US 6262724

I'll search for authoritative records on US 6262724, including any 2026 CAFC activity.

Search methodology and a scope caveat

I ran targeted searches for the literal string 6262724 / 6,262,724 across web-indexed USPTO-derived records (Google Patents, Unified Patents, PatentLeaderboard) and for Federal Circuit 2026 docket activity. I found no CAFC 2026 docket entry naming US 6,262,724, and no results referencing any other patent number. Absence of a 2026 CAFC hit in these searches is not proof of absence — CAFC dockets are indexed unevenly by third parties — but nothing surfaced.

One caveat on sourcing: the authoritative patent text supplied to me (fetched from https://patents.google.com/patent/US6262724/en, 2026-09-24) is truncated mid-Summary of the Invention and does not include the numbered claims. So while I can give you verbatim bibliographic data and the abstract, my claim overview below is derived from the specification's enumerated aspects and the description, not from a verbatim reading of the allowed claims. I flag that explicitly rather than reconstruct claim language I could not verify.

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Bibliographic data (verbatim from the authoritative source)

Assignments of record: Apple Computer, Inc. — 1999-04-15 (Crow, Dean, Dykstra-Erickson, Hoddie, Wasko); 1999-07-12 (Jobs); 1999-10-25 (Jobs, corrective assignment re reel 010085/frame 0829); 2007-06-04 name change to Apple Inc.

Discrepancy worth noting (not auto-corrected): Unified Patents' third-party record listed this patent's priority date as 1999-04-14, whereas the authoritative Google Patents/USPTO-derived record lists 1999-04-15. I report both as found; the authoritative source controls.

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Abstract (as published)

"A user interface and methods for using a user interface for controlling processing of time-based media files. In one exemplary method, a graphical representation of a time line for a time-based media is displayed along with a graphical representation of a current time along the graphical representation of the time line. A start graphical indicator and a stop graphical indicator is also displayed along the graphical representation of the time line. A portion of the time-based media may be selected for presentation by dragging or positioning at least one of the start graphical indicator and the stop graphical indicator along the graphical representation of the time line. In another aspect of the invention, an exemplary method allows for the adaptive control of a portion of the interface which indicates time relating to a time-based media. An input speed is determined where this input is to change the portion and the rate at which the change to this portion occurs is dependent upon the input speed. Other aspects of the present invention relating to the interface for controlling the processing of time-based media files are also described."

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Plain-language overview of the independent-claim subject matter

Because the supplied text stops before the claims, the following maps the Summary-of-the-Invention aspects (which in this document read as a recitation of separate claim families) plus the FIG. 14 routine inventory. Treat each bullet as "the claimed subject matter is directed to…," not as quoted claim language.

1. Selected-range playback via a time line (the "start/stop marker" claims).
Display a time line for the media, a current-time indicator along it, and separate start and stop graphical indicators. Dragging either indicator along the time line sets the start/stop of a sub-range. The distinction the patent touts over the prior art is that the user can then hit a single play button to play back only the dragged-out range — prior editing interfaces selected ranges but did not offer one-button playback of a drag-selected range. The description adds live feedback during the drag (updated time readout, a displayed frame at the dragged position, chapter readout, and highlighting of the selected span).

2. Primary window plus "drawer" window holding media objects (favorites/channels).
Generate and display a primary player window and a secondary drawer window. In one display state the drawer is at least partially overlapped (hidden) by the primary window; in another it is at least partially viewable. The drawer is architecturally part of the primary window: it appears to slide out from under it, slides back under when closed, and moves with the primary window when the window is dragged around the desktop. The drawer provides fixed, predetermined, tiled "wells" (non-overlapping drop locations) each holding one media source icon — a thumbnail frame, logo, text, or symbol — that can reference a local file or a remote streamed channel. Icons can be dragged into, out of, and between wells.

3. Primary window plus auxiliary drawer(s) for information and controls.
A parallel claim family directed to the same primary-window/secondary-drawer architecture, but where the drawer supplies information about the current media (e.g., copyright, encryption, compression notices, credits) and/or additional playback controls (bass, treble, balance, forward/reverse scan, skip, etc.) rather than favorites/channels.

4. Adaptive speed control of the time/chapter portion of the interface.
Detect a user input that changes a portion of the GUI indicating time; determine a speed characteristic of that input; change the displayed information at a rate that depends on (the patent says "in direct proportion to") that input speed. The canonical implementation is chapter browsing: click-and-hold on the chapter display, then move the cursor up/down; faster cursor movement scrolls chapters (and the linked time readout) faster. The background section frames the novelty as an improvement over LaserDisc-style chapter lists whose scroll rate is fixed at one predetermined speed.

5. Possibly a machine-readable-medium claim (FIG. 14).
The FIG. 14 disclosure enumerates a media-player routine comprising a drawer routine, an adaptive time/chapter selection routine, a time bar selection marker routine, a streaming status message routine, a player/display-window resizing routine, and an auxiliary drawer routine. It is likely (but I cannot confirm from the truncated text) that at least one independent claim is drafted for a machine-readable medium storing such executable code.

Also described but of uncertain claim status: the two-window resize behavior — dragging a resize control animates two rectangles (inner media display vs. outer player window); the inner window grows until it hits a threshold (in one embodiment ~320×240 or the player's edges), after which further enlargement also grows the outer window, and shrinking below the default minimum affects only the inner window.

Uncertainties I am not resolving:

• Exact independent-claim count, numbering, and recited limitations — I did not retrieve the claim set in this session; the bullets above are specification-derived.
• Whether the claims are drawn to method, apparatus, or medium categories, and which aspects survived to issuance versus appearing only in the specification.
• The identity of the parent application Ser. No. 09/293,507's resulting patent, and the exact continuation lineage (a 2012 MacTech report describes a same-titled, same-inventor patent 8,196,043 — consistent with a continuation in this family, but I did not verify that relationship from an authoritative record here).
• Any 2026 CAFC activity: none found, but I cannot certify that none exists.

If you want the verbatim claims, the reliable next step is the USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Public Search "Claims" view or the granted-PDF claim column, both of which sit outside what I was able to retrieve in this session.

I'll research litigation involving US Patent 6262724. Let me run several targeted searches.

Initial results don't surface litigation directly. Let me search more specifically on litigation databases and the patent portals.

The generic searches are noisy (the engine is surfacing unrelated "6,272,264" and JP "JP6262724" items). Let me go directly at litigation databases and patent-specific sources.

Bottom line

I found no confirmed litigation involving US Patent 6,262,724 ("User interface for presenting media information," Crow et al., Apple; filed 1999‑04‑15; granted 2001‑07‑17; expired/anticipated expiration 2019‑04‑15).

Based on the sources I was able to reach, there are no cases to report — no plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome. I am stating that as a negative finding, not as proof of non-existence.

What I searched and what came back

1. Google Patents — US6262724B1 (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6262724](/patent/US6262724)/en). The full record I retrieved shows only prosecution/assignment events (Apple Computer → Apple Inc.) and legal status "Expired – Lifetime," with anticipated expiration 2019‑04‑15. It contains no "Litigation" or "PTAB" event entries.
2. Unified Patents portal — queries against portal.unifiedpatents.com surfaced only the patent's citation pages (e.g., https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/[7953390](/patent/7953390), which lists US‑6262724‑B1 as a cited reference). No litigation/case-list entry for 6262724 appeared.
3. General litigation queries ("6262724 patent lawsuit," "6262724 asserted litigation," "6262724 IPR") returned no case naming this patent.
4. CourtListener / Justia / Docket Alarm queries did not return a case asserting 6,262,724 before my search steps ran out. I could not complete a full RECAP docket-number sweep, so this leg is incomplete, not exhausted.

Near-matches I deliberately did NOT count (literal-ID rule)

Per your strict rule, I did not treat the following as the same patent. Flagging them because they are the most likely source of a false positive:

• US 6,272,264 — a different seven-digit number (note the transposed digits: 272 vs 262), asserted in Volterra Semiconductor Corp. v. Primarion, Inc. (N.D. Cal.), discussed in an opinions-of-the-court entry at https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[2181625](/patent/2181625)/volterra-semiconductor-corp-v-primarion-inc/. This is NOT US 6,262,724.
• JP 6262724 B2 — a Japanese granted patent appearing in PCT search-report family annexes (e.g., the JP2022505921A and US10,689,450 PDFs). Not the US patent.
• "6262724" as a Brazilian court document/portal ID (TJPR e-DJ attachment link). Not the US patent.
• Justia/other patent pages showing "6262724 | July 17, 2001 | Crow et al." are merely this patent appearing in "Referenced Cited" / citation tables of later patents (e.g., US 9,275,673; US 8,444,486; US 11,574,296) — that is prior-art citation, not litigation.

Assessment and caveats

• Contextual plausibility: '724 claims a QuickTime-style media player UI (time bar with start/stop markers, adaptive chapter scrolling, "drawer" windows). It is an Apple UI patent that expired in 2019. Nothing in my searches indicates it was ever asserted, and I have no independent knowledge of a case asserting it. Any litigation would predate the April 2019 expiration.
• Confidence: Moderate that no litigation exists, based on the negative results above — but I did not complete a comprehensive PACER/RECAP or Docket Alarm sweep, and one of my planned search calls was cut off by a tool limit. Unified Patents' litigation case list and free docket databases were not fully queried. So treat this as "no litigation found," not "no litigation exists."
• Related-family caution: '724 is a divisional continuation of Ser. No. 09/293,507 (filed 1999‑04‑15), with a WO/EP counterpart (WO 0063766 / EP 1180253). Do not assume a sibling member wasn't litigated just because '724 wasn't. Family patents such as US 6,538,665 and US 6,850,256 (both Crow et al., media-information UI) merit a separate check if you need the full family picture.

Recommended verification steps to close this out

1. Unified Patents Litigation search — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist — run 6262724 as a party/patent filter.
2. Free Law Project RECAP / CourtListener — search dockets for the literal string "6,262,724" and "6262724".
3. Docket Alarm / Lex Machina patent case lookup by patent number.
4. USPTO Patent Center / Global Dossier and PTAB (IPR/PGR/CBM) filings for the patent.
5. SEC 10‑K/10‑Q litigation footnotes for Apple and for any entity that ever held rights, for the pre‑2019 window.

If you want, I can run any of those specific lookups next — but I will not invent case numbers, parties, or filing dates to fill the table.

I'll start by verifying the structured data against web sources, since this patent has a long history and PTAB records can surface via search even when ODP hasn't indexed them.

PTAB / AIA Trial Analysis — US Patent 6,262,724 ("User interface for presenting media information")

Assignee of record: Apple Inc. (originally Apple Computer, Inc.)
Priority / filing date: 1999-04-15 · Granted: 2001-07-17 · Application: 09/293,508 (divisional continuation of Ser. No. 09/293,507)
Legal status: Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 2019-04-15)

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block reports no AIA trial proceedings for US 6,262,724, and targeted web searching surfaced none either — no IPRs, no PGRs, and no CBMs have been filed against this patent, which means there is no claims-invalidated / claims-sustained / settled / institution-denied breakdown to report: all claims remain UNTESTED at the PTAB. The bottom-line defensive posture is therefore unusual and cuts in two directions: a defendant gets no free cancellation (nothing is dead, so there is no ready-made "claim 1 was canceled, your demand letter is baseless" argument), but it also gets a very weak attack surface — the patent expired on 2019-04-15, so any current assertion can reach only past damages within the 35 U.S.C. § 286 six-year lookback, and any IPR would be a pure defensive-cost exercise over an already-expired right. (This is the opposite of the "hardened by surviving two IPRs" scenario: it is a patent that was never stress-tested at the Board at all.)

⚠️ Verification note. I could not reach PTAB E2E / the PTAB Decisions API directly in this session; the finding above rests on (a) the structured ODP block supplied in the prompt, which is the canonical source, and (b) web search. Absence of results is strong but not conclusive. Confirm independently before relying on it in a brief: PTAB E2E, USPTO PatentCenter, and the Google Patents Litigation / Similar tabs for US 6,262,724.

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Per-proceeding sections

None may be completed. There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} to report, and I will not synthesize one. No petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, termination, or Federal Circuit appeal exists for this patent. A Federal Circuit appeal is, as a matter of course, impossible in the absence of an FWD or other appealable Board decision.

Number-collision warning (false positives to avoid citing)

Searching for "626" and "'724" against this patent produces several lookalikes that are not proceedings on US 6,262,724. Do not let these migrate into a brief:

• Karami '626 / Karami '772 / Benning / Stupperich / Jacobs — references and a "Medline IPR" appearing in absorptive-article IPRs (diaper fastening patents, e.g. claims 1–54 of a '990 patent). Unrelated art and unrelated patent owner.
• US 6,278,264 and US 6,462,522 — the patents at issue in Volterra Semiconductor Corp. v. Primarion, Inc. (CourtListener). Different patents.
• US 5,602,524 — the tire-pressure-monitoring patent in a Delaware IPR-estoppel dispute (D. Del. opinion).

Also note a priority-date discrepancy in third-party databases: the Unified Patents portal lists 1999-04-14 for US 6,262,724, while the patent's own front page and Google Patents show 1999-04-15 (prior art date and filing date). Use 1999-04-15; the ODP/patent text is authoritative.

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Strategic summary

Canceled vs. sustained vs. untested. There is nothing in the "canceled" or "sustained" columns. Every claim of US 6,262,724 is UNTESTED — no claim has been canceled by the Board and no claim has been confirmed by the Board. Practically, "surviving claims" = the full original claim set as granted, as narrowed only by whatever prosecution history and any district-court § 282 invalidity rulings exist. (I have not verified the claim count or the full claim text; the excerpted record in this session does not enumerate them — pull the claim set from PatentCenter before drafting.) Note the patent is a divisional continuation of Ser. No. 09/293,507, same 1999-04-15 priority; sibling/continuation patents in the family (and the WO 00/63766 / EP 1 180 253 counterparts) may carry overlapping but not identical claims — check whether any family member was separately challenged, since a sibling's FWD is not binding here but is highly persuasive art/framing.

Estoppel landscape. Because no IPR/PGR/CBM was ever instituted, § 315(e)(2) estoppel is empty — there is no petitioner, no privy, and no "ground raised or reasonably could have been raised" bar flowing from this patent. Nothing is foreclosed. A defendant today can raise any prior-art ground, in any forum, including art that a hypothetical earlier petitioner could have raised. Conversely, Apple suffers no adverse estoppel either.

Pattern signals.

• Same petitioner filing multiple IPRs: not applicable — no petitioners at all.
• Patent owner appealing aggressively to the Federal Circuit: none — no Board decision to appeal.
• Defensive aggregator in the chain (Unified Patents et al.): none detectable. Unified maintains a portal listing for US 6,262,724, but that is a data page, not a filed challenge.
• Why the silence? This is the analytically interesting part, and I flag it as inference, not fact: IPR practice began 2012-09-16, by which point the '724 patent had roughly seven years of life left, and it expired 2019-04-15. Patents with a short remaining term and no live prospective injunction value are poor candidates for an IPR spend. The absence of PTAB activity is not evidence that the claims are strong — it is most consistent with the patent's age and expiry. Do not read "zero IPRs" as a validity signal in either direction.

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Recommended next steps

1. If you are a defendant being asserted today: there is no FWD to link and no canceled claim to quote — resist the temptation to imply otherwise. Your dispositive posture is timing, not preclusion: verify the expiration and any term adjustment and confirm the § 286 damages window. If the demand letter asserts ongoing/forward relief on an expired patent, that is the first thing to attack.
2. If you are still considering an IPR: confirm the § 315(b) one-year clock from service of the complaint, and price the petition against a patent with no remaining prospective exclusionary value. An expired patent can still be the subject of an IPR, but the ROI is usually negative — a well-supported § 282 invalidity case in the district court (with no estoppel constraints, per point above) is usually the cheaper path here.
3. Run the primary-source checks before filing anything: PTAB E2E petitions search, the PTAB Decisions database (search by patent number and by the 09/293,508 application number), PTAB API v2, CourtListener docket search for "6,262,724" to find any district-court assertions and their outcomes, and the Google Patents Litigation tab for the assertion timeline.
4. Check the family, not just this patent: because 09/293,508 is a divisional continuation of 09/293,507, pull the continuations and counterparts. A prior Board or foreign decision on a sibling claims-congruent patent is your best available substitute for the IPR that never happened.

Bottom line for a defendant: the PTAB door was never opened on US 6,262,724 — nothing is invalidated, and nothing is confirmed. Your leverage comes from the 2019-04-15 expiry and the correspondingly short § 286 damages tail, not from any AIA-trial estoppel or cancellation.

I'll research the assignment record, correspondent data, and any NPE-linked transfers for US 6,262,724.

Let me check for any post-2007 transfers and confirm the family/ownership picture.

Ownership Reconstruction — US 6,262,724 (Crow et al.)

Sourcing note (read first): I could not drive the USPTO Assignment Center UI directly in this session. The assignment events below are taken from the Google Patents legal-events view of the record (which is populated from USPTO assignment data) that was supplied as the authoritative source, cross-checked against web-indexed USPTO-derived records. That view exposes only one reel/frame pair (via the corrective entry's internal reference) and does not expose the correspondent of record for any link. Where the source does not show a field, I say so rather than reconstruct it. This is a real limitation, not a stylistic choice.

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Inventors

Unusual-pattern check: None detected. The inventors' employment at Apple is directly corroborated by the inventor-to-Apple assignments themselves. There is no evidence of a mass inventor departure within 12 months of filing preceding a portfolio sale; the patent remained with Apple for its entire term and expired in Apple's hands. One minor structural quirk: Jobs's interest was assigned separately and separately corrected (recorded at reel 010085/0829, corrected 1999-10-25), which is consistent with a corporate-officer execution rather than inclusion in the bulk employee assignment — not a red flag.

Cross-reference: the sibling/related Crow-et-al. patents in this family are US 6,538,665 (granted 2003-03-25; from parent Ser. No. 09/293,507) and US 6,850,256 (continuation of 09/293,507 via 10/374,831). This is consistent with the lineage already noted in the Patent-summary section. Note the earlier summary speculated about 8,196,043; the records I reached populate the family as 6,538,665 / 6,850,256, not 8,196,043 — no contradiction with the authoritative text, but the 8,196,043 link remains unverified.

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Original assignee

Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino, California (the entity named on the issued patent; renamed Apple Inc. in 2007).

• Did it ship a product embodying the claims? Yes. The specification discloses and the figures depict the QuickTime media-player GUI (time bar with start/stop markers, favorite/channel "drawer," adaptive chapter scrolling), i.e., the QuickTime Player interface Apple shipped. This is a product-embodying operating-company patent.
• Primary line of business: computer hardware, operating systems, and multimedia software (QuickTime media layer).
• Current status: Operating. Assignee of record is Apple Inc. following the 2007-06-04 recorded change of name from Apple Computer, Inc. No bankruptcy, dissolution, or acquisition; Apple remains the most valuable public company and is named as current assignee.

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Assignment timeline

Four recorded events. No post-2007-06-04 assignments exist in the record.

• 1999-04-15 (executed) / recorded date not exposed in source — Reel not exposed

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: Daniel N. Crow; Cary Dean; Elizabeth Dykstra-Erickson; J. Peter Hoddie; Timothy E. Wasko
  • Assignee: Apple Computer, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not exposed in the record retrieved
  • Context: Original employee-inventor assignment to the operating company at filing.

• 1999-07-12 (executed) / recorded date not exposed — Reel 010085 / 0829 (reel/frame established by the 1999-10-25 corrective entry, which references this exact pair)

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: Steven P. Jobs
  • Assignee: Apple Computer, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not exposed in the record retrieved
  • Context: Separate assignment of the CEO/co-founder's inventor interest — internal; not a sale.

• 1999-10-25 (executed/recorded, as listed) — Reel 010085 / 0829 (corrective)

  • Conveyance: Correction (corrective assignment — "TO CORRECT AN ERROR ON RECEIVING PARTY'S … ON REEL 010085 FRAME 0829")
  • Assignor: Steven P. Jobs
  • Assignee: Apple Computer, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not exposed in the record retrieved
  • Context: Administrative correction of the receiving-party data on the Jobs recording — internal housekeeping, no change in beneficial ownership.

• 2007-06-04 (recorded) — Reel not exposed

  • Conveyance: Change of Name
  • Assignor: Apple Computer, Inc., a California corporation
  • Assignee: Apple Inc.
  • Correspondent: not exposed in the record retrieved
  • Context: Change of name only (Apple Computer, Inc. → Apple Inc.); no transfer of beneficial ownership.

Terminal state: Apple Inc. No assignment out of Apple appears anywhere in the record. The patent expired (anticipated expiration 2019-04-15) still owned by Apple.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6262724
    1999 : Filed by Apple Computer Inc
         : Five inventors assign to Apple
         : Jobs assigns his inventor rights
         : Corrective assignment recorded
    2001 : Patent granted on 17 July
    2007 : Name change to Apple Inc
    2019 : Patent expires still Apple owned

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No assignment to any "IP / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" entity. The only post-filing conveyance is the 2007-06-04 change of name to Apple Inc. Chain terminates at a large operating company.
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No assignee on the record matches Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, or any Spangenberg entity. Current assignee is Apple Inc.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear. The correspondent of record is not exposed in the data I could retrieve for any of the four events. I cannot confirm or refute a repeat-player attorney; this signal cannot be scored on the available record and should be checked directly in Assignment Center.
4. Cascading transfers — not present. Four recorded events over eight years (1999-04 → 2007-06), all intra-Apple. There is no chained-LLC sequence of any kind.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No transfer precedes any suit; per the Litigation section, no litigation naming '724 was found, and the last recorded event (2007-06-04) is roughly 19 years before expiration with no assertion.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Apple never filed; no sale-in-bankruptcy of this asset.
7. Privateering — not present. No transfer from Apple to any assertion vehicle.
8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified, or OIN; it terminates at an operating company. This is therefore not a "neutralized-by-aggregator" finding either.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — with the affirmative caveat that no NPE pattern is present.

Under the rubric's five options, the record for US 6,262,724 consists only of the original assignments plus a change of name, which is the rubric's express definition of "Insufficient data." The record affirmatively shows the patent was assigned by the five inventors to Apple Computer, Inc. on 1999-04-15, by Steven P. Jobs on 1999-07-12 (corrected 1999-10-25 at reel 010085/frame 0829), and conveyed by change of name to Apple Inc. on 2007-06-04 — with no subsequent assignment and no transfer to any third party or licensing entity, so none of the NPE, fire-sale, cascading-transfer, or privateering signals fire. Note that no option captures "single owner, never transferred, never asserted by an operating company"; the closest literal fit is "Insufficient data," but the operative finding is no NPE/troll pattern and continued operating-company ownership through expiration.

Verify directly (required, because the source I could reach omits reel/frame and correspondent fields):

• USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 6262724)
• Legacy USPTO Assignment Search — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html

Explicit limitations: (a) reel/frame is confirmed only for the Jobs recording (010085/0829); the three other events' reel/frame numbers were not exposed in the retrieved data; (b) correspondent of record was not retrievable, so signal #3 is genuinely unresolved; (c) this reconstruction covers '724 only — family members 6,538,665 and 6,850,256 would need a separate pull before making any statement about the Crow-et-al. family as a whole.

I'll run targeted searches on the specific patent number and its cited prior art.

The main patent page content is truncated. Let me pull the citation tables directly.

Let me try to retrieve the citation table from alternate sources and confirm the key reference.

Scope note before the analysis (read first)

I need to be straight with you about what I could and could not verify, because the task asks for claim-by-claim § 102 mapping and I do not have two things required to do that rigorously:

1. The front-page "References Cited" table is not in my source. The authoritative text supplied to me for US 6,262,724 (fetched from https://patents.google.com/patent/US6262724/en) is truncated mid-Summary and stops before the claims and before the front-page citation list. My attempts this session to pull the citation table returned the specification's token/statistics block and third-party mirrors, not the enumerated "U.S. Patent Documents" table.
2. The allowed claims are not in my source. Claim-by-claim anticipation mapping requires the verbatim claim language. I did not retrieve it. So any "claim" mapping below is at the level of the patent's enumerated inventive aspects / claim families, and I say so explicitly rather than inventing claim numbers.

I also did not complete a direct USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter query — my tool steps were exhausted — so the returns below are third-party mirrors of USPTO data (Google Patents, Justia, RPX/Insight), not the USPTO primary interface itself. Treat this as a work-in-progress prior-art picture, not a certified citation list.

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1. Patent identification (confirmed)

Critical date implication: the 1999-04-15 filing date means any reference published or patented before 1998-04-15 is § 102(b) prior art (statutory bar) and cannot be sworn behind by the applicant. This matters for the references below. (Note the previously flagged discrepancy: one third-party record lists priority as 1999-04-14; the authoritative record says 1999-04-15. The authoritative date controls, and it does not change any § 102(b) conclusion here, since the margin is a full year.)

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2. The one citation I can verify verbatim from the patent's own text

Reference A — U.S. Pat. No. 5,745,096

• Full citation: U.S. Patent No. 5,745,096, entitled "Desk Drawer User Interface," issued Apr. 28, 1998. Recorded patent-holder: Apple Computer, Inc. (per https://lxer.org/module/db/go/13/6307/, listing "US 5,745,096 | Desk drawer user interface | April 28, 1998 | Apple Computer, Inc.").
• How it appears in '724: the '724 specification expressly incorporates it by reference: "Examples of mechanisms and terminology for display interfaces, cursor control, and drawer user interfaces are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,745,096, issued on Apr. 28, 1998, and entitled, 'Desk Drawer User Interface,' which is hereby incorporated by reference herein." This is a citation made by the applicant in the body of the specification, i.e., the clearest "citation" in the document.
• Date / § 102 basis: issued 1998-04-28, i.e., more than one year before the 1999-04-15 filing → § 102(b) (printed publication / patent bar). It is also a § 102(a) "known or used by others / patented before the invention" reference.
• Brief description: A display-oriented UI generating a secondary display region ("Desk Drawer") within a primary display region of a windowed information-management system. A trigger region / handle bar is displayed when the drawer is closed; resizing the drawer is done by dragging a pointer on the handle bar; icons are dragged into and out of the drawer. (Substantively confirmed via the sibling disclosure in US 5,825,348, https://patents.justia.com/patent/5825348, which carries the same "Desk drawer user interface" title/spec text.)
• What it potentially anticipates (§ 102) — mapped to '724's claim families:
  • Aspect/claim family 2 (primary window + drawer window holding objects): US 5,745,096 appears to disclose (i) a secondary region that is displayed/hidden relative to a primary region, (ii) a trigger/handle control used to open it, (iii) resizing of the secondary region, and (iv) drag-in / drag-out transfer of icons — the core "drawer" concepts. This is the reference most likely to have been the § 102 backbone for the drawer claims, and the reason the applicant incorporated it by reference rather than distinguishing it on substance.
  • Important distinction to preserve: in US 5,745,096 the secondary region is always displayed over the windows ("always displayed over and covering other data including said plurality of windows" — its claims 1 and 6), whereas '724's drawer slides under and is at least partially overlapped by the primary window. '724 also adds fixed, tiled "wells," each holding one media-source icon (thumbnail/logo) tied to a time-based media file or streamed channel. Desk Drawer discloses neither the under-slide geometry nor tiled media-source wells. So US 5,745,096 is a strong § 102/§ 103 reference against the broad drawer concept but is unlikely to anticipate claims reciting the slide-under-as-part-of-primary-window + tiled wells combination on its own.

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3. Same-family art surfaced in the search (highly material, but I could NOT confirm it appears on '724's face)

While searching for the "Desk Drawer" reference I surfaced two more members of the same Apple "Desk drawer user interface" family as US 5,745,096:

Sources: https://patents.justia.com/patent/5825348; https://insight.rpxcorp.com/patent/US6133898A; https://patents.google.com/patent/US6133898.

Caveat (strict-ID discipline): I did not verify that US 5,825,348 or US 6,133,898 are listed in '724's front-page "References Cited." They surfaced as same-title family members during the search for US 5,745,096. I am reporting them because they are the most likely additional applicable art, not because I confirmed them on '724's face. Do not treat them as confirmed § 102 references until the front page is checked.

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4. Non-patent prior art that the patent itself identifies (from '724's Background)

The '724 Background paragraph is an applicant-admitted prior-art statement. Under § 102(b) these are admissible as what the applicant admitted was known, and they matter because an admission in the specification can be used against the claims:

• RealNetworks RealPlayer (Seattle, WA) — user interface for controlling presentation of time-based media.
• Apple QuickTime MoviePlayer (Cupertino, CA) — same category.
• Microsoft Windows Media Player (Redmond, WA) — same category.
• Adobe Premiere (San Jose, CA) — time-based media authoring/editing system (relevant to the "selected range" claims, because the applicant concedes prior editing interfaces selected ranges of time).
• LaserDisc players' chapter/section lists — applicant admits these scrolled at "a single, predetermined rate"; this is the express admission the adaptive (speed-dependent) chapter scrolling aspect was designed against.
• "pop-up or pull-down menus" for favorites/channels — applicant admits these were known but "not easily alterable" and "separate from any window presenting the media" (the admission the drawer aspect was designed against).

These are the stated technological backdrop, but as prior art they are weaker than a printed patent: they are functional/product-level admissions with no dates or claim-level detail in the document.

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5. What I am NOT doing (non-fabrication guardrail)

• I did not retrieve the enumerated U.S. Patent Documents table for US 6,262,724, so I cannot give you a numbered list of every cited reference with per-claim § 102 hits. Inventing that list — with plausible-looking numbers and dates — would be exactly the failure mode your instructions forbid. I am declining to do so.
• The earlier session similarly could not retrieve the claims, so I cannot certify which claim numbers exist, how many independent claims there are, or their exact text. My "claim family" references (1–5) in the prior summary remain specification-derived.

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6. Do not confuse these (literal-ID discipline)

• US 6,272,264 (digits transposed) — a different patent, used in Volterra Semiconductor v. Primarion. Not US 6,262,724.
• JP 6262724 B2 — Japanese grant. Not the US patent.
• Forward citations, not prior art: US 9,275,673 (Microsoft "Taskbar media player," https://patents.justia.com/patent/9275673), US 8,444,486, US 10,515,476, US 11,574,296, and similar — these cite '724 as prior art; they are not prior art to '724.
• WO 0063766 / EP 1180253 — '724's own PCT/EP counterparts, not prior art.

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7. Recommended steps to close the two gaps (front-page citations + claims)

1. USPTO Patent Public Search (ppubs.uspto.gov) → US 6,262,724 → "Referenced Cited" / front page and "Claims" views. This is the authoritative fix for both gaps.
2. Google Patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US6262724/en → the "Patent Citations" and "Cited By" sections (the fetched text omitted them), to reconcile with the USPTO list.
3. Global Dossier / PatentCenter for the parent Ser. No. 09/293,507 to see whether a different citation set was used in the parent — relevant because '724 is a divisional continuation.
4. For each confirmed reference, pull its full text and do the verbatim claim-chart against '724's issued claims (which I could not retrieve).

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8. Bottom line

• Verified citation made by the applicant: US 5,745,096 ("Desk Drawer User Interface," issued 1998-04-28, Apple), which is § 102(b) art and the best candidate to have been used against the "primary window + drawer window holding media objects" claim family — subject to the over-window vs. under-window and tiled-wells distinctions.
• Strong but unconfirmed-against-'724 additional art: US 5,825,348 and US 6,133,898 (same "Desk drawer user interface" family).
• Applicant-admitted § 102(b)-style non-patent art: RealPlayer, QuickTime MoviePlayer, Windows Media Player, Adobe Premiere, LaserDisc chapter navigation, and pop-up/pull-down favorites menus, per '724's own Background.
• Unretrieved: the complete front-page "References Cited" list and the issued claims — so I am not providing a fabricated full citation table, and my § 102 references to "claims" are to the patent's enumerated aspects, not verbatim claim numbers.

Confidence: High on the bibliographic data and on the US 5,745,096 incorporation-by-reference (it is quoted in the specification). Moderate on US 5,825,348 / US 6,133,898 being material. Low/none on the completeness of the citation list — that requires the USPTO front page, which I was unable to reach this session.

I'll research prior art relevant to the claim families identified in the earlier sections. Let me run several targeted searches.

I have the examiner-cited reference list from the sibling continuation (US 6,850,256, same specification). Let me dig into the key references and the family's actual claim text.

Obviousness Analysis — US 6,262,724 B1 (35 U.S.C. § 103)

0. What the "Prior Art section of this page" actually gave me — and how I supplemented it

Per the operating rule, I used the prior-art material on the authoritative record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6262724/en, fetched 2026‑09‑24). That section, as supplied, contains only:

The fetch did not include the cited-references table for '724 itself. I did not invent one. Instead I pulled the "References Cited" list from US 6,850,256 B2 — a same-specification, same-inventor continuation in this family (Crow et al., Apple; continuation of Ser. No. 09/293,507) whose full front page is retrievable (e.g. the Docket Alarm-hosted copy at https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/CBM2013-00023/.../Exhibit-4427-United_States_Patent_No_6,850,256.pdf). The two patents share the identical specification and abstract, so that list is a strong (not perfect) proxy for the art of record. I flag this substitution explicitly.

Two corrections/additions to the earlier sections in this file:

1. The earlier "uncertainties" note asked whether US 8,196,043 belongs to this family. The Justia citation table at https://patents.justia.com/patent/11392291#15 confirms the family chain: 6,538,665; 6,850,256; 7,111,240; 7,315,984; 7,318,196; 7,458,025; 8,196,043 (all "Crow et al."). The lineage is therefore confirmed.
2. The earlier sections correctly warned that the verbatim claims of '724 were not retrieved. That remains true. Everything below is therefore organized by claim family (the four/five specification-derived aspects), not by claim number. Where I state a claim scope, it is an inference from the specification and abstract and should be verified against the granted-PDF claim column before being relied on.

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1. Governing framework

• Pre-AIA § 103 applies. Filing date 1999‑04‑15. No AIA §§ 102/103, no KSR‑as-codified gloss. The Graham v. John Deere factors control: (1) scope and content of the prior art, (2) differences between the prior art and the claims, (3) level of ordinary skill, (4) secondary considerations.
• Of-record art that pre-dates 1999‑04‑15 (from the '256 list), with filing/issue dates I could partially verify:

• Non-patent art of record (from the '256 "Other Publications"): QuickTime Movie Player Screendumps illustrating Current Time Indicator Dragging Operation (Ver. 2.1.2.59, 1996); RealOne Player 2.0 (2002); Windows Media Player 8.0 for XP (2001); PCT ISR mailed 2000‑07‑11 in PCT/US00/10441.

Date caution. Several entries on the '256 list (US 6,332,147 Moran; 6,366,296 Boreczky; 6,204,840 Petelycky; 6,456,305 Qureshi; and pub. 2002/0191028) issued after '724 and would only qualify as pre-AIA § 102(e) art if their underlying applications were filed before 1999‑04‑15. I did not verify those filing dates and therefore do not build the primary case on them. Where I mention them, I mark them as secondary/verify-first.

• Art the specification itself admits (a § 103 gift — admissions bind): pop-up/pull-down menus for "favorites" and "channels" (Background); playback controls rendered on the media window's own border, "a time bar may be displayed on a window with controls for playback"; LaserDisc chapter/section lists whose "speed of scrolling is fixed at a single, predetermined rate"; and editing interfaces that select a time range but "do not allow for the playback, through a single playback button, of a selected range … selected by at least one dragging action." The patent frames each claim family as an improvement on an admitted baseline. That materially lowers the § 103 hurdle: the invention is positioned as a refinement, not a leap.

• PHOSITA (proposed): a bachelor's-level software engineer with 2–3 years of consumer multimedia/GUI application development, familiar with the Apple Macintosh Toolbox/Finder, QuickTime, and non-linear editing packages (Premiere). This is a low-to-moderate skill level, which cuts toward obviousness for UI-composition inventions.

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2. Claim family A — timeline + start/stop indicators + single play button for the drag-selected range

Claimed subject matter (per Abstract + FIG. 8A–8F/8C): display a time bar for the media; display a current-time indicator on it; display a start indicator and a stop indicator on it; set the start/stop by dragging at least one indicator; then play back the selected portion.

Primary combination: Ubillos (US 5,999,173) + QuickTime Movie Player screendumps (1996) + Klingler (US 5,404,316 / 5,682,326)

• Ubillos (https://patents.google.com/patent/US5999173) discloses a computer video-editing system that "display[s] representations of video, still image, and audio clips at desired positions along a displayed time ruler," a separate video window for preview, and marked in/out points manipulated to define a sub-range — i.e., a timeline with start/stop range selection and a preview of the selected material. Filed 1992, so squarely pre-1999 despite issuing in Dec. 1999.
• Klingler '316/'326 (same USPC pocket, 345/328, as the '724 examiner's art) supply the same idea in a simpler consumer form: a time bar with a movable position indicator and range markers for a stored media program.
• The 1996 QuickTime Movie Player screendumps, of record and pre-dating the filing by three years, show a current-time indicator being dragged along a time bar in a player application — i.e., the "graphical representation of a current time along the time line," in a player (not an editor).

Why a PHOSITA would have combined them

1. Same field, same problem, same data structure. All three are time-based-media GUIs manipulating an identical abstraction — a linear timeline indexed by time. Combination requires no change of field or of the underlying data model.
2. Ubillos and Klingler already contain every element but the "one-button playback" convenience. The only identified difference over the admitted art is the single-action playback of the range the user just dragged, which the specification offers as the prior-art gap. That is a runtime/preview control that Ubillos already provides in kind (Ubillos previews a program assembled from selected clips) and that the QuickTime player already provides in kind (a play button acting on the currently-loaded media). Placing a player's play control at the service of an editor's in/out markers is the combination of two known elements each performing its known function — the classic KSR predictability case, with no change in principle of operation.
3. Explicit design incentive in the art's own terms. The patent's stated motivation (Background §) — novice users intimidated by control-heavy editing windows — is a recognized market/design pressure, and the resulting claim (one button instead of an edit-list workflow) is a mere streamlining/automation of a manual sequence, which KSR treats as within the skill of the artisan.
4. Live-feedback sub-features are separately anticipated/obvious. Updating a time readout during a scrub drag is exactly the QuickTime screendump behavior; chapter-linkage and frame-preview-on-drag are routine monitoring of a variable the system already holds.

Strengthened by the Applicant's own admission: the Background concedes editing interfaces "may include the ability of selecting a range of time of the media for editing in that selected range" but lacked one-button playback of a drag-selected range. Where the specification concedes the missing element is a use/convenience of a structure the art already had, § 103 falls with little resistance.

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3. Claim family B — primary window + "drawer" secondary window holding tiled wells of media icons

Claimed subject matter: generate a primary player window; generate a secondary drawer window; drawer overlapped by the primary window in one state, at least partly viewable in another; drawer appears to slide out from under the primary window; drawer moves with the primary window; drawer provides fixed, predetermined, tiled (non-overlapping) locations ("wells"), each holding a media-source icon; icons draggable in/out/between.

Primary reference: Ludolph US 5,745,096 — "Desk Drawer User Interface" (Apple), expressly incorporated by reference into '724's own specification, plus its sibling US 6,133,898 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6133898)

This is the strongest single-reference § 103 position in the whole analysis, because the reference is Apple's own prior patent, cited and incorporated by the applicant. Ludolph discloses, verbatim from the record:

• a secondary display region ("drawer space") triggered by a trigger region / handle bar — the precise "drawer control" of '724's FIG. 3A/4;
• open/close animation: drawer opens and closes with animation ("animating downward"); a "zoom down" series of shrinking window outlines for the icon/close animation — matching '724's "slide out from under the primary window" and its zooming animated rectangles;
• size adjustability by dragging the handle bar ("the cursor pointer could adjust the size of drawer space 38 by using the handle bar … dragging … as previously described"), matching '724's incrementally-draggable drawer;
• drag-and-drop of icons into, out of, and between drawer partitions ("files may be easily transferred into and out of a drawer space"; "files may be easily transferred from one drawer space partition to another");
• multiple, independent, simultaneously-active drawer partitions with independently adjustable size and independently-held content — i.e., the "auxiliary drawers" of family C as well;
• icon position stored relative to screen dimensions (relative-position persistence).

The remaining gaps and why they close

Net: Family B reads as the application of the applicant's own incorporated Desk Drawer patent to the applicant's own media player, with a grid-snapping refinement. Under § 103 that is close to a per-se obviousness posture, and the applicant's express incorporation of Ludolph is itself evidence that the artisan of the time had the drawer concept at hand.

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4. Claim family C — auxiliary drawers for media information and for additional playback controls

Claimed subject matter: same primary/secondary drawer architecture, but the drawer supplies (i) information about the current media — copyright, encryption, compression notices, credits, warnings — and/or (ii) controls — bass, treble, balance, forward/reverse scan, skip.

Combination: Ludolph drawer architecture + Bauer US 5,664,128 (control-panel UI) + the admitted prior-art player chrome

• The drawer architecture is supplied, as above, by Ludolph alone.
• The contents ("audio bass, treble, and balance controls, forward/backward scan, skip"; information/credits panels) are garden-variety media-player controls. The specification itself concedes that prior interfaces put "various controls … on a border of the same window which presents the media," including a "time bar … on a window with controls for playback." Tabs/panels that swap in a different set of controls or a text-information pane are the textbook solution to the very problem the Background articulates (control-clutter intimidating novices).
• Motivation is supplied by the patent's own stated objective: keep the primary window uncluttered while preserving access to controls. Moving a known set of controls or a known text panel into a known hideable secondary region is a predictable rearrangement of known parts with no change in function — the paradigm § 103 case. Nothing in these claims requires new hardware, new data, or new control logic; the controls and the information already exist in the art; only their housing is relocated.

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5. Claim family D — adaptive scroll speed dependent on input speed (chapters/time)

Claimed subject matter: detect an input that changes a GUI portion indicating time; determine a speed characteristic of the input; change the displayed information at a rate dependent on (spec: "in direct proportion to") the input speed. Canonical embodiment: click-and-hold the chapter display and drag up/down; faster cursor ⇒ faster chapter/time scroll (FIGS. 7C–7J, 12A–12B).

Primary reference: EP 0 474 234 A2 (Kabushiki Kaisha Dainichi, "Scroll control system") — priority JP 238360/90 (1990-09-07); published 1992‑03‑11

This is the reference I would lead with, and it is not on the '256 of-record list — i.e., a likely oversight/incomplete-search point for validity attack. From the record (http://data.epo.org/publication-server/rest/v1.2/patents/EP0474234NWA3/document.pdf, and the A2 text at https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/0b/0f/86/4326fb67f332f5/EP0474234A2.pdf):

• a cursor-displacement calculator (35) computes the cursor's displacement from a window reference point;
• a scroll rate calculator (37) "decide[s] a scroll rate" and the system scrolls window content "in a direction and a speed according to cursor direction and distance";
• the scroll distance is expressly made a function of the cursor's displacement, with a "scroll distance calculator" outputting a variable rate — and the specification states "the scroll speed is determined low" or "high" accordingly.

So: variable, cursor-motion-dependent scroll rate in a window was in the printed art eight years before the '724 filing. The only residual delta is that '724 ties scroll rate to the speed of the drag (distance/time) rather than to the displacement from a reference point.

Why that delta is obvious

1. Two-way / predictable-variable combination. 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." A practitioner of Dainichi's rate calculator who wanted a rate responsive to how fast the user is driving the cursor would naturally measure Δdisplacement/Δt rather than Δdisplacement. Both are computed from the same sampled cursor stream; the modification is arithmetic, not architectural.
2. The prior art of record independently teaches speed-proportional scrolling. The Belfiore references on the '256 list (US 5,611,060; US 5,726,687) sit in the scroll-control pocket (345/684, 345/819) and, together with the general art of inertial/momentum scrolling, establish that deriving scroll behavior from cursor motion characteristics was a known and pursued design space by the mid-1990s.
3. The admitted baseline creates the motivation. The Background expressly criticizes prior chapter lists where "the speed of scrolling is fixed at a single, predetermined rate. Thus, the user's ability to scroll through a list of chapters is limited." A finite, fixed-rate list-scroll is precisely the pain point that a user-controllable, speed-varying scroll is designed to cure, and Dainichi shows the cure. Motivation is thus supplied by the patent's own admission, and the mechanism by Dainichi.
4. Linked time/chapter readouts (scroll the time display in lockstep with the chapter display) are the mere display of a second view of the same variable the system is already changing — predictable, no new function.

Secondary/verify-first art (post-dating, do not lean on for '724): US 2010/0058240 A1 (frictional list items; scroll-speed profiles mapped from scroll-request signals) and EP 2 413 227 A2 ("mochi cursor": scrolling direction and speed control set according to the direction and length of a drag). Both confirm that the field treats "scroll speed as a function of drag input" as ordinary design space — useful for a § 103 obviousness narrative about the state of the art in 1999, unusable as § 102 art against a 1999 filing.

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6. Claim family E (uncertain claim status) — two-rectangle / threshold window resizing

Claimed subject matter: dragging a resize control animates two rectangles (inner media display vs. outer player window); inner grows until a threshold (~320×240 or the player's edges); beyond it the outer window grows too; shrinking below the default minimum affects only the inner window.

Combination: standard window-resize art — Austin US 5,760,772 (345/798, display/window control), Leong US 5,513,342 (345/798), Southgate US 5,880,725 — supplies animated resize outlines and multi-pane window sizing. The '724 spec itself states the animated zoom outline is a known technique on the Macintosh ("zoom down," per Ludolph; "zoom down" is also Ludolph's own admitted prior art). Two simultaneous outlines is the obvious extension of a single-outline resize to a window containing an inset content pane — a designer's choice to show the user both constrained dimensions, motivated by the very concern the spec articulates (not obscuring the desktop / not pushing controls off-screen). § 103: obvious. (Note: I could not confirm from the supplied text whether this aspect is actually claimed; if it is only disclosed, it is irrelevant to validity and relevant only to written-description/enablement of other claims.)

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7. Family F — machine-readable-medium / "routine" claim (FIG. 14)

If any independent claim is drafted as a machine-readable medium storing executable code comprising the drawer routine, adaptive time/chapter routine, time-bar selection-marker routine, streaming-status routine, resizing routine, and auxiliary-drawer routine (FIG. 14), then it rises and falls with the method claims recited in those routines. Under In re Beauregard / In re Lowry, a medium claim reciting the same executable code is not patentably distinct from the method it performs. Consequence for this analysis: it adds no independent § 103 defense and requires no separate art. (Whether such a claim exists in '724 I could not verify.)

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8. Motivation-to-combine synthesis (the § 103 "why," gathered in one place)

A single narrative covers all families:

1. Common field and common data abstraction. Every reference and the patent operate on the same object — a time-indexed media program rendered in a windowing GUI with drag-and-drop. There is no analogous-arts problem.
2. Teaching-suggestion-motivation is present, and where it isn't, KSR supplies it. For families B/C the suggestion is textual (the specification incorporates Ludolph by reference). For families A and D the suggestion comes from the patent's own admissions of the complained-of deficiencies (no one-button playback of a dragged range; fixed-rate chapter scrolling). For the residual differences (speed vs. displacement; grid vs. free placement; two resize rectangles), the changes are predictable in result, require no new function, and are the kind of "arrangement of old elements" that KSR holds obvious.
3. No change in principle of operation. In every combination, each element performs exactly the function it performed in its reference. That is the strongest available signal of obviousness.
4. Design incentives / market pressure. Consumer multimedia in 1998–99 (QuickTime, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, DVD/LaserDisc) created intense pressure to simplify control surfaces and add convenience playback — a recognized incentive the Background itself recites.
5. Low PHOSITA skill level for UI composition. With 2–3 years of GUI/multimedia development, a tiled well grid, a child window that translates with its parent, a second animated resize outline, and a rate = f(cursor motion) computation are all within routine engineering.

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9. The counter-case, stated fairly (what a patent owner would argue)

I should not present this as one-sided:

• "Single play button for a drag-selected range" — the applicant's express point of novelty over the editing art. A patent owner argues that editing systems selected ranges for output/rendering, not for immediate playback, and that the QuickTime player had no range markers; combining them changes the user's mental model from "edit then export" to "select then watch." Whether that is a new function or a new convenience is the crux, and it is genuinely arguable.
• "Directly proportional" scroll speed. A patent owner argues Dainichi discloses scroll rate ∝ displacement from a reference point, which is a position-dependent rate — responsive to where the cursor is, not how fast it moved. That is a real, if narrow, distinction, and it is the strongest non-obviousness argument available for family D. The counter is that both quantities are derived from the same cursor samples and the substitution is arithmetic; but a panel could go the other way.
• Incorporation-by-reference cuts both ways. Ludolph being incorporated by the applicant proves the concept was known, but it also means the applicant disclosed the drawer as background, and the combination with a media player's playback semantics is the point of novelty. A patent owner will frame the claims as an ordered combination and invoke the rule that a combination is not obvious merely because its parts are known.
• Secondary considerations. The '724 family was maintained and continued through at least six additional patents (6,538,665; 6,850,256; 7,111,240; 7,315,984; 7,318,196; 7,458,025; 8,196,043) by a sophisticated applicant with an incentive to prune non-core claims — weak, but non-zero, evidence of perceived value. I found no evidence of commercial-success/nexus, licensing, or copying, so I cannot weigh this factor.
• Procedural reality. The claims issued over this exact art — the '256 listing is the examiner's own cited set, applied against a same-spec sibling. That means the examiner had Klingler, Ubillos, Ludolph, Belfiore, and the 1996 QuickTime screendumps in front of him and still allowed claims. The § 103 case above therefore depends on claim-scope details I have not read. This is the single most important caveat in this document.

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10. Bottom line

• Family B (drawer + wells): strongest obviousness case. Ludolph US 5,745,096 — incorporated by reference into the patent itself — discloses the drawer, its trigger/handle, its open/close animation, its drag-resizing, drag-and-drop in/out, and multiple independent drawer partitions. The residual delta (tiled fixed wells holding media thumbnails; the drawer translating with its parent window) is routine design choice. Should be held obvious absent a claim limitation I could not read.
• Family C (auxiliary info/control drawers): same architecture plus garden-variety player controls/info — obvious.
• Family A (timeline start/stop + one-button ranged playback): obvious over Ubillos (1992) + the 1996 QuickTime Movie Player screendumps + Klingler, with the motivation supplied by the specification's own admission of the prior-art gap. Defensible but contestable on the "new function vs. new convenience" point.
• Family D (speed-proportional adaptive scrolling): obvious over EP 0 474 234 A2 (Dainichi, 1990/1992) in view of the admitted fixed-rate chapter lists; the position-vs-speed distinction is the claim owner's best rebuttal and is narrow. Note this reference is not on the sibling's of-record list — a live search-completeness issue.
• Family E (two-rectangle resize) / Family F (medium claim): obvious / not separately patentable, respectively.

Confidence and its limits, stated plainly: My confidence in the reference-level findings (what Ludolph, Ubillos, Klingler, and EP 474 234 disclose) is moderate-to-high; my confidence in the claim-level conclusions is low-to-moderate, because the numbered claims of US 6,262,724 were not present in the authoritative text supplied to me and I was unable to retrieve them within this session's tool budget. Any reliance on this analysis should be preceded by reading the granted claim column (USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Public Search "Claims" view, or the granted-PDF claim pages) and by (a) confirming the filing dates of the post-1999 references on the '256 list before treating them as § 102(e) art, and (b) verifying that EP 0 474 234 A2 was not already before the examiner in the parent application 09/293,507 and its foreign counterpart (WO 00/63766 / EP 1 180 253).