US 6388579

I'll search for authoritative sources on this patent number, including any litigation or CAFC docket activity.

Let me check for any litigation, PTAB, or CAFC records specifically involving this patent.

US Patent 6,388,579 — Analyst Summary

Scope note on sources: The authoritative full text and bibliographic record I relied on is the Google Patents full-text record for US6388579B1 (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6388579](/patent/US6388579)/en), corroborated by uspto.report (https://uspto.report/patent/grant/6388579) and FreePatentsOnline (https://FreePatentsOnline.com/6388579.html). Searching USPTO/CAFC-adjacent sources returned no litigation, PTAB, or CAFC docket activity involving this specific number — see the "Litigation / CAFC 2026" section below, including the limits of that negative finding.

Bibliographic Data

Discrepancy flag (not auto-corrected): Unified Patents' portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-6388579-B1) lists priority 1999-08-08, application date 1999-12-21, grant 2002-05-13, expiration 2019-12-21 — each one day earlier than the Google Patents/USPTO-style record. These are formatting/time-zone normalizations; I report both rather than silently reconciling them.

Key legal-status fact: The patent did not run to its 2019 term. Per the legal events on the record: maintenance-fee reminder 2005-11-30 → "Lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees" 2006-05-15 → "Patent expired due to nonpayment of maintenance fees under 37 CFR 1.362," effective 2006-05-14. That means enforceable term ended roughly 3.5 years after grant.

Abstract (as issued)

A vehicle status device and system for remotely updating and monitoring the status of a vehicle. The device is located in a vehicle and reports status information for the vehicle and an owner to an interrogating unit. It includes a database of status information; an update receiver that receives updated information from a wide area paging network for storage in the database; an interrogation receiver that receives an interrogation signal from the interrogating unit; and a response transmitter that transmits encoded status information, including a vehicle identification (VID), back to the interrogating unit. The system also includes the interrogating unit (interrogation transmitter + response receiver), and a processor that decodes the status information and translates it into plain language for an operator. The abstract further notes implementation as a ticket-less toll system matching VIDs to subscriber identity, credit-card data, and valid-subscriber status.

Plain-Language Overview of the Independent Claims

Important structural point: The patent has only four claims, all independent, and all drawn to the in-vehicle device. Despite the abstract and summary describing an interrogating unit, a system, and a ticket-less toll system, none of the granted claims covers the interrogating unit, the network/server side, or the toll system. Claim scope is limited to the vehicle-mounted hardware.

Claim 1 — Radar-triggered status reporting device.
A vehicle-mounted device containing: (a) a control processor; (b) memory storing vehicle status information; (c) an update receiver that pulls updated vehicle status information from an external central database into that memory; (d) a radar receiver that detects a "dataless" radar signal from an external police radar transmitter and signals the processor, which then retrieves the stored status information; and (e) a response transmitter that sends the retrieved status information to the external interrogating unit in response to that radar trigger.
Plain meaning: The car keeps its own copy of its status. A police radar hit carries no data — it is used purely as a "wake up and answer" trigger — and the car answers over a separate link.

Claim 2 — Laser-triggered version of Claim 1.
Identical to Claim 1 except the trigger receiver is a laser detector that detects a "dataless" laser signal from an external police laser transmitter.
Plain meaning: Same invention, but keyed to a police LIDAR/laser gun rather than radar. Claim 2 is the laser sibling of Claim 1.

Claim 3 — Radar trigger + paging updates + owner information + codec.
Adds to the radar-trigger architecture: (a) the memory stores status information for the vehicle and the owner; (b) the update receiver is specifically a wide area pager receiver receiving encoded updated vehicle and owner information from the external central database through a wide area paging network; (c) the response transmitter sends encoded retrieved vehicle/owner information; and (d) a coder/decoder decodes paging-network updates for storage and encodes the retrieved data for transmission.
Plain meaning: This is the fullest radar embodiment — remote refresh over commercial paging, two-way encode/decode, and both vehicle and driver/owner data.

Claim 4 — Laser version of Claim 3.
Identical to Claim 3, substituting the laser detector for the radar receiver (detecting the dataless laser signal). (Note: the issued claim text contains the typo "transits" for "transmits" — I am reporting it literally and not correcting it.)

Family / Continuation Note

The related continuation-in-part US 6,359,570 B1 ("Vehicle-status device and system for remotely updating and locally indicating the status of a vehicle," priority 1999-12-22) is a different patent with a different claim set that adds an in-vehicle status indicator driven by the dataless radar/laser trigger. Claims reciting "a status indicator mounted on the vehicle" belong to the '570 CIP, not to '579. Some third-party aggregator pages (e.g., a Radaris inventor page surfaced in search) mix text from both — treat any claim language mentioning an on-vehicle indicator as belonging to '570.

Litigation / CAFC 2026 Docket Check

• No USPTO/CAFC/PTAB proceedings or district-court cases specifically asserting US 6,388,579 were found in my searches (Google Patents, Unified Patents portal, Justia, FreePatentsOnline, IPWatchdog, Federal Circuit weekly digests, A&O Shearman IP blog).
• The 2026 CAFC decisions my searches surfaced involve unrelated patents with numerically similar or coincidentally overlapping digits (e.g., TrackTime's U.S. 8,856,638 / 8,862,978; Nike's 8,620,413; Ravin's 9,354,015). None is US 6,388,579.
• Uncertainty statement: I could not query PACER, Docket Alarm, or the CAFC's live docket directly, and my search coverage is not exhaustive. My negative finding is therefore "not found," not "confirmed none exists." A records search on the patent's 2006 lapse date strongly suggests there is little economic incentive for post-2006 assertion, but I cannot rule out older, non-indexed suits.
• The '579 patent is heavily cited-by other patents (the Google Patents record shows ~203 citing documents) and is cited as prior art in EPO/patent-family records (e.g., WO2003095276A1, EP1519320A1) — it is a prior-art reference of note even though it generated no appellate jurisprudence in my search.

Bottom line: US 6,388,579 is a 2002 Adcox patent (Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Inc.) covering an in-vehicle transponder that stores vehicle/owner status refreshed over a wide-area paging network and answers a dataless police radar or laser signal with a separate RF response. Its four independent claims are all vehicle-device claims; the interrogating-unit and toll-system embodiments described in the specification and abstract were not claimed. The patent lapsed in 2006 for nonpayment of maintenance fees, and I found no litigation or CAFC 2026 activity tied to this number.

I'll research litigation involving US Patent 6388579. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me run additional targeted searches on litigation databases and the patent's assignee.

Bottom line

Based on the searches I was able to run, I found no litigation — no district court case, no PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM), and no ITC investigation — involving U.S. Patent No. 6,388,579. Neither my training data nor the search results surfaced any plaintiff-v.-defendant case with this patent number as the patent-in-suit.

I want to be precise about what that means and how much weight it carries, because "no results" from the sources I could reach is not the same as a definitive negative from a subscription docket database.

What I searched

I was unable to complete the E.D. Tex. / PACER-specific and Docket Alarm-specific follow-up queries (search step limit reached), so I cannot claim to have exhaustively screened those databases.

Why the absence of litigation is consistent with the record

The prosecution and post-grant history in the authoritative patent text explains why this patent was very unlikely to be asserted:

• Terminated early for fee nonpayment. Legal events show a maintenance-fee reminder (2005-11-30), "Lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees" (2006-05-15), patent discontinuation status (2006-06-14), and "Lapsed due to failure to pay maintenance fee," effective 2006-05-14. The patent therefore became unenforceable roughly four years after grant — long before the modern vehicle-telematics/NIO-era assertion campaigns that some later patents in this space were caught up in.
• The patent was never part of a plaintiff-side portfolio campaign. Assignee is a small entity (Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Inc.), originally assigned from Road Blok-Aid, Ltd. (Adcox inventors), with no indication of a monetization/litigation program.
• PTAB activity is absent. The portal page shows no AIA review (IPR/PGR) history and "Family Members (0)" on the litigation-facing view.
• The family members show no litigation either. The continuation-in-part, US 6,359,570 B1 ("Vehicle-status device and system for remotely updating and locally indicating the status of a vehicle"), plus AU 24478/01 and WO 01/50435 A1, likewise did not surface in any docket.

Note that numerous later patents cite the '579 as prior art (e.g., US 11,005,657; US 9,172,742; US 9,137,108). Being cited as prior art is not litigation and should not be reported as such.

One item I could not verify (flagged, not asserted)

One search returned an E.D. Va. case, docket 2:12-cv-00525, in which a plaintiff abbreviated "IVS" litigated against Microsoft and where interrogatory/prior-art disputes were at issue. I could not confirm that "IVS" in that case is Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Inc., and I found no indication that US 6,388,579 was the patent-in-suit. Given that the '579 had already lapsed in 2006, it is improbable this case concerns it. I am flagging this only as an unverified lead — I am not reporting it as litigation involving the '579.

How to get a definitive answer

Because I could not fully query the fee-based and litigation-specific databases, a conclusive "no litigation" determination should be confirmed through:

1. PACER / CourtListener RECAP — full-text and party search for "6,388,579," "6388579," and the party names (Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Inc.; Road Blok-Aid, Ltd.; Thomas A. Adcox; William R. Adcox).
2. Docket Navigator or Lex Machina — patent-level query on the patent number (these index complaints, terminated cases, and confidential settlements that free sources often miss).
3. Unified Patents litigation portal caselist — filtered to this patent.
4. USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) API / Patent Public Search — AIA proceedings and any ex parte reexamination of 6,388,579.
5. USPTO Assignment database — to see whether the patent was ever transferred to a known asserting entity.

Caveat

Per your rule, I have interpreted the identifier literally as US 6,388,579 B1. I excluded results for similar or neighboring numbers (e.g., 6,389,340; 6,388,577; 6,388,578), which appeared in unrelated DriveCam v. SmartDrive and other matters. If any of those similar numbers were actually intended, please say so and I will re-run the search.

Current conclusion: no known litigation involving US 6,388,579 — with the express qualification that my direct access to PACER, Docket Navigator, Lex Machina, and the complete Unified Patents caselist was limited, and the patent's 2006 lapse for maintenance-fee nonpayment makes past or future assertion highly improbable.

I'll verify the structured data's "no proceedings" finding against the open web before finalizing.

Let me run two more targeted checks — one on the USPTO PTAB portal and one on the patent's litigation/enforcement history.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 6,388,579. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal, most recent ingest) returns an empty list, and my independent web checks surfaced nothing that contradicts it: no IPR, PGR, or CBM docket names this patent, in any status category (active / claims invalidated / claims sustained / settled / institution denied). I therefore cannot give you a claim-level IPR outcome — because there is no Final Written Decision to quote. The real defensive posture is not "hardened by surviving IPR" nor "claims canceled by IPR" — it is that the patent lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees in 2006 and has been dead for roughly two decades.

What I checked, and what I found

Note one thing I did find and can confirm: the Unified Patents patent portal has a page for US-6388579-B1. That is Unified's neutral patent-data/prior-art portal, not evidence of a Unified Patents-filed IPR on this patent. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise — there is no Unified Patents proceeding here.

No proceeding sections

Because the count is zero, there are no ### {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} entries to write. I will not manufacture proceeding numbers, panels, institution dates, or FWD dispositions to fill the template — that would be fabrication, and in a PTAB context it is the kind of error that gets a brief sanctioned.

What follows is the substitute analysis that actually matters to a defendant.

The dispositive fact: the patent is expired

From the Legal Events on the patent's Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6388579/en):

• 2005-11-30 — Maintenance fee reminder mailed
• 2006-05-15 — Lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees
• 2006-06-14 — Information on status: patent discontinuation; free-format text: "PATENT EXPIRED DUE TO NONPAYMENT OF MAINTENANCE FEES UNDER 37 CFR 1.362"
• 2006-07-11 — Lapsed due to failure to pay maintenance fee; effective date 2006-05-14
• Current status: "Expired - Fee Related"

The 3.5-year maintenance fee window ran from the 2002-05-14 grant date, which puts the missed payment squarely in the first maintenance window. The patent's nominal term end is 2019-12-22 (20 years from the 1999-12-22 nonprovisional filing), and Google's timeline lists an "anticipated expiration" of 2019-12-22 — that is not what happened. The patent terminated 2006-05-14, thirteen years early.

Practical consequences for a defendant:

1. No prospective infringement. An expired patent cannot be infringed. Any demand letter built on present or future conduct involving this patent is baseless.
2. Past damages are time-barred. The 35 U.S.C. § 286 six-year lookback from today (2026-09-26) reaches back only to 2020-09-26 — nearly fourteen years after the patent died. Every actionable date is outside the recovery window. A § 286 damages case is not merely weak; it is arithmetically impossible.
3. You may face the sibling, not this patent. The family is the real exposure: US 6,359,570 B1 ("Vehicle-status device and system for remotely updating and locally indicating the status of a vehicle"), filed 2000-10-11 as a continuation-in-part of the '579 application; plus WO 01/50435 A1 and AU 24478/01 A. If a demand letter cites "the Intelligent Vehicle Systems patents," verify which patent number — the '579 is the decoy.

Strategic summary

Claim status. US 6,388,579 has exactly four claims, all apparatus claims directed to a vehicle-mounted status device: claim 1 (radar receiver / dataless radar signal), claim 2 (laser detector / dataless laser signal), claim 3 (wide-area pager receiver + radar receiver + coder/decoder), and claim 4 (wide-area pager receiver + laser detector + coder/decoder). None of claims 1–4 is canceled, sustained on the merits, or otherwise adjudicated — because no tribunal ever reached them. Under the taxonomy you asked for: CANCELED = none; SUSTAINED = none; UNTESTED = claims 1, 2, 3 and 4 — all of them, and permanently so. The claims were never tested because the patent owner let the patent lapse before the AIA's IPR regime even took effect (IPR petitions became available 2012-09-16, six years post-lapse). "Untested" here is not "untested but live" — it is untested and dead.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is a non-issue: estoppel attaches only to a petitioner who obtained an institution decision, and there has never been a petitioner. No prior-art ground is foreclosed to you by PTAB estoppel, because none was ever litigated. That is cold comfort, however — the prior art you would want to run is already on the face of the patent. The examiner cited nineteen references, including US 5,847,661 (Intelligent Ideation, vehicle data acquisition), US 5,961,312 (Warner, vehicle identification and information system), US 6,028,537 (Prince Corp., vehicle communication and remote control), US 5,918,714 / WO 98/43104 (Price, vehicle identification), and WO 99/22353 (Sonic Systems, DSRC for ITS). Those are the natural § 102/§ 103 building blocks for a device-side reader/interrogator response system, and they are publicly available with no estoppel encumbrance. If you are evaluating the sibling '570 for invalidity, start there.

Pattern signals. No repeated-petitioner pattern — there is no petitioner at all. No PTAB appeals, no Federal Circuit docket (an appeal requires an underlying Board decision), no defensive aggregator involvement. What the record does show is a small two-inventor family (Thomas A. Adcox and William R. Adcox, originally assigned to Road Blok-Aid, Ltd. and reassigned to Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Inc. on 2000-06-19) that abandoned the portfolio at the first maintenance-fee milestone. The '579's downstream footprint is as cited prior art — it appears in the references of later NIO, Neology, and Allstate filings — not as an assertion vehicle. This is a classic abandoned-1990s-portfolio artifact.

Recommended next steps

1. The absence of PTAB activity is not the headline — the expiration is. If you are a defendant and a demand letter cites US 6,388,579, respond with the USPTO Legal Events record showing termination effective 2006-05-14 under 37 CFR 1.362, and the § 286 point that the six-year lookback (to 2020-09-26) cannot reach any date on which the patent was in force. There is no FWD to link to here; link the patent's legal-status record instead, and if you need a verbatim USPTO confirmation, pull the fee-history/status page from USPTO Patent Center for application 09/469,560.
2. Do not let a counterparty blur the family. Confirm in writing which patent number is asserted. If it is US 6,359,570 (the CIP) or any WO 01/50435 national-phase member, run a fresh term and status check — the '570 is a separate patent with its own fee history, and I have not verified its status in this analysis.
3. If — and only if — the asserted patent turns out to be a live member of this family, the PTAB avenue is open with a clean slate: no estoppel, no prior Board construction, and a rich set of examiner-cited art (US 5,847,661, US 5,961,312, US 6,028,537, US 5,918,714, WO 99/22353) to build a § 103 combination on. Note that CBM is unavailable regardless — the transitional CBM program sunset on 2020-09-16, and these are apparatus claims styled for law-enforcement/toll use, not a "financial product or service" claim, so CBM eligibility would have been marginal even during the window.
4. No watchlist action needed on the '579. With no IPR and no litigation to monitor, there is no institution deadline, no oral-hearing date, and no statutory one-year FWD clock to track for this patent. If you want to keep an eye out for late-filed or recently-indexed activity that the ODP ingest may have missed, monitor PTAB E2E / PTAB Decisions and the Federal Circuit docket via CourtListener directly.

Confidence note. I have high confidence in the zero-proceedings finding (structured ODP data plus multiple independent web checks agree) and in the 2006-05-14 lapse (verbatim USPTO legal-event data). One minor data discrepancy worth flagging: the Unified Patents portal lists priority 1999-08-08, application date 1999-12-21, grant 2002-05-13, and expiration 2019-12-21, while the Google Patents record states 1999-08-09, 1999-12-22, 2002-05-14, and 2019-12-22 respectively. Per my operating rules I treat the authoritative patent text (Google Patents/USPTO) dates as controlling; the one-day differences do not affect any conclusion above. I did not find any district court litigation or Federal Circuit appeal involving the '579 patent, but absence of search hits is weaker evidence than the affirmative USPTO records — treat the litigation-clearance point as "nothing found" rather than "confirmed none exists."

I'll reconstruct this from the authoritative patent text first, then cross-check the primary sources.

Let me dig for the assignment-record specifics and any litigation history.

Ownership & Assignment Report — US 6,388,579 B1

"Apparatus and system for remotely updating and monitoring the status of a vehicle"
Assignee of record on the face of the patent: Intelligent Vehicle Systems Inc (Texas)
Application US09/469,560 · filed 1999-12-22 · granted 2002-05-14 · provisional 60/147,974 (1999-08-09)

Sourcing note up front. I could not query assignmentcenter.uspto.gov directly in this session. The assignment data below is taken from the Google Patents legal-events mirror of the USPTO assignment record (which carries the reel/frame numbers verbatim) and cross-checked against the Unified Patents patent portal entry for US-6388579-B1. The correspondent of record — the attorney who filed each recording — is not exposed in either source. Both recordings carry the boilerplate "SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS" in the assignment index metadata. I therefore cannot report a correspondent name, and I will not invent one. Frame images on reel 010910 must be pulled manually to capture it.

Inventors

Pattern observations:

• Both inventors share a surname and both assigned to the same closely-held Texas entity within 7 days of filing — this reads as a founder-controlled startup title assignment, not a corporate R&D lab inventorship. Neither inventor is employed by a large operating company whose name appears anywhere in the chain.
• No inventor-departure pattern is observable, because there is no post-issuance assignment in which either inventor's rights move again. The inventors' entire recorded transactional footprint is the single pre-filing link at reel 010910/0624.
• ⚠️ Name-collision warning: public inventor aggregators (e.g. Radaris, "William Adcox – Inventor") conflate this William Adcox with a different William Adcox who appears on Medtronic nerve-monitoring / spinal-surgery patents (e.g. the "nerve monitoring in spinal surgical procedures" family). The aggregator page interleaves the two patent portfolios. Do not treat the medical-device patents as belonging to the inventor of the '579 patent without pulling the underlying assignments — I could not verify the identity either way.
• ⚠️ Source conflict, unresolved: the EPO search-report annex for WO 03/095276 lists "US 6 359 570 B1 (VANDER DRIFT ERIC N ET AL)", whereas the Google Patents family record for this application lists US 6,359,570 B1 as its own continuation-in-part (US09/686,603). One of the two records mis-maps the inventor field. Flagging it rather than resolving it.

Original assignee

Intelligent Vehicle Systems Inc (Texas) — named as assignee (73) on the issued patent, and confirmed as "Parent Company / Original Assignee" by the Unified Patents portal entry for US-6388579-B1.

• Product: The specification describes a genuine, buildable product: a cylindrical vehicle-status transponder that clamps onto the battery cable and pierces the insulation for power (FIGS. 2–3), a police-unit radar/laser interrogator with RF response receiver and plain-language display (FIG. 1), a wide-area paging update network (FIG. 4), and a ticket-less toll system (FIG. 5). This is not a paper patent — it is a full system disclosure with mechanical mounting detail, an internal backup battery, a discriminator for prioritising multiple simultaneous responses, and toll-lane antenna-gain tuning.
• Primary line of business: vehicle telematics / automatic vehicle identification hardware and enforcement systems.
• Evidence of actual commercial shipment: none found. No product literature, no SEC registrant, no press coverage, no fleet-deployment record surfaced. The company appears to be a development-stage venture during 1999–2002.
• Current status: No evidence of acquisition, dissolution, or bankruptcy was found. What is documented is that the asset was abandoned by its owner — see the maintenance-fee events below.
• Intermediate holder: Road Blok-Aid, Ltd. (Texas) — never named on the patent face; it held the inventors' rights for exactly 7 days.

Assignment timeline

Two recorded assignments exist. Both are on Reel 010910, on adjacent frames (0606 and 0624), and both were recorded on the same day, 2000-06-19 — i.e. one batch recordation of a single pre-filing title chain. There are no post-issuance assignments of any kind.

1. 1999-12-15 (executed) / recorded 2000-06-19 — Reel 010910/0624

• Conveyance: Assignment
• Assignor: Adcox, Thomas A.; Adcox, William R.
• Assignee: Road Blok-Aid, Ltd. (Texas)
• Correspondent: Not published. Google Patents legal-events metadata reads "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)"; the recording attorney/agent field is not exposed. Cannot flag recurrence — no name to recur.
• Context: Founder-to-company title assignment, executed 7 days before the 1999-12-22 application filing date and roughly four months after the 1999-08-09 provisional. Ordinary pre-filing housekeeping.

2. 1999-12-22 (executed) / recorded 2000-06-19 — Reel 010910/0606

• Conveyance: Assignment
• Assignor: Road Blok-Aid, Ltd. (Texas)
• Assignee: Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Inc. (Texas)
• Correspondent: Not published — same batch as entry 1 (same reel, frames 0606 and 0624, same recording date of 2000-06-19). If a single filer handled both frames, that is consistent with one corporate counsel or one outside firm, but I have no name to cite, so this is not a finding.
• Context: Internal reorganisation / consolidation of title into the entity named on the issued patent. Effective date is the filing date itself.

Post-assignment events (no conveyances — recorded by the USPTO as legal-status events)

Net finding: the patent has never left the control of its original assignee. Intelligent Vehicle Systems Inc is still the "Current Assignee" per Google Patents. The chain is two links long, both links executed inside a 7-day window in December 1999, both recorded in one batch on 2000-06-19, and the asset was then allowed to lapse for non-payment in 2006 — four years after grant. The Unified Patents portal corroborates a zero-activity profile: Lifetime Renewal Fees $0, assertion indices PVIX 0 / RNIX 0 / SVIX 0, and Family Members (0) in its litigation tracking.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6388579
    1999 : Provisional filed Aug 9
         : Inventors assign to Road Blok Aid Ltd
         : Application filed Dec 22
    2000 : Road Blok Aid assigns to Intelligent Vehicle Systems
         : Both assignments recorded Jun 19
    2002 : Patent issues May 14
    2006 : Lapsed for unpaid maintenance fee
    2019 : Anticipated expiration

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT.
There is no operating-company → licensing-LLC transfer. The terminus is Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Inc., the entity printed on the patent face as assignee since grant. Neither entity carries an "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" suffix, and no registered-agent-service address is disclosed on either reel 010910/0606 or 010910/0624. The only cosmetic resemblance is Road Blok-Aid's 7-day holding period — which, standing alone and with no product/address/entity evidence, is not a finding. Recording lag was ~6 months and is fully explained by the CIP and PCT filings that followed (US09/686,603 on 2000-10-11; PCT/US2000/034846 on 2000-12-21).

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT.
Neither Road Blok-Aid, Ltd. nor Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Inc. appears on any published NPE list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Conversant/Mosaid, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation, or any Spangenberg vehicle). The Unified Patents portal entry for US-6388579-B1 records the patent with PVIX 0, RNIX 0, SVIX 0 and no campaign or proceeding data. No litigation naming this patent was found in any source searched.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR.
Both entries sit on the same reel at adjacent frames recorded on the same day (010910/0606 and 010910/0624, both 2000-06-19), which is structurally consistent with a single batch filer. But the correspondent field is not published in any source I could reach — both index entries say only "SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS." With no name captured, I cannot establish recurrence, and I will not infer one.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT.
Two assignments, both executed within 7 days (1999-12-15 and 1999-12-22), both pre-issuance, both recorded in one batch. There are zero post-issuance transfers. Nothing cascades.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT.
No infringement suit naming US 6,388,579 exists. There is no litigation date to measure a 6-month window against. (The patent is cited as prior art — e.g. against US 6,707,392 and in the Siemens EP 1 519 320 A1 search report — but prior-art citation is not assertion.)

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT.
No Chapter 7/11 filing by either entity was found. The abandonment of the asset took the opposite form: voluntary lapse for non-payment, recorded 2006-05-15 / effective 2006-05-14.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT.
No operating company transferred this patent to an NPE to assert on its behalf. No SEC disclosure, Patent Progress item, or EFF coverage implicates this patent.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT.
The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at the original assignee, and then at the USPTO's abandonment docket.

Verdict

Insufficient data

The assignment record for US 6,388,579 consists of exactly two entries, both forming the original pre-filing title chain: inventors Adcox to Road Blok-Aid, Ltd. (reel 010910/0624, executed 1999-12-15) and Road Blok-Aid, Ltd. to Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Inc. (reel 010910/0606, executed 1999-12-22), both recorded 2000-06-19. There is no post-issuance conveyance, no NPE in the chain, and no litigation ever filed naming the patent; instead the owner let it lapse for non-payment of the 3.5-year maintenance fee effective 2006-05-14, which is the opposite of a monetisation footprint. All eight NPE signals are either not present or unclear (signal 3 is the only "unclear," and solely because the correspondent field is unpublished). The patent is expired and commercially neutralised; no troll pattern exists to report.

Verification links:

• USPTO Assignment Center — search patent number 6388579: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (pull reel 010910, frames 0606 and 0624 to capture the correspondent of record, which no index exposes)
• USPTO legacy assignment search UI: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events (source of the reel/frame citations): https://patents.google.com/patent/US6388579/en
• Unified Patents portal entry (Lifetime Renewal Fees $0; PVIX/RNIX/SVIX 0; no assertions): https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-6388579-B1

Two open items for a follow-up pass, both requiring document images rather than indexes: (a) the recording attorney on reel 010910/0606 and /0624; (b) whether "Road Blok-Aid, Ltd." and "Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Inc." share officers/directors with the two inventor-assignors, which would confirm the chain as a single founder-controlled structure rather than any kind of third-party transfer.

I'll research the cited prior-art references for US 6,388,579 to give you accurate citations and § 102 analysis. Let me start with the examiner-cited references.

Now let me research the remaining examiner-cited references, especially those most pertinent to the claims.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 6,388,579 B1

Verification note up front. This analysis is built on the authoritative Google Patents full-text record for US6388579B1 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6388579/en), whose "Patent Citations (20)" and "Citations (19)" lists enumerate every reference cited on the '579 face. I confirmed details for the examiner-flagged references via Google Patents / FPO / Justia / EveryPatent. I hit a research-step limit before I could live‑verify three of the later Lucent references (US 6,163,277; US 6,167,333; US 6,222,463) and several background references; those are flagged lower confidence below. Per operating rules, I do not auto-correct any identifier and I report the record literally.

0. The legal framework you must read this against

• US 6,388,579 has pre‑AIA status (provisional 60/147,974 filed 1999‑08‑09; non‑provisional 09/469,560 filed 1999‑12‑22). So the operative statute is pre‑AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102(a), (b), (e), (g) and § 103 — not AIA § 102(a)(1)/(a)(2).
• Priority date = 1999‑08‑09 (provisional). Anything published or patented before 1999‑08‑09 is § 102(a)/(b) art; a reference patented before that date also triggers the § 102(b) one-year bar only if it predates 1998‑12‑22 (one year before the non-provisional filing).
• A US patent granted after the priority date but filed before it is § 102(e) art. This is the key hook for the Lucent/Prince/Price/Warner references.
• Anticipation vs. obviousness: § 102 anticipation requires a single reference disclosing every claimed element arranged as claimed. As explained in the previously generated claim overview, all four claims require a "dataless" radar (claims 1, 3) or laser (claims 2, 4) signal from an external police radar/laser transmitter as the interrogating trigger, plus an update receiver fed by an external central database. No single cited reference discloses that specific combination. So almost every reference below is properly § 103 combination art, not a clean § 102 anticipation — I say so explicitly per reference rather than manufacture an anticipation theory.

Important scoping caveat: none of the four granted claims covers the interrogating unit, server, or toll system (they are device‑side claims only). Therefore references directed to the interrogator/server side are weak § 102 art for these claims unless they also disclose the vehicle‑mounted device elements.

1. References cited ON the '579 patent ("Patent Citations")

Legend: ★ = flagged "Cited by examiner" on the face of '579 (the seven the examiner appears to have relied on); the rest were cited by third parties / listed in the record.

Reading of the § 102 picture for the cited patents

• No cited reference is a clean, single‑reference § 102 anticipation of any of claims 1–4. The novelty that the examiner appears to have been testing is the combination of (i) an in‑vehicle memory of vehicle/owner status refreshed from an external central database / wide‑area paging network, and (ii) a "dataless" police radar or laser signal used purely as a trigger, with the answer sent over a separate RF link.
• The strongest § 103 primary references are, in order: US 6,052,068 (Price) and US 6,028,537 (Prince) — both vehicle‑side, memory‑based, external‑database‑linked, and § 102(e) art — followed by US 5,963,129 (Warner) and US 5,847,661 (Intelligent Ideation) for the interrogate‑and‑respond architecture, with the Lucent references (US 6,163,277; US 6,167,333; US 6,222,463) supplying the radar/laser/network context.

2. Non‑patent references cited on the '579 face ("Non‑Patent Citations")

These are § 102(a)/(b) printed publications / prior‑art documents. They are short trade‑press/product materials; I did not verify full text.

3. What I did not treat as prior art (and why)

The Google Patents record also carries a large "Cited By" list (~203 documents) — e.g., Neology's secure‑transaction family, Rent‑A‑Toll/ATS Tolling patents, the Nio USA autonomous‑vehicle family. These are later patents that cite '579; they are not prior art to '579. They are useful only as evidence of the field's development, and a few (e.g., Raytheon's "Enforcement transponder"/"Mobile enforcement reader," US 7,545,287 / US 7,382,275) are themselves arguably within the same problem space.

4. Bottom line

1. No cited reference anticipates any of the four claims under § 102. The distinguishing limitation — a "dataless" police radar/laser signal used as a trigger to return locally stored, central‑database‑refreshed vehicle/owner status over a separate RF link — is not disclosed as a complete set in any single cited document.
2. The references fall into two clusters:
   • Vehicle‑side, memory/status‑based, externally updated (best § 103 primaries): US 6,052,068 (Price), US 6,028,537 (Prince), US 5,963,129 (Warner), US 5,847,661 (Intelligent Ideation).
   • Radar/laser, network, and interrogation‑infrastructure context: US 6,163,277, US 6,167,333, US 6,222,463 (Lucent), WO 1999/022353 (Sonic Systems), plus the tracking/radiodetermination NPL.
3. If you are charting these against the claims for an opinion, the correct posture is § 103 obviousness combinations (e.g., Price or Prince as primary, in view of a Lucent radar/laser reference, to supply the dataless‑trigger element), with § 102 reserved for the "dataless radar/laser + memory‑answer" limitation itself, which the record shows was not met by any single reference.

Confidence flags: High confidence on the bibliographic data and descriptions for US 5,847,661, US 6,028,537, US 6,052,068, and US 5,963,129 (verified this session). Medium confidence on US 6,163,277 / US 6,167,333 / US 6,222,463 (described from titles/assignee only; live fetch blocked) and on the exact internal pagination/date sensitivity of US 6,167,333 relative to the provisional. Flag any of these if you intend to rely on them in a formal opinion, and I can re‑verify.

I'll ground the obviousness analysis by pulling details on the examiner-cited references in the Prior Art section of the record.

Good grounding. Now let me pull the remote-update / paging-related references and the remaining examiner-cited art.

Obviousness Analysis — US 6,388,579 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope note / analyst's caveat. This builds on the prior summary and litigation sections (not repeated here). I rely on the Prior Art section of the Google Patents record for US 6,388,579 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6388579/en): the 19 examiner-cited patent references (the seven asterisked ones are examiner-cited applications of art), the five non-patent citations, and the applicant's own specification. Where I verified a reference's disclosure directly via search I say so; where I have only the title, date, and assignee from the record, I flag the mapping as provisional and note what would have to be confirmed. This is an analytical exercise, not a legal opinion, and no litigation over this patent was found (see prior section).

I. Framework and person of ordinary skill

Governing standard: Graham v. John Deere (scope/content of prior art; differences; PHOSITA level; secondary considerations) as refined by KSR Int'l v. Teleflex (2007) — a combination is obvious where (a) the elements were known, (b) there was a finite number of identified, predictable solutions, (c) a known technique was used to improve a similar device in the same way, or (d) the combination was "obvious to try." KSR also legitimizes common sense and design-incentive rationales, and recognized that market pressure and the "interconnected teachings of multiple patents" supply motivation.

PHOSITA (as of the 1999-08-09 provisional / 1999-12-22 filing): a B.S. in electrical engineering or computer science (or equivalent), with ~2–4 years of experience in RF identification/transponder design, vehicle electronics, or land-mobile radio/paging. This is a mature, incremental art: automatic vehicle identification (AVI) for tolling, radar detectors, and paging receivers were all commodity technologies by 1999.

Critical structural point (carried over from the summary): all four granted claims are in-vehicle device claims. That means the entire §103 fight is over a hardware/architecture combination — memory + an update receiver + a radar-or-laser trigger receiver + a response transmitter (+ a pager receiver and codec in claims 3/4). There is no claim to the interrogating unit, the network side, or the toll system, so those disclosed-but-unclaimed embodiments are relevant only as context/motivation, not as claim limitations.

II. The prior-art record relied on

Also relevant as applicant's own admissions in the '579 specification: the radar/laser transmitter "may be a standard police radar or laser gun normally utilized to determine the speed of a vehicle… standard police bands such as X, K, Ka as well as laser frequencies such as a 904 nanometer laser"; the pager may be a "standard wide area pager receiver"; the paging network "may be a satellite-based network or… a cellular network." Under §103 these admissions about what is "standard" are usable against the claims.

III. Claim decomposition (the elements that must be supplied)

IV. Combination A — Claims 1 and 2 (radar / laser "dataless" trigger + stored status + remote update)

A-1. Price (US 6,052,068) in view of the admitted art of conventional police radar/laser detection

Mapping:

Motivation (strongest argument in the whole analysis): The '579's stated purpose is to let existing, unmodified police radar/laser guns trigger the vehicle's response — the specification literally says the trigger is "a standard police radar or laser gun." Using Price's responder architecture but keying the trigger to the already-deployed police speed-enforcement signal is the paradigmatic KSR "use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way," and a substitution of one known signaling front-end for another (RF interrogation receiver → radar/laser detector) to achieve the predictable benefit of interoperability with police equipment. There is no new function in the receiver; it is a wake-up signal. No teaching away: nothing in Price requires the interrogation signal to carry data; Price's own claims 13–18 treat the tag response as the point of novelty, so migrating the trigger to a dataless carrier preserves Price's function.

A-2. Pedersen (US 5,831,519) and/or Scarinus (US 5,798,714) as the primary interrogation reference

Both are roadside/authority interrogates vehicle → vehicle responds systems — the same field, same problem (identify/authorize a vehicle without stopping it). Either alone or with Price supplies L4/L5 for a police/interrogating-unit-triggered in-vehicle responder. Provisional: I could not verify their full disclosures within the tool budget; I characterize them by title/field only. If either discloses a roadside radar/laser interrogation of an in-vehicle transponder, it moves from "secondary evidence of the field" to a §102/§103 primary reference, which materially strengthens the case.

A-3. Lucent '277 (US 6,163,277) as a bridging reference

Verified content: police and civilian vehicles each carry an antenna + processing unit + sensors; the annotation expressly contemplates police checking for auto theft and vehicle data "without stopping an automobile." That is a motivation-to-combine gold mine: it establishes (i) that police-initiated wireless interrogation of a civilian vehicle's on-board processor was a known, desired objective in the same field, and (ii) an express design incentive (resource-efficient enforcement without stops) identical to the '579's stated goal. Combine '277 (police-vehicle-to-civilian-vehicle data exchange, knowable by police radar/laser triggering) with Price (memory-resident vehicle/owner status + DB verification) and L1–L5 are met for claims 1 and 2.

A-4. Supplying L3 for claims 1/2 (external central database refresh)

Claims 1 and 2 do not require paging — only an "update receiver" receiving from an "external central database." That is the broadest, easiest element to meet:

• Joao (US 5,917,405) — remote (wireless) communication with a vehicle control apparatus, including receipt of updated data.
• Trimble '693 / '752 — vehicle unit whose data/behavior is driven by remote paging/cellular messaging.
• Pedersen/Scarinus — any wired/bench or over-the-air update path suffices for L3 in claims 1/2; the claim does not specify the medium.

Rationale: refreshing a vehicle-resident record from a central source by any wireless link was not novel and was the object of the entire intelligent-transportation-systems program reflected in the cited WO 99/22353 (Sonic Systems DSRC) and WO 98/43104 (Price) references. The '579's own text concedes the paging network and pager were off-the-shelf.

Conclusion — Claims 1 & 2: Obvious under §103 over (Price + conventional police radar/laser detection) alone or in view of (Pedersen or Scarinus) and (Joao or Trimble). Draft a KSR-style petition with the interoperability rationale and the applicant's own "standard police radar gun" admission.

V. Combination B — Claims 3 and 4 (adds wide-area paging + codec + owner info)

Claims 3/4 differ from 1/2 only by requiring L3 = wide-area pager receiver over a wide-area paging network, receiving encoded data, L5 = encoded response, L6 = coder/decoder, and owner (not just vehicle) information.

Motivation: (1) Paging is a one-to-many, already-deployed, low-cost broadcast medium purpose-built for pushing small data packets to many embedded receivers — a predictable choice to implement the "central database push" that Price already performs by other means. (2) The '579 spec itself states the pager may be "standard" and the network "satellite-based or… cellular," undercutting any argument that the paging selection was inventive. (3) Adding owner data to a tag that already stores owner identification records (Price) is mere aggregation of old data for its established purpose — buying nothing beyond predictable results (see In re Kerkhoven-type aggregation reasoning).

Conclusion — Claims 3 & 4: Obvious over (Price + a Trimble-type paging/cellular vehicle unit), optionally in view of Intelligent Ideation '661 for the codec element. Claim 4 is identical to 3 with the laser trigger — obvious by the same substitution rationale unless "dataless laser signal" is construed narrowly (below).

VI. Why a PHOSITA would have combined these (rationale checklist)

1. Same field of endeavor + same problem. All references are in vehicular identification/traffic supervision/vehicle data communication. KSR recognizes that a combination of references addressing the same problem is likely obvious.
2. The references themselves supply the design incentive. Lucent '277's "police check for auto theft without stopping an automobile" is the '579's own stated objective; Price's "law enforcement" utility statement is the same; the '579 Background recites the market pressure (uninsured drivers, forged insurance/registration, stolen-vehicle identification difficulty) that all of these references were addressing. KSR: the "interconnected teachings of multiple patents" and known "market forces" supply motivation.
3. Predictable, finite solutions. AVI/tolling, radar detectors, and paging receivers were three mature, off-the-shelf building blocks. Wiring a paging receiver to an AVI-style transponder to refresh its memory has a finite number of identified, predictable implementations — no new discovery, only juxtaposition of known circuits.
4. No change in principle or function of the assembled references. Price still identifies/verifies vehicles; Trimble/Joao still push remote updates; the radar/laser detector still detects. Each performs its known function in the combination.
5. Interoperability with legacy police equipment (the '579's express stated advantage) is the classic "use a known, unmodified component for its intended function" rationale; it is also the reason any designer would use a dataless trigger — no police-gun hardware modification is required.
6. Absence of teaching away and of unexpected results — see §VIII and §IX.

VII. Claim-by-claim conclusion

VIII. Weak links a challenger must address

1. The word "dataless." Price's interrogation signal is encoded (data-carrying). If "dataless radar signal" is construed as a structural limitation (the received waveform carries no information), Price alone does not read on L4. Cure: the limitation is met by conventional radar-detector front-ends (X/K/Ka and LIDAR), which the '579 specification itself calls standard; the dataless character is thus the unmodified police gun used as a trigger, and KSR makes "swap the encoded RF interrogation for the standard unmodulated police carrier" an obvious substitution. Counter-risk: a patentee could argue the claims exclude any interrogating signal carrying data — a narrow reading that nonetheless leaves the radar-detector+responder combination fatal.
2. Provisional reference mappings. I could verify only Price '068, Intelligent Ideation '661, and Lucent '277 by direct search. US 5,831,519 (Pedersen), US 5,798,714 (Scarinus), US 5,917,405 (Joao), US 5,629,693 / US 5,929,752 (Trimble), US 5,963,129 (Warner), US 6,222,463 (Lucent) are mapped from title/date/assignee only because the tool step budget was exhausted. Pin cites must be pulled from the PDFs before any petition is filed.
3. The "dataless" trigger as a possible non-obvious hook. The only candidate point of novelty in claims 1/2 is using a police speed-enforcement signal as a data-less wake-up as opposed to a purpose-built interrogator. That is a result-effective but trivially different design choice tied to the admitted advantage of not modifying police guns — likely obvious under KSR, but it is the argument a patentee would press.
4. Date/availability mechanics (a real trap).

• US 6,167,333 (Lucent) was filed 1999-08-19 — ten days after the '579 provisional date of 1999-08-09. Under pre-AIA §102(e) it is not available as prior art if the provisional filing is the constructive reduction to practice. Its appearance as an examiner-cited (asterisked) reference is therefore surprising and should be verified; do not rely on it.
• US 6,222,463 (filed 1998-06-25) and US 6,163,277 (filed 1998-10-22) are available under pre-AIA §102(e) (filed before the '579 date, granted after) — usable in §103.
• US 6,052,068 / WO 98/43104 is available at least under §102(a)/(e) (WO published 1998-10-01, less than one year before — not §102(b)).
• Confirm all pre-AIA §§102(a)/(b)/(e) and §103(a) timing against the 1999-08-09 provisional vs. the 1999-12-22 nonprovisional date.

1. Aggregation vs. combination (claims 3/4). A patentee could argue the pager+codec+radar-responder architecture is a new cooperative combination rather than a mere aggregation. Cure: the references each perform their own known function with no mutual modification beyond the ordinary — the pager writes to the same memory the radar trigger reads from, which is ordinary design coupling, not ingenuity.

IX. Secondary considerations (§103(Graham) prong)

• No evidence of unexpected results. Nothing in the '579 record suggests the combination produced a result beyond what the constituent references predict (identify vehicles faster; push updates remotely). The patent claims no criticality, no numerical ranges, no synergistic effect.
• No demonstrated nexus / commercial success of record. The patent lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees effective 2006-05-14 — approximately 3.5 years after grant. Non-payment of maintenance fees is at minimum relevant evidence of a lack of commercial significance (it is not dispositive, but it is difficult for a patentee to argue strong secondary considerations in the teeth of an abandonment 4 years post-grant).
• No industry praise, licensing, or copying evidence surfaced in the record or in the litigation search (see the prior section: no litigation, PTAB, or CAFC activity found).
• Third-party citation volume (~203 citing documents per the record) confirms the patent is a prior-art node, not a validated commercial pioneer — citations show the field developed around it, not that it succeeded commercially.

X. Bottom line

• Every limitation of all four claims is disclosed or rendered obvious by the AVI/tolling interrogation art (Price '068; Pedersen; Scarinus), the vehicle-telematics/paging art (Trimble '693/'752; Joao '405; Intelligent Ideation '661; Lucent '463), and the admitted art of conventional police radar and LIDAR (conceded in the '579 specification and reflected in Lucent '277).
• The strongest, cleanest ground is a two-reference case: Price '068 in view of conventional police radar/laser detection (plus a paging reference for claims 3/4), with motivation drawn from the express interoperability benefit the specification claims and from Lucent '277's "police check … without stopping an automobile" teaching.
• The principal vulnerability of a §103 challenge is the "dataless" qualifier; the answer is that the dataless trigger is the conventional police radar/laser front-end, which the applicant admitted was standard, making the substitution a textbook KSR predictable variation.
• Confidence: moderate-to-high on the overall conclusion; moderate on Pedersen/Scarinus/Joao/Trimble element-level mapping (title-level only, flagged), and low on the utility of US 6,167,333 given its post-priority filing date.

Confidence/caveat statement: I verified full text for US 6,052,068, US 5,847,661, and US 6,163,277 via search; the remaining references are mapped from the Google Patents record's title/date data and general field knowledge, and my search step budget was exhausted before I could pull their PDFs — per your rule I have not auto-corrected any identifier and have flagged every inference rather than presenting it as verified.