." I have not auto-corrected either. Because 1997-02-21 falls before the 1997-02-28 priority date but after the reference's own 1996-06-12 date, its availability as § 102(e) art depends on which date governs and on antedating rules; accordingly I present '112 as corroborating art for the straight-line metric rather than as an independent ground.
• Not verified: the actual prosecution history of 09/032,026 (Office Actions, whether the three examiner-cited references were applied in a § 103 rejection or merely listed as considered art, and any applicant remarks distinguishing them). Without it, I cannot say which of the above grounds the examiner considered and rejected. The claim-by-claim strength assessments are mine, derived from the reference texts, and no claim-construction order, IPR final written decision, or court construction exists for "crossing point," "border line data," or "linear line" in any source I located.
• Explicit non-use of post-critical-date art: I have not relied on US 6,574,553, US 6,574,554, US 6,489,090 or any other "Cited By" reference as § 103 art. They post-date 1997-02-28 and could only be used with hindsight. I note only that US 6,574,554 lists US 6,169,956 as an examiner-cited reference, meaning the Office later treated this patent as material art against a third party's cross-database routing claims — which is context, not a validity ground here.
• No fabrication: I located no case, docket number, IPR number, or reexamination request directed at 6,169,956. Consistent with the earlier litigation section, the correct statement remains "no evidence located," not an affirmative negative certification.