US 6286005

I'll search for authoritative records on this patent number and check for any CAFC 2026 activity.

Now let me check for CAFC 2026 litigation and obtain the actual claim text.

Let me check the Nielsen Federal Circuit appeal in 2026 and try to pull the claim text directly.

US 6,286,005 B1 — Verified Summary

Sourcing note: I retrieved the Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6286005/en, fetched 2026‑09‑24), the front-page image of the granted patent (patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/46/27/89/43f9c743a9b254/US6286005.pdf), the published continuation US 2001/0020236 A1, and uspto.report's grant page. I did not find any CAFC docket (2026 or otherwise) naming this patent — see the litigation section below.

Bibliographic data (authoritative)

Family / related filings: WO 1999/046719 A1 (PCT/US1999/005363, filed 1999‑03‑09), AU 30809/99, and US 2001/0020236 A1 (application 09/814,622, filed 2001‑03‑22 — a continuation of the '005 application). Notable prior art cited on the face: US 5,848,396 (Gerace), US 5,855,008 (Goldhaber), US 5,636,346 (Saxe), and US 6,029,176 (also to Cannon).

Abstract (as printed)

The most preferred embodiment of the present invention is a computer-based decision support system that includes three main components: a database mining engine (DME); an advertising optimization mechanism; and a customized user interface that provides access to the various features of the invention. The user interface, in conjunction with the DME, provides a unique and innovative way to store, retrieve and manipulate data from existing databases containing media-related audience access data … By using a database with a simplified storage and retrieval protocol, the data contained therein can be effectively manipulated in real time … Further, by utilizing the advertising optimization mechanism of the present invention, businesses, networks, and advertising agencies can interactively create, score, rank and compare various proposed or actual advertising strategies … Finally, the user interface for the system provides access to both the DME and the optimization mechanism in a simple and straightforward manner, significantly reducing training time.

Internal inconsistency worth flagging: the printed abstract says three main components (DME, optimization mechanism, user interface), while the specification body repeatedly says four main components (DME and a DME database, optimization mechanism, user interface). Same reference numeral scheme (100/110/120/126/127/128/129 in FIG. 1).

Plain-language overview of the disclosure

The patent is a pre‑"ad tech" data-mining and media-planning system built around Nielsen person‑by‑person TV viewing data:

1. Data conversion (FIGS. 2, 4; element 128). Nielsen weekly ASCII/log files (calendar, classification, program-data lead, program-data continuation, usage-data lead, usage-data continuation records) are reorganized into a proprietary binary, object-oriented .tvd (Television Viewing Data) file — one file per week, named by date (e.g. 19970728.tvd) — in which the on-disk byte layout mirrors the in-memory layout, permitting bulk binary load rather than row-by-row reconstruction.
2. DME database (126). A .tvd file contains arrays of household, person, and program objects plus a "viewing catalog" of index values that indirect through to a compressed viewing-data block (a week of ~7 MB divided into 28 six-hour blocks of ~250 KB). Catalog offsets let a single person be tracked across many weeks without reloading person/household arrays. Demographic filtering uses Boolean bit-masks (e.g. a 16-bit age field: PersonAge & AgeSelectionMask), avoiding relational joins.
3. Advertising optimization mechanism (129). An incremental optimizer (FIG. 13): start from a base plan/schedule, propose candidate spots to add or delete, score each candidate, pick the best, promote it to the new base, and repeat (human-in-the-loop or automatic). Scoring (FIG. 14) combines up to five multiplicative indices — Exposure Valuation (1440), Audience Valuation (1450), Exposure Recency (1460), Response (1470), and Cost (1480) — each an indicator of relative rather than absolute value, summed over a sample audience and multiplied into a single score.
4. GUI (125). Single-click drill-downs on program names/data regions, slider-bar demographic selection, "what-if" comparison of alternatives, and real-time feedback as the planner assembles a schedule.

Claim overview — with an important caveat

⚠️ I could not retrieve the verbatim claim text in this session. The full text supplied to me ends in the middle of the "Detailed Description" (at "…the number of times that an audience member has already seen the advertisement; exposure spacing…"); it does not include the claims. My searches returned the front page (which confirms 32 claims / 31 sheets) and third-party discussion of the patent's subject matter, but not the claim set itself.

Accordingly, the following is a functional mapping inferred from the specification, not authoritative claim language:

A prosecution "Remarks" paper filed 2003‑04‑17 in an unrelated matter (US 09/285,929) characterizes Cannon as claiming "a complex system for optimizing the scheduling of advertisements, e.g., over multiple days or weeks and over a number of media slots," scoring "using factors such as exposure valuation, audience valuation, exposure recency, and cost" — consistent with the above, but that is an advocate's paraphrase, not claim language.

Recommendation: pull the exact claims from USPTO Patent Center (or the "Claims" tab of the Google Patents page) if verbatim claim construction matters.

CAFC 2026 dockets — no match found

I searched the Federal Circuit's 2026 materials and found no docket in 2026 (or otherwise) involving US 6,286,005. Specifically:

• The prominent 2026 Nielsen Federal Circuit case is The Nielsen Company (US), LLC v. TVision Insights, Inc., No. 2025‑1371 (argued June 3, 2026 per the court's June 2026 scheduled-cases list; decided August 14, 2026, Dyk, Reyna, Bissoon, JJ., precedential). That appeal concerns U.S. Patent No. 11,470,243 ("Methods and Apparatus to Capture Images") — a different patent, from a different family, involving camera/facial-recognition audience measurement. It is not an appeal about 6,286,005, and I did not auto-substitute it for your number. The outcome was affirmance of the PTAB's obviousness holding (analogous-art issue).
• Practical context: US 6,286,005 reached the end of its 20-year term on March 11, 2018 and is listed as Expired – Lifetime, so a 2026 infringement appeal would be unusual (appeals on pre-expiration conduct or from PTAB/reexamination proceedings would still be possible, but none surfaced).

Uncertainty disclosure: I cannot rule out a low-visibility 2026 docket (e.g., a sealed or non-precedential appeal) that did not surface in search. I also have no authoritative information on the sub-claims' exact language or on any 2018–2026 post-expiration proceedings involving this patent. If you need certainty, the two definitive checks are (1) USPTO Patent Center → Application 09/038,380 → "Legal Proceedings"/"Patent Trial" tabs, and (2) the Federal Circuit's CM/ECF docket search by patent number.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 6286005. Let me search multiple sources.

Let me search more specifically for litigation databases.

Let me search targeted litigation sources.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 6,286,005

Bottom line

I did not find any confirmed, verifiable litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 6,286,005. Based on the sources I was able to reach in this session, no district court action, ITC investigation, or PTAB proceeding asserting or challenging this specific patent was identified. I am stating this as a negative finding with explicit caveats rather than guessing, because I was unable to reach a live litigation database (Stanford NPE database, RPX Insight, Docket Alarm, Unified Patents litigation portal, or PACER) for this specific patent number within the search budget.

Patent identification (verified, not assumed)

Before reporting, I confirmed I am looking at the right patent:

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6286005/en

What I checked

1. Google Patents bibliographic/legal-events page for US 6,286,005 — shows prosecution, assignment, and expiration events, but no "litigation" or "lawsuits" data section populated.
2. General web searches for 6286005 patent litigation, "6,286,005" patent infringement lawsuit, "Cannon Holdings" patent lawsuit "6,286,005", and attempts against the Unified Patents litigation portal URL structure.
3. Searches for the assignee family (Cannon Holdings / Nielsen) combined with the patent number.

The results returned were either (a) unrelated patents with similar-but-different numbers (e.g., 6,456,326; 6,286,005 appearing merely as a cited reference / prior-art citation), or (b) unrelated litigation involving different patents and different parties. Per your instruction, I am not returning those as results for 6,286,005.

Important caveat about "cited by" hits

The patent appears frequently in third-party patent specifications and in the "cited by" / "References Cited" lists of later patents (for example, it shows as a cited reference in the file histories of several Nielsen-family and advertising-analytics patents). A citation to US 6,286,005 as prior art is not litigation, and I have not counted any of these as a case.

Analyst notes relevant to your query

• Expiration forecloses most future infringement suits. The patent's 20-year term from the 1998-03-11 priority/filing date ran to 2018-03-11, and Google Patents lists "Anticipated expiration" on that date. Damages for past infringement are time-barred under 35 U.S.C. § 286 after six years, so a newly filed infringement claim on this patent would be very unlikely today. Litigation, if any, would have to have occurred roughly between 2001 (grant) and ~2018.
• Entity history. Cannon Holdings, L.L.C. was the original assignee and later merged into The Nielsen Company (US), LLC (assignment recorded 2009-02-17). Any suit would most plausibly have been brought by one of those two entities, or by an exclusive licensee. Note also the collateral security interest recorded in favor of Citibank, N.A. (2008), which is a financing document, not litigation.

What I could not verify

I could not complete a search of PACER, CourtListener's RECAP docket search, the Stanford NPE Litigation Database, RPX Insight, or Docket Alarm for this exact patent number. It remains possible that a case exists — for example, a declaratory-judgment action, a case filed in a district court whose docket is not well indexed by general web search, or an older pre-2010 suit. If you need a definitive answer, the authoritative next steps would be:

• PACER Case Locator / CourtListener RECAP search restricted to the exact patent number 6,286,005.
• Stanford NPE Litigation Database: https://npe.law.stanford.edu/patent/6286005
• RPX Insight litigation search by patent number.
• Unified Patents patent litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com) — note the portal is organized by case lists and may require the specific patent lookup.
• USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) proceeding search for the patent number (no IPR/PGR/CBM for this patent appeared in my searches).

Summary table

Conclusion: No litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 6,286,005 was identified from the sources available in this session. This is a qualified negative finding, not an affirmative representation that no case has ever been filed.

I'll verify the structured data against public sources before drafting.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 6,286,005. The structured USPTO Open Data Portal block for this patent reports no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceedings (active, terminated, or otherwise), and my independent web sweeps for a docket, FWD, or petition number tied to this patent returned nothing — so the count is 0 proceedings: 0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials.

The bottom-line defensive posture is the opposite of hardened: no claim of this patent has ever been tested in a post-grant trial, and the patent has already expired. Per the Google Patents legal-status record, the anticipated expiration date is 2018-03-11 (20 years from the 1998-03-11 filing date), status "Expired – Lifetime." That means (a) no AIA trial can now cancel claims, (b) activity after 2018-03-11 cannot infringe, and (c) an IPR today would be an academic exercise. If a demand letter cites this patent, the attack surface is not the PTAB — it is the expiration date, § 286's six-year damages lookback, and the patent owner's burden on pre-expiration infringement.

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No proceedings to report

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} to enumerate. To be explicit about what I checked and did not find:

• ODP structured data (canonical): no AIA trial proceedings.
• Web search for "6286005" + IPR / PGR / CBM / PTAB: no petition, institution decision, FWD, or Board docket entry surfaced. Hits were unrelated (a Japanese trademark registration no. 6286005, an Australian museum specimen record, patent-family citations of US 6,286,005 as prior art in other companies' patents, and unrelated Canon/hardware IPRs).
• File-history events that are not PTAB proceedings (do not mistake these for trials): the 1999-03-09 PCT filing (PCT/US1999/005363 → WO1999046719A1), the Australian counterpart (AU30809/99A), and a continuation application filed 2001-03-22 (US09/814,622 → US20010020236A1). These are prosecution/counterpart events, not AIA trials.
• Ownership chain relevant to who would assert today: Cannon Holdings, L.L.C. (original assignee) → The Nielsen Company (US), LLC (2009-02-17 merger) → Nielsen Co US LLC (current assignee of record). A 2008-04-11 security interest in favor of Citibank, N.A. was released 2022-10-13. So assertions, if any, would come from the Nielsen side, not from an independent troll entity.

Uncertainty flag, stated plainly: I could not run a direct docket-level query against PTAB E2E / Docket Alarm with the available tooling, and my search returned no Board docket page for this patent at all. Combined with the ODP block, the strong inference is "no PTAB activity," but the reliable way to close the gap is a manual PTAB E2E patent-number search — see next steps. I am not aware of any proceeding, and I will not invent a number to fill the template.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: all claims UNTESTED, and the patent is expired. No claim of US 6,286,005 has been canceled or sustained in an AIA trial, so I cannot give you a "claims 1–5 are dead" shortcut, and I equally cannot give you a "claims survived two IPRs" reassurance. What I can give you is stronger and simpler: the statutory term ran out on 2018-03-11 (per the anticipated-expiration record; confirm against USPTO Patent Center maintenance-fee and expiration data before relying on it). Note also that no claim-level PTAB record exists, so there is no FWD language to quote — quoting an FWD here would be fabrication.

Estoppel landscape: empty, but also moot. Because no petitioner ever filed, no § 315(e)(2) or § 325(e)(2) estoppel attaches to anyone, and no prior-art ground is off the table by estoppel. Conversely, IPR eligibility is now largely theoretical: the term has expired, and while the Board has historically been willing to institute on expired patents (typically where a parallel litigation needed resolution), the practical value is low — an expired patent cannot support prospective injunctive relief, and recovery is confined to past damages. If you were served with a complaint more than one year ago, § 315(b) bars you from filing an IPR anyway; if you were served within the last year, you retain the right, but weigh it against the expiration defense.

Pattern signals: none. No serial petitioner (no second, third, or joined petition), no Unified Patents or other defensive aggregator in the chain, no PTAB appeal to the Federal Circuit, and no ex parte reexamination identified in the record I retrieved. The most likely explanations for the total absence of PTAB activity are (i) the patent's commercial relevance peaked and faded well before the AIA's IPR regime matured (IPRs began 2012-09-16, six years before this patent expanded), and (ii) an expired patent is not worth a $300K+ post-grant campaign. The absence of IPRs here is not a signal that the patent is unusually strong or hardened — it is largely a function of age and expiration.

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Recommended next steps

1. If you are a defendant facing a demand or suit: do not build a PTAB strategy. Build the calendar defense. Establish (a) the exact expiration date from USPTO Patent Center / the maintenance-fee record, and (b) the filing date of the first complaint asserting the patent. Under 35 U.S.C. § 286, recovery is limited to six years before filing — and those six years (on a 2026 filing, back to 2020-09-24) fall entirely after the 2018-03-11 expiration, leaving no compensable post-expiration infringement period. On this record the patent owner's damages case may be zero; verify before asserting that as a certainty.
2. Close the search gap manually. Run a patent-number query on USPTO PTAB E2E (https://ptab.uspto.gov/) and cross-check a commercial docket (Docket Alarm / RPX Insight) for any 2012–2020 CBM or IPR filing that indexing may have missed. CBM review sunset on 2020-09-16, so a CBM could only have been filed before then; PGR was never available (this is a pre-AIA patent filed 1998-03-11). IPR is the only remaining vehicle, and it requires a claim that has not expired.
3. Treat expiration as the primary defense and the PTAB as backup. If a live assertion exists against you, request the patent owner's infringement contentions and confirm the accused-activity dates; anything dated on or after 2018-03-11 is non-infringing as a matter of the patent term. Consider whether ex parte reexamination (which has no estoppel and can be filed by anyone, unlike IPR) is worth filing purely to force the patent owner to defend validity in parallel — but only if there is a live suit, since reexam on an expired patent has little independent value.
4. Verify before you rely. The expiration characterization above is drawn from the structured record in the prompt (anticipated expiration 2018-03-11; "Expired – Lifetime"). Confirm it against the USPTO Patent Center maintenance-fee and term records, and confirm there is no later-filed continuation or reissue in the family (US20010020236A1 is a published application, not a granted patent, on this record) that might carry a later term and become the real assertion vehicle.

I'll start by gathering authoritative records on the assignment chain and the parties involved.

Let me pull the specific assignment records and the corporate history of the assignees.

Let me try to retrieve the actual reel/frame records and the corporate history.

Ownership Analysis — US Patent 6,286,005 B1

Patent: US 6,286,005 B1 — "Method and apparatus for analyzing data and advertising optimization"
Application: 09/038,380 · Filed: 1998-03-11 · Issued: 2001-09-04 · Anticipated expiration: 2018-03-11
Family: WO 99/46719 A1 (PCT/US1999/005363, 1999-03-09); AU 30809/99; continuation US 2001/0020236 A1 (filed 2001-03-22); DE 69812701 T2; CN 1372682 A

Sourcing caveat, stated up front: the assignment facts below are drawn from the Google Patents legal-events record (authoritative copy in this file) plus legacy-assignments.uspto.gov documents reachable by search. Reel/frame is exposed for only one of the four recorded events (the 2022 release, reel 020783/0606). The Assignment Center correspondent-of-record fields and reel/frame numbers for the 1998, 2008 and 2009 records were not retrievable within this research pass and are not reconstructed or guessed below. Any analyst needing those fields should pull them directly from https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search "6286005").

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Inventors

Anomaly check: No unusual inventor pattern. There is one inventor, and no evidence of any inventor departing, or of a multi-inventor team scattering, within 12 months of filing. The unusual feature of this record is chronological, not personnel: a ~10-year quiet period between the original 1998 assignment and the next recorded event in 2008.

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Original assignee

Cannon Holdings, L.L.C. (a.k.a. Cannon Holdings, LLC) — named original assignee on the issued patent.

• Primary line of business: media/advertising decision-support analytics. The specification describes the assignee's commercial system in operational terms: a database mining engine (DME) that ingests A.C. Nielsen person-by-person viewing data, plus an advertising optimization mechanism and a GUI for building, scoring and comparing ad plans/schedules. The patent's background section is written from the perspective of a firm that builds and sells such tools to advertisers and networks.
• Did it ship a product embodying the claims? The specification describes an operational system, but no product name, datasheet, or shipping evidence was retrievable in this research pass. I will not assert a product identification I could not document. The entity was plainly an operating media-analytics business rather than a licensing shell — the entire disclosure is written as an implemented decision-support product — but treat the "ships product X" statement as unverified.
• Current status: No longer an independent owner. Its interest passed to The Nielsen Company (US), LLC by merger recorded 2009-02-17 ("MERGER (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)"; assignor CANNON HOLDINGS, LLC). Naming variation between "Cannon Holdings, L.L.C." (1998, 2008) and "Cannon Holdings, LLC" (2009) appears on the face of the records themselves and is not necessarily a change of legal entity.

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Assignment timeline

Four recorded events. Only the last carries a reel/frame in the retrievable record.

• Executed date not exposed / recorded 1998-05-29 — Reel/frame not exposed in retrievable record

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest (see document for details)
  • Assignor: Cannon, Mark E. (inventor)
  • Assignee: Cannon Holdings, L.L.C.
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable in this research pass — do not infer. (The patent's item (74) attorney/agent/firm of record is Schmeiser, Olsen & Watts, but that is the prosecution firm on the patent face, not the assignment correspondent.)
  • Context: Founder/inventor-to-company assignment — the routine instrument conveying the application to the operating entity.

• Executed date not exposed / recorded 2008-04-11 — Reel/frame not exposed in retrievable record

  • Conveyance: Security Agreement — "Security Agreement Supplement No. 5"
  • Assignor: Cannon Holdings, L.L.C.
  • Assignee: Citibank, N.A., as Collateral Agent
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable in this research pass.
  • Context: Secured financing / lien encumbrance, not an ownership sale. A "Supplement No. 5" to a collateral-agent security agreement is the signature of a syndicated credit facility, consistent with the leveraged-buyout financing structure of the Nielsen group in that period. Note the timing: Cannon Holdings was already pledging its patents into a Citibank collateral package in 2008, ~10 months before the formal merger into Nielsen was recorded — indicating Cannon Holdings was already inside the Nielsen consolidated group when it granted the lien. (This reading is an inference from the instrument type and date; the document text was not retrieved.)

• Executed date not exposed / recorded 2009-02-17 — Reel/frame not exposed in retrievable record

  • Conveyance: Merger (see document for details)
  • Assignor: Cannon Holdings, LLC
  • Assignee: The Nielsen Company (US), LLC
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable in this research pass.
  • Context: Internal group reorganisation / absorption of an acquired subsidiary into Nielsen's main U.S. operating LLC — a clean-up merger, not a third-party divestiture. This is corroborated by a parallel 2009 wave of Nielsen housekeeping assignments I located on legacy-assignments.uspto.gov: TNC (US) Holdings, Inc. → The Nielsen Company (US), LLC, executed 2009-09-30, recorded 2009-10-26 at reel 023430/0901 and recorded 2009-10-27 at reel 023428/0106, both omnibus "Exhibit A" instruments covering listed patents. I could not confirm that US 6,286,005 appears on those Exhibit A schedules, so cite them as context for the 2009 rationalisation only, not as a record of this patent.

• Executed date not exposed / recorded 2022-10-13 — Reel 020783 / Frame 0606

  • Conveyance: Release
  • Assignor: Citibank, N.A.
  • Assignee: The Nielsen Company (US), LLC
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable in this research pass. (No recurrence of a correspondent can be assessed — this is the one link with a known reel/frame, and no correspondent name was exposed.)
  • Context: Release of the secured party's lien back to the owner, i.e. discharge of the 2008 collateral package. The October 2022 date is consistent with the closing of the Nielsen take-private by the Elliott/Brookfield-led consortium; that linkage is a timing inference, not a statement appearing in the assignment record. Regardless of cause, it is a lien release, not a transfer of title — Nielsen remained the owner before and after.

No link in this chain runs to a licensing-only entity, and the chain ends where it started commercially: with an operating company.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6286005
    1998 : Application filed by Mark E Cannon
         : Assigned to Cannon Holdings LLC
    1999 : PCT and Australian family filings
    2001 : Patent issued Sep 4
    2008 : Security interest to Citibank as collateral agent
    2009 : Cannon Holdings merged into The Nielsen Company US LLC
    2018 : Patent expires
    2022 : Citibank security interest released

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present.
The only assignees in the chain are Cannon Holdings, L.L.C. (an operating media-analytics business that is the named applicant and the assignee of the inventor's rights, recorded 1998-05-29); Citibank, N.A. as collateral agent (2008-04-11, a lien, not title); and The Nielsen Company (US), LLC (merger, recorded 2009-02-17). There is no intermediate "IP Holdings / Licensing / Ventures" LLC, no single-purpose Delaware/Texas entity, and no registered-agent-service address in the record. The name "Holdings" appears only in the original operating assignee, which is the entity that filed the application — the opposite of the shell-transfer pattern.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present.
None of the recorded assignees matches any entity on the supplied NPE list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities). The current assignee, The Nielsen Company (US), LLC, is a large operating measurement/analytics company. I did not find any record of Nielsen asserting US 6,286,005 against a competitor, and I will not assert one — treat Nielsen's general litigation posture as unclear/not researched to closure here.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear (cannot be assessed).
The Assignment Center correspondent-of-record field was not retrievable for any of the four links, including the one link (reel 020783/0606) whose reel/frame is known. There is therefore no evidence of a recurring NPE-side recording attorney — and equally no basis to claim recurrence. The only attorney data available is the prosecution firm on the patent face (Schmeiser, Olsen & Watts), and a firm doing prosecution is not an NPE signal. This is a genuine gap the analyst should close at the source.

4. Cascading transfers — not present.
Three recorded post-filing events spanning 1998 → 2008 → 2009, plus a 2022 lien release. No two transfers occurred within 24 months of each other, let alone through chained LLCs. The 2008 and 2009 events are ~10 months apart but are, respectively, a lien and a merger into the parent operating company — not a cascading ownership relay.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present.
No infringement suit naming US 6,286,005 was surfaced, so there is no litigation anchor against which a 6-month pre-suit transfer could be measured. Because the patent expired 2018-03-11, no assertion is now possible; the patent cannot have been moved into position for a future suit.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present.
The Citibank instruments (security agreement, recorded 2008-04-11; release, reel 020783/0606, recorded 2022-10-13) reflect secured lending and its discharge, not a Chapter 7/11 estate sale. No bankruptcy docket, sale motion, or stalking-horse transfer appears in the record for the original assignee.

7. Privateering — not present.
The chain moves toward the operating parent (Cannon Holdings → The Nielsen Company (US), LLC), not away from it to an NPE for assertion against competitors. There is no outward transfer to an assertion vehicle and no SEC/Patent Progress/EFF coverage indicating Nielsen funded an NPE against its rivals over this patent.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present.
The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. A search of the Unified Patents portal does surface US-6286005-B1 with assignee "Nielsen Co (Us) LLC" — that is Unified indexing the patent for prior-art/defensive purposes, not Unified acquiring it. Termination is at Nielsen, an operating company, not at an aggregator.

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Verdict

Operating-company assertion (nearest available fit — with the "assertion" prong unevidenced).

Justification: the entire chain is inventor → original operating assignee (Mark E. Cannon → Cannon Holdings, L.L.C., 1998-05-29) → secured lender as collateral agent (Cannon Holdings → Citibank, N.A., 2008-04-11, a lien) → operating parent by merger (Cannon Holdings, LLC → The Nielsen Company (US), LLC, 2009-02-17) → lien release (Citibank → The Nielsen Company (US), LLC, reel 020783/0606, 2022-10-13). That is a 24-year operating-company ownership record with zero shell-entity transfers, zero known NPE assignees, zero cascading LLC relays, and zero bankruptcy or privateering events — so the NPE hypothesis is affirmatively rejected, not merely unsupported. Two caveats should travel with the label: no infringement suit by Nielsen over this patent was located (the "assertion" prong rests on nothing more than the assignee's status as an operating competitor in media measurement), and because the patent expired 2018-03-11 it is now unenforceable and cannot be asserted by anyone.

Verify at: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search "6286005") and https://patents.google.com/patent/US6286005B1/en — the Assignment Center view will supply the correspondent-of-record and reel/frame fields missing from this report, including whether a single recording attorney handled the 2008/2009/2022 filings.

I'll research the prior art citations for US 6,286,005. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me look for the actual front-page citations for this patent on Justia and FreePatentsOnline.

I hit the tool-call/time limit before I could retrieve the authoritative front-page citation list. Here is my analysis based on what I was able to verify, with explicit separation between what I confirmed, what I could not retrieve, and what I will not guess at.

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Prior-Art Report — U.S. Patent No. 6,286,005 B1

Patent under analysis: US 6,286,005 B1, "Method and apparatus for analyzing data and advertising optimization"; inventor Mark E. Cannon; original assignee Cannon Holdings, L.L.C.; application US 09/038,380; filed 1998-03-11; granted 2001-09-04; current assignee The Nielsen Company (US), LLC.
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6286005/en

Critical date for § 102 purposes: 1998-03-11 (the filing/priority date). Any reference must predate that date to qualify as prior art absent a § 102(e)/§ 102(a)(2) situation.

Date note: Your task header says "Current Date: April 26, 2026"; my operating instructions say today is 2026-09-24. I flag this inconsistency rather than resolve it, per the "interpret literally" rule. It does not affect the analysis, since the patent expired 2018-03-11.

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Bottom line

I was unable to retrieve the authoritative "References Cited" / "Patent Citations" list from the face of US 6,286,005. The full patent text supplied to me as authoritative does not contain a References Cited section — it ends mid-sentence in the description. My web searches did not return the front-page citation table from Google Patents, Justia, or FreePatentsOnline before I exhausted my search budget.

Because your instruction is explicit that I must not fabricate citations or auto-correct identifiers, I am not going to invent a list of US patents said to be cited on the face of 6,286,005. Instead I am reporting (a) what I could verify, clearly labeled, and (b) the exact sources needed to complete the task.

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Important confusion to avoid: backward vs. forward citations

The web is saturated with appearances of "6286005" that are forward citations — i.e., later patents and search reports that cite 6,286,005 as prior art. These are not prior art against 6,286,005 (they post-date it) and must not be reported as § 102 references. I found many of these:

These are not prior art. They are included only so that the accounting is transparent and so this artifact is not mistaken for a prior-art list.

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Family members — also NOT prior art

Note the interesting inversion: in the EPO search report for EP 1,973,343 A1, examiner applied WO 99/46719 A (Cannon Holdings) as an "X" reference against claims 1–43 of that (third-party) application. That is 6,286,005's own family being used as prior art against someone else — it says nothing about 6,286,005's own novelty, but it does confirm the disclosure's relevance in the field.

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Third-party search reports that cite 6,286,005 — context only

• EP 1,535,215 A4 European search report lists as X references: US 6,286,005 B1 (Cannon, 2001-09-04) and US 5,740,549 A (Reilley et al., 1998-04-14). Source: http://data.epo.org/gpi/EP1535215A4
  • US 5,740,549 ("Information and advertising distribution system and method," Reilley/James P. Reilly et al., filed 1995-06-07, granted 1998-04-14) is a genuinely pre-1998 reference in the targeted-advertising field. I flag it as a candidate that plausibly appears in 6,286,005's own citation list — but I did not verify it is on the face of 6,286,005, so I am not asserting that.

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Non-patent literature found

• Cannon et al., "Modeling Advertising Media Effectiveness," Developments in Business Simulation & Experimental Exercises, vol. 23, 1996, pp. 1–7. Appears in the NPL list accompanying a later patent that cites 6,286,005 (https://patents.justia.com/patent/8630891). Dated 1996 — i.e., before the 1998-03-11 critical date — and authored by the inventor, so it is a genuine candidate for the applicant's own pre-filing publication. I could not confirm from this session whether it was actually cited during prosecution of 6,286,005.
• CenterBridge / Bay Bridge Decision Technologies materials (dated Dec. 2001) appear in the same NPL list but post-date the 1998 filing and are therefore not prior art.

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What I could NOT do, and why this matters

Your request asked me to (1) search USPTO for 6286005, and (2) for each cited reference give full citation, date, description, and the claim(s) it potentially anticipates under § 102.

I can complete (1) only bibliographically, and I cannot complete the per-reference § 102 mapping, because the set of cited references was not obtained. Providing a per-reference anticipation table without the actual reference set would require me to fabricate both the references and the claim mapping. I decline to do that.

Authoritative sources to run next (in priority order):

1. USPTO PatentCenter — https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/ — enter application 09/038,380. The "References Cited" section of the patent document and the examiner's PTO-892/PTO-1449 forms are the ground truth for what was considered.
2. Google Patents front page — https://patents.google.com/patent/US6286005/en — the "Patent Citations" and "Non-Patent Citations" tables (distinct from the "Cited By" table).
3. USPTO Patent Full-Text (PatFT/Patent Public Search) — https://ppubs.uspto.gov/ — retrieve the full printed front page including the (56) References Cited block.
4. EPO Register / Espacenet for the EP family member, to see the search report's cited documents.
5. File wrapper for the related continuation application (US 09/814,622 → US 2001/0020236 A1), which may contain a parallel citation list.

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§ 102 framework, ready to populate once references are obtained

For each cited reference that does ultimately resolve, the analysis should follow this structure (the claims are apparatus/method claims directed to: (a) converting person-by-person media-exposure data from a first to a second object-oriented binary format [claims typified by the FIG. 2/FIG. 4 disclosure]; (b) a database-mining engine with Boolean bit-mask demographic filtering [FIG. 5 age mask]; (c) the .tvd contiguous-object file format with viewing catalog indirection [FIG. 6]; and (d) the five-index advertising-optimization scoring method — exposure valuation, audience valuation, exposure recency, response, and cost [FIG. 14]):

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Summary table of confirmed findings

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Conclusion

Most relevant prior art: not determinable from this session's data. I confirmed the patent's identity and legal history and identified which "6286005" hits are forward citations (not prior art) versus family documents (not prior art), and I surfaced one plausible pre-1998 non-patent-literature candidate. However, I did not obtain the actual (56) References Cited list from the printed patent, so I cannot honestly provide the per-reference citations, dates, or § 102 anticipation mapping you asked for.

If you can either (a) let me run additional targeted retrieval against PatentCenter/Google Patents, or (b) supply the printed front page / PTO-892, I can produce the full claim-by-claim § 102 table immediately.

A note on scope: because 6,286,005 expired 2018-03-11 (anticipated expiration), a prior-art/validity analysis is now mainly of historical or defensive interest; the litigation summary you supplied likewise found no identified litigation. That does not change the retrieval gap above.

I'll first try to retrieve the actual claim language and the "Prior Art" / "References Cited" section for this patent, since the full-text extract provided ends mid-description and does not include either.

Let me try to retrieve the examiner-cited "References Cited" list and the granted claim set directly.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 6,286,005 B1

Under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) / Graham / KSR

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0. Threshold: what record I actually have (read this before the conclusions)

The "Full patent text" supplied to me for US 6,286,005 is the Google Patents description extract (Definitions → description). It reproduces the specification's "Definitions" and "Classifications" blocks and ends mid-sentence in the description ("…elements surrounding the"). Two things the task asked me to rely on are not present in that extract:

I attempted to pull the cited-references table and the granted claims through four separate searches. The results returned the patent as prior art cited in later patents (e.g., US 8,936,340; US 8,886,654; US 7,698,719; US 10,497,034; EP 1535215's EPO search report, where US 6,286,005 B1 is cited as an "X" reference alongside US 5,740,549) — that is cited-by data, not the reference list of this patent, and I am not treating it as such.

What I did recover that is genuinely useful: the published PCT counterpart, WO 99/46719 (PCT/US99/05363), whose claims are visible in the patentimages PDF and which shares this specification. Those claim excerpts give me the actual claim language of the Cannon disclosure (claims 54, 60, 65–78). I use them below as a proxy, flagged as such.

⚠️ Flag: a PCT publication's claims are not the granted U.S. claims. Any conclusion below keyed to a specific claim number must be re-verified against the printed US 6,286,005 claim set.

⚠️ Minor contradiction to flag: the task header states "Current Date: April 26, 2026"; my operating environment date is 2026-09-24. No substantive impact (§103 analysis is date-insensitive at this remove; the patent expired 2018-03-11 per the earlier section).

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1. The claim scope I am testing

Because the granted claims are unavailable, I analyze the claim language actually recovered from WO 99/46719 (source: patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1a/20/75/30689e88f52c79/WO1999046719A1.pdf), taking it as the best evidence of what Cannon claimed:

Representative recovered claim text:

• Claim 76 (score-calculation method): "A method of calculating a score for an advertising spot … determining a separate value for each exposure of each of a plurality of audience members to the advertising spot; and summing the exposure values for each of the plurality of audience members to calculate the score for the advertising spot."
• Claim 77: "…wherein the step of determining a value for each exposure … comprises the step of using a weighted effective frequency method…"
• Claim 78: "…wherein the step of determining a value for each exposure … comprises the step of using a time weighted effective frequency method…"
• Claim 60 (system): "…wherein the mechanism for evaluating an exposure comprises a mechanism for assigning advertising value to multiple levels of advertising exposure based on actual or anticipated exposure to an advertisement."
• Claim 65–75 (GUI family): using a GUI to evaluate a plurality of alternative advertising options; distributing advertisements over time and space based on actual or anticipated individual/collective exposure; assigning advertising response values; assigning costs based on time or space boundaries; assigning individual exposure values according to demographic measurements; displaying estimated influence based on declining influence over time and on accumulated influence; assigning advertising value to multiple levels of exposure based on frequency of exposure.

Parallel claim scope derived from the specification (authoritative text supplied): the five-index scoring architecture — exposure valuation index 1440, audience valuation index 1450, exposure recency index 1460, response index 1470, cost index 1480 — combined into a single multiplicative score, and the DME database structure (object-oriented .tvd files whose on-disk byte layout mirrors memory; viewing catalog with catalog-offset indirection).

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2. PHOSITA

A person of ordinary skill in the art as of the March 11, 1998 priority date would be a media-planning/audience-measurement professional with a bachelor's degree and 3–5 years' experience in television media planning or audience research, working in a team with a database programmer. The PHOSITA knows:

• Nielsen's person-by-person metered panel and its file conventions (the specification itself treats the Nielsen record formats, HUTS, ratings, VPH, and impressions as given — i.e., prior-art knowledge);
• classic media-planning constructs: reach, frequency distributions, effective frequency, CPM/cost-per-rating-point;
• demographic indexing/weighting of audience cells in media selection;
• basic database design and the performance distinction between row-store files and directly-mapped binary records.

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3. Graham factors

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4. Prior art landscape

Honesty flag: the examiner-cited list was not retrievable. The references below are drawn from my own knowledge of the field, with a confidence column. They must be verified for exact number, date, and disclosure before being used in a real office action or invalidity contention.

Critically, the patent's own specification concedes the prior-art context. Verbatim from the supplied text: advertising agencies "have utilized the services of various different research and consulting firms"; campaigns "are most often the result of educated estimates, well thought out probabilities, and other experience-based decision-making processes"; and the specification recites HUTS, household rating, demographic rating, share, homes delivered, VPH, and impressions as pre-existing industry definitions. Those admissions are usable as applicant's own evidence of what the art already contained.

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5. Proposed § 103 combinations

Combination 1 — Person-level exposure data ⨯ published effective-frequency curve → Claims 60/76/77

Combine: a person-level metered audience database (e.g., US 5,481,294; US 4,658,290 — Nielsen data as admitted in the spec) with the published effective-frequency response curves of Naples/Krugman/Ostheimer.

**Why obvious:1 Naples and Krugman already taught that the n-th exposure is not worth the same as the first (Krugman: roughly three exposures suffice; the patent's own FIG. 16 "ideal frequency = three" is lifted from this literature). US 5,481,294 already stored exposure by person. The only step claimed is the mechanical one: read the person's prior-exposure count from the metered record, look up the curve value for that frequency level, and sum across the exposed panel. That is "arranging old elements with each performing the same function it had been known to perform" (KSR, 550 U.S. at 416–17), producing nothing more than predictable aggregation. Reciting the lookup as "assigning advertising value to multiple levels of advertising exposure based on frequency of exposure" (claim 60 language) is the description of what the published curves already do.

Expected result: routine. The step yields "a total exposure valuation, not an average" — the specification's own words — i.e., a summation, which the claim recites literally.

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Combination 2 — Frequency valuation ⨯ time-decay of advertising effect → Claim 78 ("time weighted effective frequency")

Combine: Combination 1 with advertising-carryover/decay modeling (Broadbent's adstock line of work; general marketing-mix literature on ad decay).

Why obvious: Once the PHOSITA is valuing an exposure at a frequency level (Comb. 1), the next question — "but how old is that exposure?" — is the exact question advertising-carryover research had already answered with exponential/geometric decay curves. Weighting each prior exposure by a decay factor before summing is a two-line modification of the Comb. 1 sum. 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." No claim element recites a particular decay function, so there is nothing to non-obvious.

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Combination 3 — Frequency valuation ⨯ demographic weighting → Exposure/audience valuation indices (claims 69/70; spec's VA(i) product)

Combine: Combination 1 with conventional media-planning demographic indexing (product-usage indices per demographic cell — the bread-and-butter of Advertising Media Planning-type practice and of Telmar/IMS-class software).

Why obvious: Demographic weighting of audience value was not merely known — it was the standard media-planning practice (index a demographic cell by product usage, weight the audience accordingly). The claim's arithmetic is a product of per-attribute values (spec: age value 0.70 × income value 0.68 = 0.476), which is elementary. The specification concedes the weights are judgmental ("assigned based on market research"). A claim that recites weighting a sum by arbitrarily assignable weights, without showing that the particular weights are critical, is the classic "result-effective variable optimized by routine experimentation" case (In re Applied Materials; Pfizer v. Apotex). The patent identifies no criticality, no unexpected result, no data showing the multiplicative form matters.

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Combination 4 — Program-attention research ⨯ the above → Response index

Combine: program-involvement/attention research (a recognized television research construct, with established instruments) with Combinations 1–3.

Why obvious: The claim language ("assigning advertising response values to a plurality of media alternatives") asks for a weighted program factor. Program involvement/attention was an existing measured construct. The PHOSITA seeking to incorporate "program environment quality" into an ad-value score would predictably reach for it. Notably, the specification expressly polices its own indices against overlap — it says the response index "should not be dependent on factors which are accounted for in other indices, such as program loyalty levels … because loyalty levels are related to frequency." That is an admission that the five indices are a deliberate partition of a known whole, i.e., a classification scheme, not a new technical contribution.

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Combination 5 — CPM/cost-per-rating-point buying ⨯ the above → Cost index

Combine: established media-buying cost arithmetic (CPM, cost-per-rating-point, cost-per-point) with Combinations 1–4.

Why obvious: The cost index is "simply tracks the absolute cost of the alternative spot as measured in dollars" (specification's own words). Media buyers had compared options on cost-per-delivered-impression since long before 1998. Placing a dollars term in the denominator of a score is the definition of obvious optimization, driven by the express market objective the specification itself states: get the best "bang for the buck."

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Combination 6 — Spreadsheet/decision-support GUI art ⨯ the scoring arithmetic → Claims 65–75

Combine: conventional interactive GUI decision-support (spreadsheet "what-if" analysis, drill-down/hyperlink-style data navigation from a tabular display, bar-widget range selection) with the score from Combinations 1–5.

Why obvious: Every GUI element in claims 65–75 is a presentation layer. Claim 66 ("distributing advertisements over time and space based on actual or anticipated … exposure"), 67 ("assigning advertising response values"), 68 ("assigning costs … based on time or space boundaries"), 69 ("assigning individual exposure values … according to … demographic measurements"), 71 ("displaying the estimated influence … based on the declining influence of advertising over time"), 73–75 ("assigning advertising value to multiple levels of advertising exposure based on frequency of exposure") are, on their face, functional restatements of the underlying computation plus an instruction to display it. U.S. precedent is squarely against this: displaying a known result on a known interface, or automating and deploying a known mental/paper process on a general-purpose computer, is obvious where the automation is technically routine and the result predictable.

⚠️ Important caveat for this combination: if the GUI claims are system/apparatus claims written in means-plus-function style, § 112(f) construction may narrow them to the disclosed structures; conversely if they are bare functional method steps, they are the most vulnerable claims in the patent under § 103 and also under § 101 (see § 10).

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Combination 7 — Database-structure claims (.tvd / viewing catalog)

The specification describes (a) an object-oriented file whose on-disk byte layout is identical to the in-memory layout, allowing bulk binary transfer, and (b) a "viewing catalog" with per-week offsets providing cross-week person lookup.

Combine: standard flat-file/record-oriented database design with offset-index/catalog lookup techniques with the acknowledged performance problem (7 MB per week × 52 weeks; interactive-response requirement).

Why obvious — on the applicant's own admissions:

1. "the generally accepted concepts of database design and manipulation so prevalent today must be discarded or modified";
2. "however, the methods of the present invention can be practiced with other, less efficient models";
3. "Future advances in computer hardware may make it possible to implement the present invention using conventional database management techniques";
4. "However, by mirroring the data in both locations, a significant speed advantage is recognized" — i.e., the benefit is a recognized, quantified tradeoff, not an unexpected result.

Where the applicant concedes the structure is (i) substitutable, (ii) a recognized performance/memory tradeoff, and (iii) achievable by conventional techniques given enough hardware, the structural claims present a textbook "predictable variation of known design" and a strong KSR "design choice" argument. Fixed versus variable record layout, contiguous versus paged blocks, and pointer versus offset indirection are precisely the "design choices" the Federal Circuit routinely deems obvious.

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6. Motivation to combine — the KSR showing

A single, coherent motivation runs through every combination:

1. Market pressure was explicit and pre-existing. The specification's own background states the recognized need "to create an optimal campaign which effectively utilizes a finite combination of resources to communicate to the target audience," and that campaigns were then built from "educated estimates." KSR recognizes "the need to reduce costs, increase profitability, and improve performance" and market forces as motivations.
2. The design incentive to use person-level rather than aggregate data was self-evident. Once metered person-level panels existed (Comb. 1), an aggregate reach/frequency model and a person-level model compute the same quantity; using the finer data is a straightforward accuracy improvement.
3. Same field, same problem, same predicted result. All cited references sit in or bear directly on advertising/media planning and audience measurement — the field the applicant situates himself in ("the present invention relates to the field of computer-assisted data manipulation and analysis … for various decision-making purposes, especially advertising"). No cross-field leap is required.
4. Predictable results, no criticality, no unexpected effect. Nothing in the specification asserts a critical numerical range, a critical index value, a critical decay constant, or a critical database parameter, and no comparative data shows the multiplicative five-index form outperforms alternatives. Absent criticality, optimization of the weighting scheme is routine (In re Boesch; Pfizer).
5. Applicant's own admissions of substitutability (database models; index values "assigned based on market research"; index values "arbitrary" in the sense of being relative percentages) remove any argument that the specific implementation is the inventive point.
6. No teaching away identified. I found no reference teaching away from person-level exposure valuation, from multiplicative index combination, or from interactive "what-if" scoring. Note the limit of this statement: I did not have the full prior-art record, so this is a negative finding on incomplete evidence.

The specification's FIG. 15/16/17/18 worked example is itself an admission that the operative arithmetic is a multiplication and a sum of looked-up table values:
VA(i) = VA_age(i) × VA_income(i) (0.70 × 0.68 = 0.476), then summed across exposed panel members. Multiplication of indexed weights and summation across a sample is the most elementary arithmetic operation in the statistics the PHOSITA already uses daily.

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7. Claim-by-claim vulnerability summary

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8. Where a patent owner would resist

Fairly stated, the strongest non-obviousness arguments available on this record are:

1. "Person-level exposure history as the valuation substrate" as a whole. Prior-art media planning used aggregate reach/frequency distributions (beta-binomial and similar), not per-person exposure histories; the point of novelty might be framed as applying the valuation per individual, then aggregating rather than to a distribution statistic. Counter: the metering art already stored person-level records, and the arithmetic is trivial once the data is keyed to the individual.
2. The specific five-index partition with non-overlap discipline. The specification's insistence that each factor be counted "in one and only one" index is a design principle; a patentee would call it a technical contribution. Counter: it is a classification choice made by the claim drafter, and the patent itself says factors "may be omitted."
3. Feedback loop (FIG. 13, viewing data 1380 fed back into scoring). Iterative re-scoring against actual results is textbook closed-loop/decision-support optimization. Counter: strong.
4. Secondary considerations. A ~20-year, unabridged-lifetime patent owned successively by Cannon Holdings and The Nielsen Company, with very heavy later-patent citation density, could support a commercial-success and industry-praise narrative. But I found no litigation, no adjudicated validity finding, and no evidence of nexus in the record — so this remains argument, not evidence.

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9. Procedural posture (ties to the earlier section)

The earlier Litigation section concluded — as a qualified negative finding — that no litigation, ITC action, or PTAB proceeding involving US 6,286,005 was identified. Consequences for this analysis:

• No claim construction exists. Under Phillips, construction rests on the intrinsic record alone. Since the granted claims were not retrievable here, the claim boundaries I analyzed are provisional.
• No IPR/PGR/CBM record. Notably, this patent (filed 1998, business-method subject matter, "Expired – Lifetime" as of 2018-03-11) would have been a plausible CBM candidate under AIA § 18 during the 2012–2018 window; the earlier section identified no such proceeding.
• Damages are time-barred (35 U.S.C. § 286) and the term ran out 2018-03-11, so an actual § 103 challenge today would arise only collaterally (e.g., in a later-patent proceeding where US 6,286,005 is asserted as itself prior art, or in an ex parte reexam). Practically, this analysis is predictive/historical, not a live invalidity opinion.

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10. Parallel note: § 101 (flagging, not arguing)

Even where § 103 is close, the claim families here would face a Bilski/Alice-era § 101 challenge: the claims are directed to organizing human activity with the aid of a generic computer and a generic database. The PTAB/Board and district courts have consistently treated media-planning optimization claims as abstract ideas implemented with generic technology. I note this only because a § 103 analysis that finds claims obvious and ineligible is a much stronger invalidity theory than § 103 alone — and because a patentee's § 103 rebuttal often borrows the same "inventive concept" evidence it would offer for § 101.

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11. Bottom line

On the record I could verify, the vast majority of the claim families in US 6,286,005 are vulnerable to a well-constructed § 103 challenge. The only asserted advance over the art is the combination and computer implementation of: (i) already-metered person-level audience data, (ii) already-published effective-frequency and decay curves, (iii) already-standard demographic indexing and media-buying cost arithmetic, and (iv) already-conventional interactive GUI decision support. The specification itself supplies the KSR motivation ("finite combination of resources," "best bang for the buck"), concedes that the database structure is substitutable and hardware-dependent, and asserts no criticality or unexpected result for any of its index values. The closest thing to a defensible claim is the specific five-index multiplicative combined score, and that survives only on the strength of argument about partition discipline and the absence of a single anticipatory reference — not on any demonstrated technical effect.

Confidence and verification: High confidence in the framework and in the specification-derived admissions (verbatim text supplied). Medium confidence in the specific reference numbers and non-patent-literature dates, because the examiner's References Cited list and the granted claims of US 6,286,005 were not retrievable in this session. Before this analysis is used for any filing, obtain: (1) the granted claim set from the US PatentCenter/PDF; (2) the examiner's Form PTO-892 references cited; (3) the "Cited By" list; and (4) the WO 99/46719 International Search Report, which would show what the PCT examiner actually treated as relevant art. Those four documents would either confirm or materially qualify everything in Sections 4–7.