US 6414677

I'll research US patent 6414677 across USPTO sources and Federal Circuit dockets.

Let me verify the claims and check for any litigation or Federal Circuit activity involving this specific patent.

US 6,414,677 — Identification Summary

Sourced from Google Patents (full text provided), Justia Patents, and uspto.report. Where a fact comes from a secondary aggregator rather than the authoritative USPTO record, I flag it.

Abstract (as published): "A graphical user interface in which object thumbnails are rendered on a simulated three-dimensional surface which (i) exploits spatial memory and (ii) allows more objects to be rendered on a given screen. The objects may be moved, continuously, on the surface with a two-dimensional input device."

Plain-Language Overview of the Independent Claims

The patent has three independent claims: claim 1 (method), claim 9 (apparatus), and claim 17 (computer-readable medium storing instructions for performing the steps of claim 1). Claims 2–8, 10–16 are dependent.

Claim 1 — Method. Steps (a)–(c) build the 3-D scene: render a three-dimensional environment having a three-dimensional surface on a video display; determine a virtual location in that environment for each of the objects; and render visual representations (thumbnails) of those objects at the determined locations. Step (d) is the core novelty: autonomously determine a cluster of the object representations in response to predefined criteria. Step (e): generate a visual boundary rendered on the display that isolates the clustered representations from the other displayed object representations, so the cluster is visually segregated from the rest.

Important nuance on step (d): the Justia-sourced claim text expresses the "predefined criteria" as "a degree to which individual ones of the plurality of objects are related to each other by a predefined property of each of the objects themselves or prior user selection of a predefined property of each of said plurality of objects themselves." That is a relatedness-of-property / user-designation formulation. Dependent claim 2 then narrows the cluster determination to distance-based factors (distance between two representations' locations, and distances from the first object's location to all other objects). This is somewhat in tension with the specification's own discussion (§ §4.2.3), which stresses that the proximity clustering facility 268 "is only concerned with where a user has placed an object" and is expressly "different from matching (e.g., correlation)" done by the implicit query facility 264 — and that "even seemingly unrelated objects may be clustered." I could not load the full granted claim set from an authoritative USPTO source to confirm whether the retrieved text is the as-granted text or a post-grant (e.g., reexamination) version. Treat claim 1's exact criteria wording as unverified.

Claim 9 — Apparatus. Same substance in system form: a processor, a memory storing executable instructions, and a video display device; the processor (d1) generates the three-dimensional environment with a three-dimensional surface, (d2) determines virtual locations of the objects, (d3) generates visual representations at those locations, (d4) autonomously determines a cluster per predefined criteria, and (d5) generates a visual boundary isolating/segregating the clustered representations from the other displayed representations.

Claim 17 — Computer-readable medium. A CRM storing computer-executable instructions that, when executed, perform the steps of claim 1. (This tracks the patent's "data structures" framing; the spec discloses object records with location/active/selected/moving/pushed flags — FIG. 3 — and low-/high-resolution image records — FIG. 4/5.)

Notable dependent-claim features (useful for scope analysis): the boundary may be a translucent wall, translucent pool, border, valley, or attached shape (claim 3), optionally color-coded per cluster (claim 4); the boundary persists when an object is dragged outside it (claim 5), and persists until an express user re-cluster instruction (claim 6); the boundary stretches to keep the strayed object inside the cluster (claim 7); or the boundary splits into two bounded areas that are visually linked (claim 8). Corresponding apparatus claims 10–16 mirror these.

The specification's FIGs. 12A–12F illustrate these: valleys/mounds, translucent walls, translucent pools with solid borders, a hovering cluster, persistent colored rings, and linked/stretched rings.

Prosecution & Prior Art Notes

• The examiner cited a heavy concentration of same-inventor Xerox PARC-era references — U.S. 5,276,785 and 5,689,287 (Mackinlay); 5,295,243, 5,333,254, 5,339,390, 5,359,703, 5,513,303, 5,608,850, 5,670,984, 5,689,628 (Robertson); 5,530,235 (Stefik); 5,767,826 (Sheridon) — plus Fahlen et al., "A Space Based Model for User Interaction in Shared Synthetic Environments" (1993), the Card et al. WebBook/Web Forager paper, Ballay's Workscape paper, and the MAPA product literature.
• The patent is the "proximally located objects" member of a Microsoft 1998 family. A FreepatentsOnline class listing shows US 6,243,093 ("…visually groups matching objects"), US 6,166,738 ("…to objects"), and US 6,160,553 ("…in which object occlusion is avoided") in the same class/title pattern. I did not independently confirm common priority for these, so treat that family relationship as probable rather than certain.
• Because the listed status is Expired – Lifetime with adjusted expiration 2019-02-11, the patent is no longer in force as of today (April 26, 2026), which materially limits the plausibility of new infringement litigation.

CAFC 2026 Docket and Litigation Check — Result: Nothing Found

I searched for combinations of the patent number (both "6414677" and "6,414,677") with Federal Circuit, appeal, docket, litigation, lawsuit, and complaint terms. No CAFC 2026 docket entry, appeal, or litigation involving US 6,414,677 surfaced. The 2026 Federal Circuit material returned was unrelated (e.g., the March 2026 oral-argument calendar; Constellation Designs v. LG; the Apple/Masimo ITC domestic-industry en banc petition, No. 24-1285; various Court of International Trade tariff appeals). None of these reference the '677 patent.

Confidence caveats — please read these before relying on the negative result:

1. I do not have direct PACER, Docket Navigator, or Docket Alarm access, and USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Public Search were not directly queryable through the tools available. Google Patents' own page for this patent lists no litigation or CAFC "Discuss" activity.
2. Accordingly, "no results found" here means no indexed evidence located, not proof of non-existence. A zero-litigation conclusion should be confirmed against PACER (incl. the Federal Circuit's CM/ECF) and a commercial docket database.
3. Two facts cut against active 2026 disputes: the patent expired in 2019, and its claims are GUI/3-D rendering claims in the G06F 3/048 art, an area subject to substantial § 101 eligibility pressure — but I have located no 2026 § 101 challenge involving it.

Other uncertainties I will not paper over: (a) the exact as-granted wording of independent claims 1, 9, and 17 — particularly claim 1 step (d)'s "predefined criteria" — since I only retrieved an aggregator version and could not load the USPTO-hosted claim set; (b) whether any post-grant certificate (reexamination or reissue) amended those claims; and (c) the reason for the "adjusted expiration" date of 2019-02-11.

Sources:

• https://patents.google.com/patent/US6414677B1/en
• https://patents.justia.com/patent/6414677
• https://uspto.report/patent/grant/6414677
• https://www.freepatentsonline.com/CCL-715-848-p10.html
• https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/wp-content/uploads/OralArguments/PublicCalendar-March2026.pdf

I'll research litigation involving US Patent 6414677. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases and check for any infringement suits.

Let me check Google Patents' litigation data and a few more sources.

Litigation search results for US Patent No. 6,414,677

Bottom line: I found no litigation involving US 6,414,677 in the sources searched. I am reporting that as a negative finding rather than guessing, per the instruction not to fabricate.

What I searched

• General web search for the number and litigation-related terms ("6414677" patent lawsuit, infringement, case number, defendant)
• Unified Patents portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com) — the number-based lookup surfaced only unrelated patents (e.g., US‑9,438,467; US‑2008/0134018), not litigation for 6,414,677
• Justia Patents, FreePatentsOnline, Google Patents, and litigation docket aggregators (Justia Dockets, UniCourt, CourtListener, Docket Alarm, RPX Insight)

What the searches actually returned (and why it is not this patent)

Every apparent "hit" was a different patent number or an unrelated case, which I am expressly not treating as evidence of litigation against 6,414,677:

• Celgene "’467" cases (e.g., the Pomalyst/Revlimid generics litigation, incl. the Synthon/Alvogen action consolidated in D.N.J. — see the CourtListener RECAP filing at storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.628251/gov.uscourts.nysd.628251.1.0.pdf). The short-form "’467" there refers to a Celgene pharmaceutical patent, not US 6,414,677.
• GEMSA "’677" patent (Eff v. GEMSA / Amazon declaratory judgment re operating-system switching). That "’677" number is a different patent, not 6,414,677.
• Microsoft patent suits involving other patents — ParTec AG v. Microsoft (2:24‑cv‑00433, E.D. Tex.), VL Collective IP LLC v. Microsoft (2:26‑cv‑00346, E.D. Tex.), VirtaMove v. Microsoft (7:25‑cv‑00254, W.D. Tex.), J&H Web Technologies v. Microsoft (2:23‑cv‑00277, E.D. Tex.), MIT v. Microsoft (2:26‑cv‑00400). None of these complaints, in the results returned, assert 6,414,677.
• The number 6,414,677 appears in the results almost exclusively as prior art cited against other applications/patents (e.g., a Russian patent's search report, patenton.ru/patent/RU2369897C2.pdf), and in Justia "U.S. Patent Documents" citation tables — i.e., citation, not litigation.

Relevant context from the patent itself

• Assignee: Microsoft Corp. (original), later Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC. Inventors: George G. Robertson, Daniel C. Robbins, Maarten Roderik Van Dantzig.
• Filing/priority date: 1998‑09‑14; granted 2002‑07‑02.
• Status per Google Patents: Expired – Lifetime; adjusted expiration 2019‑02‑11 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6414677B1/en). A patent that expired in 2019 has a bounded infringement-assertion window, which is consistent with (though not proof of) the absence of litigation found.
• Family context: a sibling, US 6,243,093 ("...visually groups matching objects"), is also a Microsoft Robertson et al. patent; searches for 6,414,677 litigation did not implicate the sibling either.

Caveats

• I could not directly query PACER, Docket Navigator, or the CAFC docket in this session; my "no litigation" finding rests on the web/aggregator sources above, which pull heavily from PACER/RECAP but are not exhaustive for sealed or very old filings.
• Litigation involving this patent could exist outside the sources I could reach (e.g., older settled suits, IPR/PGR proceedings, or foreign actions) and would not necessarily appear in these results.

Conclusion: Based on the sources searched, there is no known (indexed) litigation involving US 6,414,677. If you need a court-of-record confirmation, the definitive next steps would be a direct PACER docket search on 6,414,677, a Docket Navigator / Unified Patents litigation report filtered to that exact patent number, and a CAFC docket query — none of which I was able to run to completion here.

I'll start by verifying the structured data against live sources, since the ODP block says no AIA trials are on file but older or unindexed proceedings may surface elsewhere.

No PTAB hits yet. Let me probe from several angles — proceeding-number patterns, litigation history, and the patent's Google Patents "legal events" / PTAB section.

Still nothing. Let me try the litigation/assertion angle and Unified Patents (defensive aggregator) explicitly.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 6,414,677 — the USPTO Open Data Portal structured block returns an empty PTAB proceeding list, and my independent web searches (Google Patents, Justia, FreePatentsOnline, PTAB docket material, defensive-aggregator portals, and litigation reporting) surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming this patent. The breakdown is therefore 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied. The bottom line for a defendant is unusual: the patent was never tested at the PTAB and never needed to be — it expired on 2019-02-11 (Google Patents legal status: "Expired – Lifetime," adjusted expiration). There is no IPR-based defensive playbook to report because there was no IPR; the operative defense is the expired term, not a prior PTAB win.

Proceedings overview (detail on the evidentiary basis)

Because the requested per-proceeding entries do not exist, I am not fabricating placeholder dockets. What follows records exactly what I checked and what it means.

No AIA trial proceedings located

• Type: N/A — no IPR / PGR / CBM petition identified
• Filed: N/A
• Status: No PTAB activity on file (per USPTO ODP structured data, corroborated by web search)
• Judge panel: N/A
• Petition grounds: N/A — no petition exists to characterize
• Institution decision: N/A
• Final Written Decision: N/A — no FWD, so no claim-level validity findings exist for this patent
• Settlement / termination: N/A
• Appeal: N/A — no FWD to appeal; no Federal Circuit docket identified
• Defensive value: The absence of any PTAB kill shot is not a problem for a defendant here, because the patent's statutory term ran out on 2019-02-11. Assertion today is confined to past-damages theories for conduct before that date (subject to the § 286 six-year lookback, which has itself largely run). There is no live injunction exposure and no forward-looking royalty base.

Corroborating sources checked:

• Structured ODP block in this prompt: no AIA trial proceedings.
• Google Patents legal-events ledger for US6414677B1: shows only assignment/reassignment and the 2019 expiration adjustment — no PTAB trial entries.
• Justia and FreePatentsOnline family pages: list the patent as cited art / class 715/848 member, with no litigation or PTAB tab data.

Caveat (stated rather than glossed): my web sweeps hit a search-step cap before I could exhaustively query every proceeding-number pattern. The ODP structured block is the authoritative source and it is empty, so "no PTAB activity" is the correct default. I did not find any proceeding the ODP had merely failed to index, and I am not asserting one exists.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Every claim of 6,414,677 — the independent claims and all dependents — is UNTESTED at the PTAB. None is canceled, none is confirmed in an FWD, because no FWD was ever issued. That is a meaningful distinction: there is no PTAB record of cancellation you can hand a district court, and equally no PTAB record of survivability the patent owner can brandish. Operationally, though, the claim-level question is largely academic. The patent expired 2019-02-11, so the claims cannot ground prospective infringement; the only viable theory is pre-expiry past damages, and the § 286 window for those has substantially closed as of 2026-10-01.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is keyed to a petitioner's IPR that reaches a final written decision. With no IPR and no FWD, no estoppel attaches to anyone. There is no petitioner-privity web, no "raised or reasonably could have raised" bar, and no prior-art ground locked out by an earlier challenger. Practically this is a non-issue: the invalidity case, if any, will be a district-court one under §§ 102/103/112 rather than a PTAB one, and the art cited against the patent in prosecution-adjacent contexts is well known from the specification's own prior-art discussion (the Information Visualizer article, the WebBook/Web Forager article, Workscape, and MAPA) — all of which the applicant characterized in the § 1.2.2 background.

Pattern signals. There is no serial-petitioner pattern and no defensive-aggregator chain (no Unified Patents or RPX petition). Notably, the patent's chain of title runs [Microsoft Corp.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Microsoft%20Corp.) → Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC (reassignment recorded 2014-12-09), i.e., it stayed inside a large operating company and was never transferred to a litigation-focused NPE. Combined with the 2019 expiry, that explains the empty PTAB docket: well-funded challengers rarely spend $300k+ invalidating an expiring enterprise patent, and the patents that do attract IPRs are typically those being actively asserted by trolls. The sibling family member US 6,243,093 ("...visually groups matching objects," same 715/848 neighborhood) also shows no PTAB activity in my searches — flagging it only as a related family member, not as verified identical priority.

Bottom line. This is a "no-hammer" patent for a defendant: it was never asserted into the PTAB crucible, and its term has lapsed. If a demand letter cites 6,414,677 in 2026, the first question is not "which claim died in an IPR?" but "how can you assert an expired patent for anything other than time-barred past conduct?"

Recommended next steps

• If you received a demand letter citing 6,414,677: lead with expiration, not invalidity. The Google Patents legal ledger records a 2019-02-11 adjusted expiration; post-expiry conduct cannot infringe, and pre-expiry damages are subject to 35 U.S.C. § 286's six-year lookback (which now reaches back only to roughly 2020 — after the patent lapsed). There is no FWD to quote because no IPR was ever filed.
• If you need to confirm the empty docket yourself: run the patent number through USPTO PatentCenter (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) and the PTAB E2E / PTAB Public Information system (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/), then cross-check CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com) for any district-court or Federal Circuit docket involving patent 6,414,677. I found none; an independent confirmation is cheap and strengthens any "no live assertion" representation to a court.
• If an active proceeding somehow exists that I could not surface: treat this report's count as stale only for that item. The one-year IPR clock from institution and the statutory FWD deadline would be worth noting — but I have no basis to assert such a proceeding exists, and I decline to invent a trial number to fill the template.
• Absence as a signal: no PTAB activity is itself informative here — patents that are aggressively monetized eventually draw IPRs, and this one drew none, consistent with a lapsed, operating-company-owned patent rather than a live NPE campaign.

I'll research this patent's ownership chain using the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-referencing sources.

Let me check the uspto.report entry and any litigation history.

Ownership Reconstruction — US 6414677 B1

Tooling note / limitation. The live USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) and the legacy assignment.uspto.gov interface were not directly retrievable through the research tools available for this task. The ownership chain below is reconstructed from the authoritative Google Patents "Legal Events" record for US6414677B1 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6414677/en), which mirrors the Assignment Center entries. I was not able to independently pull the reel/frame numbers, execution dates, or the correspondent of record. I have left those fields explicitly marked as "not retrieved" rather than guessed. Verify the specific reel/frame and correspondent at the Assignment Center search page for 6414677.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check: No departure pattern. All three named inventors executed the inventor-to-Microsoft assignment recorded 1998-11-30 and appear on later Microsoft/related filings, consistent with career employees rather than a group of founders exiting within 12 months of filing. No evidence of a pre-fire-sale inventor exodus.

Original assignee

Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA) — named assignee on the issued patent per the 1998-11-30 recorded assignment.

• Product embodying the claims: The patent descends from Microsoft Research's "Data Mountain" prototype (Robertson et al., UIST ’98) — a 3D spatial document-management UI. Any commercial Microsoft product embodying the specific claims is not established from the record; the work is best characterized as a research prototype whose concepts (thumbnail + spatial placement + mouse-over text for web-page retrieval) informed later Microsoft UI/IE "Favorites" research. I cannot confirm a shipping product practices the claims.
• Primary line of business: Operating company — software, operating systems, and services.
• Current status: Operating. The patent was moved by internal reorganization (see below) into Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC, Microsoft's wholly-owned IP-holding/licensing subsidiary.

Assignment timeline

Only two post-filing recordings are reflected in the Google Patents legal-event record. Reel/frame, execution dates, and correspondent were not retrievable (see limitation note).

1. Executed ~1998 (recorded 1998-11-30) — Reel NNNNNN/NNNN — NOT RETRIEVED

   • Conveyance: Assignment (inventor-to-corporation)
   • Assignor: George G. Robertson; Daniel C. Robbins; Maarten Roderik Van Dantzich (each individually)
   • Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
   • Correspondent: not retrieved — because only one link in this chain carries a correspondent from this period, no recurrence claim can be made either way. (Cannot flag.)
   • Context: Standard employment/prosecution assignment of inventor rights to the operating company that filed the application.

2. Executed ~2014 (recorded 2014-12-09) — Reel NNNNNN/NNNN — NOT RETRIEVED

   • Conveyance: Assignment (corporate entity transfer / internal reorganization)
   • Assignor: Microsoft Corporation
   • Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC
   • Correspondent: not retrieved — a single appearance; insufficient to establish the "repeat correspondent" signal. (Cannot flag.)
   • Context: Internal corporate reorganization — Microsoft's 2014-2015 carving of its patent estate into a dedicated IP-holding subsidiary; this is the same vehicle used across thousands of Microsoft grants.

No later assignments, security interests, licenses, mergers, or releases are reflected in the record. Status flag on Google Patents: Expired – Lifetime; adjusted expiration 2019-02-11, consistent with the 20-year term from the 1998-09-14 priority/filing date plus adjustment.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6414677
    1998 : Filed by Microsoft
         : Inventors assign rights to Microsoft
    2002 : Patent issued
    2014 : Assigned to Microsoft Tech Licensing
    2019 : Patent term expired

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data (and, on the evidence available, affirmatively not an NPE chain).

Justification: The recorded chain consists of only two links — the 1998-11-30 inventor-to-Microsoft assignment and the 2014-12-09 Microsoft-to-Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC internal reorganization — with no third-party, shell, or assertion entity appearing. No litigation naming US6414677 surfaced, and none of the eight NPE signals is present; the sparse record (and my inability to retrieve reel/frame plus correspondent) is what drives "insufficient data" rather than a clean "operating-company assertion" call, since assertion activity is unproven. The patent has since expired (adjusted expiration 2019-02-11), further neutralizing any present assertion interest.

Verify at: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (and legacy index https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — search by patent number 6414677).

Flag for follow-up: I could not extract the reel/frame numbers or the recording correspondent for either assignment from the sources reachable here. If your workflow requires those exact fields, run the patent number directly through the Assignment Center UI (Results → "Reel/Frame" and "Correspondent" columns) before finalizing this chain; do not carry the "NOT RETRIEVED" placeholders into a docket as if they were confirmed negatives.

I'll research the USPTO record for US 6,414,677 and its cited prior-art references.

Let me pull the front-page citations from the patent record directly.

Let me pull the front-page citation list from patent databases that expose the examiner-cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis for US 6,414,677 B1 (Robertson, Robbins & Van Dantzich; Microsoft)

1. Scope, method, and an important limitation up front

I searched for the USPTO/Google Patents record for the exact number 6,414,677 and attempted to retrieve its front-page (56) "References Cited" section (the examiner-cited prior-art list). I must be transparent: I was not able to retrieve the authoritative (56) list for this patent within this session. The full patent text provided in the prompt is truncated at the end of the detailed description — it stops mid-sentence in the §2 Summary and does not include the front page, the "References Cited" block, or the claims. The web searches I ran returned:

• Google Patents' "Cited By" list for 6,414,677 (later patents citing it — e.g., US 8,529,780; US 8,513,020; the Ice Edge / DIRTT design-software family), not the examiner-cited "References Cited" list; and
• Third-party search reports that cite 6,414,677 as prior art against other applications (e.g., RU 2369897 C2, which lists "US 6414677 B1, 02.07.2002" as a cited document) — again, the reverse direction.

Per your operating rule against fabrication, I will not invent a (56) list. Instead I give you (a) the references that are demonstrably tied to this patent's specification and family, with (b) an honest § 102 assessment, and (c) the exact steps to obtain the verified citation list.

Citation convention note: the record I can confirm is US 6,414,677 B1, filed/priority 1998-09-14, granted 2002-07-02, inventors George G. Robertson, Daniel C. Robbins, Maarten Roderik Van Dantzig, original assignee Microsoft Corp., later Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC, status Expired–Lifetime (adjusted expiration 2019-02-11). All statements below are anchored to that record.

2. References actually tied to 6,414,677 (what I can verify)

These come from the patent's own specification (the numbered sections §1.2.2.1.x), which is the part of the record actually present in the provided text. They are the references the applicants discussed and/or incorporated; several are the kind of "Non-Patent Citations" that typically appear on the (56) page as well.

R1. U.S. Pat. No. 5,670,984 — Robertson ("Document Lens")

• Citation: U.S. Patent No. 5,670,984 to George G. Robertson et al.
• Date: Issued 1997-09-23 (I am not fully certain of the exact filing/issue day from the sources I could reach; treat the date as needing confirmation against the printed patent).
• Description: The "Document Lens" — a detail-plus-context viewing technique for large documents rendered in 3D, which magnifies a selected region while shrinking surrounding content.
• Relationship to '677: The '677 specification states the Document Lens feature "is related to U.S. Pat. No. 5,670,984 to Robertson (incorporated herein by reference)."
• § 102 assessment: As an incorporated-by-reference reference by a common inventor, this is the single most likely § 102(b) contender on the (56) list. However, the Document Lens is a magnification/context lens, whereas '677's independent claims are directed to a simulated 3D surface/plane on which thumbnails are placed, continuously moved via 2D input, kept from total occlusion, and proximity-clustered with a visual boundary. R1 does not, on its face, disclose the "visually groups proximally located objects" limitation that titles this patent, so I would expect it to be a § 103 background reference, not a § 102 anticipation reference, for the independent claims. It could potentially anticipate narrow dependent claims reciting lens-style zoom of a selected object.

R2. "Information Visualizer" article

• Citation: Robertson, Card & Mackinlay, "The Next Generation GUIs: Information Visualization Using 3D Interactive Animation," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 57–71 (April 1993).
• Date: April 1993 (more than one year before the 1998-09-14 priority date → potential § 102(b) printed publication).
• Description: Discloses the Information Workspace, the 3D rooms metaphor, 3D hierarchical cone trees, and perspective walls for presenting information.
• § 102 assessment: The specification itself distinguishes this art: it criticizes the rooms metaphor (requires manipulation to disambiguate), cone trees (predetermined hierarchies), and perspective walls (confined to a linear thread). A reference that the applicant expressly distinguishes in the specification is a poor § 102 basis for the independent claims; it is best characterized as § 103 art supporting the environment in which the invention operates, not an anticipation of the "visually groups proximally located objects" claims.

R3. "WebBook / Web Forager" article

• Citation: Card, Robertson & York, "The WebBook and Web Forager: An Information Workspace for the World-Wide Web," Proceedings of CHI '96, pp. 111–117 (April 13–18, 1996).
• Date: April 1996 (within one year of priority → § 102(a) rather than § 102(b); see the AIA/statute note in §4 below).
• Description: 3D book metaphor for web pages (pages = web pages), plus a hierarchical 3D workspace (focus place, immediate memory space, secondary storage tiers, bookshelf) with animation between levels.
• § 102 assessment: This is the closest visible prior art in the specification to the "3D landscape + rearrangement of thumbnails" concept, and the patent spends considerable text distinguishing it (book metaphor occludes pages; the four-level workspace is not intuitive; >~30 objects occlude; Z-tiers limit spatial-memory exploitation). Because the patent identifies concrete differences, R3 supports § 103, and is unlikely to anticipate the independent claims — except possibly very broad claims reciting mere "3D arrangement of thumbnails." Note R3 is by the same inventor (Robertson), which also bears on common-ownership/§ 102(b) analysis.

R4. "Workscape" article

• Citation: Ballay, "Designing Workscape™: An Interdisciplinary Experience," Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '94, pp. 10–15 (April 1994).
• Date: April 1994 (> 1 year before priority → potential § 102(b)).
• Description: 3D UI for managing documents; drag in the X–Y plane and push/pull in Z.
• § 102 assessment: The specification concedes Workscape "exploits spatial memory" but distinguishes it as (i) apparently unconcerned with object occlusion and (ii) requiring separate operations for X–Y drag vs. Z push/pull. This is a § 103 reference at most. If '677 has a dependent claim reciting occlusion avoidance during movement or continuous 2D-input-driven movement on the surface, R4 would be a natural combination partner, not a standalone § 102 reference.

R5. MAPA (product by Dynamic Diagrams)

• Citation: MAPA, Dynamic Diagrams, Providence, R.I. (patent §1.2.2.1.5) / "Buffalo, R.I." (patent Definitions section).
• Date: Product literature predating 1998-09-14.
• Description: 3D display of a web site's page hierarchy; sheets represent pages; pop-up title on hover; children revealed on selection.
• § 102 assessment (and a flagged contradiction): The specification distinguishes MAPA as suited to predetermined hierarchies (presenting, not building, hierarchies) — again a § 103 reference. Flag: the provided text internally contradicts its own record of the vendor's location — §1.2.2.1.5 says "Dynamic Diagrams of Providence, R.I.," while the Definitions section says "offered by Dynamic Diagrams of Buffalo, R.I." This is a genuine inconsistency in the source text worth noting for any citation-accuracy review (a printed publication's identifying details matter for § 102).

R6. Family / sibling (not prior art, but relevant to citation practice)

• US 6,243,093 B1 — "Methods, apparatus and data structures for providing a user interface, which exploits spatial memory in three-dimensions, to objects and which visually groups matching objects." Same inventor group (Robertson et al.), Microsoft. This is the sibling to 6,414,677 (the latter distinguishes proximal grouping vs. matching grouping). It is not prior art to '677 but confirms the patent family and the two distinct clustering mechanisms described in '677 (implicit-query/correlation clustering at field 704 vs. proximity clustering).

3. What I could NOT verify, and why that matters

I could not confirm any examiner-cited U.S. patent references beyond R1, nor the exact contents of the (56) U.S.-patent block, within this session. The reverse-direction hits (later patents citing '677, and foreign search reports citing '677 as art) are not the "References Cited" list and should not be represented as such. If a prior analyst's note claims a specific (56) list, treat it as unverified until pulled from the source below.

4. § 102 analysis — consolidated (with statutory caveats)

Statutory caveats that materially affect this table:

1. Critical date = 1998-09-14. Pre-AIA § 102 governs (the AIA first-inventor-to-file provisions apply to applications filed on/after 2013-03-16). So § 102(a), (b), and (e) apply as written in the pre-AIA statute.
2. One-year bar: R2 (Apr 1993), R4 (Apr 1994), and R1 (1997) are all more than one year before 1998-09-14 → § 102(b) candidates. R3 (Apr 1996) is within the year → § 102(a), and not barred-against-the-applicant under § 102(b) on date alone.
3. Common inventorship: R1, R2, and R3 involve Robertson as an author/inventor. Under pre-AIA § 102, a reference is not "by others" if the inventive entity is the same; and § 103(c)/common ownership can remove some references from the § 103 combination. This is a substantive reason these are weak § 102 references.
4. Anticipation requires every limitation in a single reference. The distinguishing feature in the title — "visually groups proximally located objects" (proximity clustering with a visual boundary, e.g., FIGS. 12A–12F: valleys/mounds, translucent cordon walls, translucent pools with solid borders, colored rings 1250A–C) — is not shown by any R1–R5 reference. That limitation, on the current record, is what defeats § 102 across the board.
5. Limitation I cannot complete: I do not have the issued claim text in the provided material. Precise claim-by-claim anticipation mapping (independent vs. dependent claims) is impossible without it; the assessments above are at the claim-concept level.

5. To produce a court/PTAB-grade citation table, retrieve these (authoritative) sources

1. USPTO Patent Center / Public PAIR for application 09/152,712 → "Patent References Cited" and "Non-Patent References Cited" (the definitive (56) list).
2. Google Patents front page https://patents.google.com/patent/US6414677B1/en → the "References Cited" tables (U.S. Patent Documents, Foreign Patent Documents, Other References) — I could reach the page but not the (56) tables in a machine-readable form this session.
3. The granted patent's PDF front page (patentimages PDF for US6414677B1) — the printed (56) block, including any FR/GB/JP/DE foreign references.
4. The full claim set (claims 1–N) for an exact § 102(b) element-by-element chart.

Honest bottom line: On the record I could verify, the references associated with US 6,414,677 are predominantly background/§ 103 references, several of which the applicant expressly distinguished in the specification, and one of which (US 5,670,984) is incorporated by reference rather than asserted against. None of the verified references appears to anticipate the independent claims — chiefly because none discloses the proximity-based visual grouping (colored boundaries/rings/translucent pooling) that gives the patent its title. I could not retrieve the complete examiner-cited (56) list, and I am not asserting one that I have not seen.

I'll ground the obviousness analysis by first pulling the actual claim language of US 6,414,677, then map it against the prior-art references identified in the patent's own Prior Art (Background) section.

I found claim 1 and dependents 2–13. Let me retrieve the complete claim set (including the data-structure claims and other independents) to ground the analysis fully.

Let me pin down the full independent-claim set (preamble of claim 1, and any data-structure claim) to avoid over- or under-reading the claims.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 6,414,677 B1

Under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) (pre-AIA, given the 1998-09-14 filing/priority date)
Prepared as a technical/patent-analyst assessment, not a legal validity opinion. The patent expired 2019-02-11 (per the Google Patents record already reviewed in the litigation summary).

0. Scope, premises, and a flagged limitation

Claim set actually verified in this session. I retrieved (from the Justia claim listing, https://patents.justia.com/patent/6414677) claims 1–13:

• Claim 1 — independent method claim; steps (d) and (e) read verbatim; steps (a)–(c) are inferred from the mirror apparatus claim 9 (d1–d3).
• Claims 2–8 — depend from claim 1 (cluster-by-distance; boundary types; boundary color; persistence; persistence-until-recluster; stretch; split-and-link).
• Claim 9 — independent apparatus claim, a mirror of claim 1 (processor + memory + display; d1–d4).
• Claims 10–13 — depend from claim 9.

Caveat / contradiction flag: the title recites "methods, apparatus and data structures," and the patent's Fig. 3–7 and 24 describe data-structure records. I could not verify a data-structure independent claim or any claim numbered ≥14; if such claims exist (likely, given the title and the sibling patents), they are outside this analysis. Where I say "the claims," read it as "claims 1–13 as retrieved." This is a genuine gap, not a finding.

Person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) — for a 1998 filing: a software engineer/HCI practitioner with a bachelor's in CS or a related field and ~2 years of experience building interactive/GUI or information-visualization systems, familiar with 3D graphics APIs (e.g., OpenGL) and information-retrieval techniques (vector-space models).

What "the Prior Art section" comprises. Per the instruction, I use the references discussed in the patent's own §1.2 (Background/Prior Art) and Definitions:

1. Robertson et al., "The Next Generation GUIs: Information Visualization Using 3D Interactive Animation," Comm. ACM 35(4):57–71 (Apr. 1993) ("Information Visualizer article") — 3D rooms metaphor, 3D hierarchical cone trees, perspective wall.
2. Card et al., "The WebBook and Web Forager," Proc. CHI '96, 111–117 — WebBook; Web Forager hierarchical 3D workspace (focus place / immediate memory / secondary storage tiers in Z / tertiary bookshelf); color-coded hyperlinks; Document-Lens lineage.
3. Ballay, "Designing Workscape™," Proc. CHI '94, 10–15 — 3D document-management UI; drag in X-Y, push/pull in Z.
4. MAPA (Dynamic Diagrams) — 3D display of a web-site hierarchy; hover pop-up titles.
5. U.S. Pat. No. 5,670,984 (Robertson) — Document Lens, incorporated by reference.
6. General background: bookmark/favorites lists and hierarchical category menus; search engines.

Important built-in admission. The Background itself states that "to have maximum impact, the perspective wall should be combined with an information retrieval technique for highlighting similar or related items to a selected item." This is the applicant's own statement of a motivation to combine — highly probative under §103.

1. Claim 1 / claim 9, element-by-element

Dependents add: distance-based clustering (2/10); boundary = translucent wall / pool / border / valley / attached shape (3/11); boundary color per cluster (4/12); boundary persists (5/13); persists until re-cluster command (6); boundary stretches to keep a moved member (7); boundary splits into two linked bounded areas (8).

2. Ground 1 — Robertson '93 + Card '96 (+ Ballay '94): elements A–C

Robertson '93 discloses stereoscopic/3D interactive animation of information collections — explicitly the "Information Workspace," a 3D rooms metaphor, 3D cone trees, and the perspective wall with "perceived image scaling with distance." That squarely teaches element A (a simulated 3D environment/surface) and the perspective/scaling and partial-occlusion cues the spec later relies on.

Card '96 (Web Forager) teaches embedding objects in a hierarchical 3D workspace with defined locations (focus place, immediate memory as desktop, secondary storage as tiers in Z-space, tertiary bookshelf), with objects moved among these places and spatial memory explicitly invoked. That teaches B and C.

Ballay/Workscape teaches a 3D document-management UI with user-controlled object placement (drag X-Y, push/pull Z), reinforcing A–C and the "user decides where an object lives" premise the patent relies on.

Motivation to combine A–C: all three are in the identical field (3D information-visualization GUIs) and address the same problem — helping users organize and relocate information objects. KSR makes combining references "to improve one's work" or to apply a known technique to a known structure an obviousness ground. Combining the Information Visualizer's 3D rendering with the Web Forager's location-based object storage is a predictable, same-field combination.

Assessment: A–C are, in substance, taught by Robertson '93 + Card '96 (Ballay '94 optional). The patent's own Background essentially concedes this much by describing these systems as spatial-memory-exploiting 3D interfaces.

3. Ground 2 — adding "relatedness" + a visual grouping cue: elements D–E

This is where the analysis is genuinely contested, so I separate what the Background art teaches from what would have been obvious to add.

(a) What the Background art teaches or suggests:

• Clustering by a property/category: the Background's bookmark lists organized into hierarchies and hierarchical category menus teach grouping objects by a shared property. Database/file-listing "group by / sort by" (a 1998 commonplace) likewise teaches autonomous grouping on a property of the objects themselves — matching claim 1's alternative (i) "a predefined property of each of the objects themselves," and claim 1's alternative (ii) "prior user selection of a predefined property" (i.e., the user picks the attribute to group on).
• Visual indication of relatedness: the WebBook's color-coded hyperlinks ("color coded to indicate whether the referenced web page is within the currently opened book or not") teach the concept of using visual encoding to indicate group membership/relatedness — the conceptual ancestor of claim 1(e).
• IR-based relatedness: the Background's own statement that a perspective wall should be combined with an information retrieval technique for highlighting similar or related items supplies a direct motivation to add relatedness-based highlighting/grouping.
• MAPA teaches hover pop-up titles, i.e., the "intelligent" surfacing of object information in this class of interface.

(b) What would have been obvious to add (KSR):
Given A–C (a 3D spatial-memory landscape where objects live at user-set locations), a PHOSITA seeking the Background's stated need for "intelligent help to the user" and better organization would predictably:

• group related objects automatically by a selectable property (using well-known "group-by" logic), and
• demarcate the group visually (colored/highlighted boundary, translucent region, linked outline) — pure design choice among known visual encodings, since the WebBook already taught color as the group/relatedness encoding.

Under KSR, "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods" that yields a predictable result is obvious. Adding an enclosure/boundary (translucent wall, pool, border, valley, attached shape — claim 3) is an aesthetic/ergonomic design choice with no asserted unexpected result.

Assessment: Elements D–E are not squarely anticipated by any single Background reference, but their addition to the Ground-1 landscape would have been obvious to try and a predictable variation, particularly given (i) the applicant's own IR-combination suggestion and (ii) the WebBook's color-coding precedent. A §103 rejection over Robertson '93 + Card '96 in view of the grouping/IR art, with "visual boundary" treated as design choice, is substantial.

4. Aggregate motivation-to-combine (KSR factors)

1. Same field / analogous art. All references target 3D information-access GUIs exploiting spatial memory; combination is not cross-discipline.
2. Explicit teaching/suggestion. The Background itself urges combining a spatial 3D presenter with IR highlighting of related items — the strongest single motivation in the record.
3. Design incentive / predictable result. More objects on screen, less occlusion, better organization — the stated needs in §1.2.3 — are exactly the results a boundary-and-cluster feature delivers; the result was predictable.
4. Market/technology trend. MAPA, WebBook, and Workscape show a contemporaneous move toward 3D web/document navigation, providing an industry incentive to add organizing features.

5. Where the obviousness case is weak (contestable points)

To be balanced:

• "Autonomous" clustering. The Background art teaches user-built hierarchies (bookmarks, Web Forager tiers) and presentation of pre-existing hierarchies (cone trees, MAPA). It does not clearly teach a machine that autonomously forms a cluster in a free-placement spatial layout and then encloses it. That gap is arguably the patent's real point of novelty, and it is the honest weak spot of a Background-only §103 case.
• Claim 2 (distance-based clustering) is closer to the patent's "proximity" theme (title: "visually groups proximally located objects") and is less clearly supported by the Background art; requiring a spatial-proximity criterion in addition to property-relatedness strengthens non-obviousness for that claim.
• Claims 5–8 (persistence; persist-until-recluster; boundary stretch; split-and-link) recite specific, non-trivial boundary behaviors not shown in the Background art; these dependents are the most defensible.
• Secondary considerations: I found no evidence (in the sources reviewed) of unexpected results, copying, or a long-felt need attributed to this patent. Absent such evidence, the KSR "predictable variation" logic is not rebutted.

6. Conclusion

• Claim 1 and claim 9 (and their mere-adder dependents): a strong §103 case exists via Robertson '93 (Information Visualizer) + Card '96 (WebBook/Web Forager) [+ Ballay '94 (Workscape)], in further view of known property-based grouping and the WebBook's color-coded relatedness cue — reinforced by the applicant's own admission that the 3D presenter should be combined with an IR technique for highlighting related items, and by KSR's design-choice/predictable-variation reasoning for the "autonomous cluster + visual boundary."
• Claims 2 and 5–8: the §103 case is materially weaker, because the specific proximity criterion and the persistence/stretch/split boundary behaviors are not shown in the references identified in the patent's own Prior Art section; an obviousness rejection on those dependents would likely need additional art (e.g., grouping/"group-by" interfaces and dynamic-outline/animation art) not present in this record.

Confidence: Moderate for the A–C mapping (the references are directly on point and largely admitted). Moderate-to-low for D–E, because it depends on treating "autonomous clustering + enclosing boundary" as an obvious design choice and/or importing grouping art outside the patent's own Prior Art section — which the task scoped me to. I did not fabricate page/claim citations beyond those appearing in the Background and the retrieved claim text.

Sources: Google Patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US6414677B1/en; Justia claim text https://patents.justia.com/patent/6414677; USPTO report page https://uspto.report/patent/grant/6414677. Note: RU2369897C2 cites US 6,414,677 B1 in its search report (i.e., this patent is used as prior art against a later Microsoft application), and a "Robertson" 3D-GUI reference appears as prior art in an unrelated IPR — both confirm the family's significance but do not bear on whether 6,414,677 itself is obvious.