US 6550672

I'll run a few targeted searches to check for any current USPTO/CAFC activity on this exact number, then summarize.

Let me try to capture the remaining claims and check for any active 2026 litigation/docket activity.

Search / docket check

I searched for US 6,550,672 (and its kind-code variant, US6550672B1) against patent-database and litigation-oriented sources. Findings:

• No CAFC 2026 docket activity surfaced for this patent. My searches returned no Federal Circuit appeal, IPR, or 2026 district-court docket entries tied to patent number 6,550,672. I cannot query PACER/CAFC directly from here, so treat "no 2026 litigation found" as negative search result, not as an affirmative verification that none exists. Given the patent's status (see below), live 2026 enforcement is unlikely.
• Collision warning (literal-number discipline). Querying the bare string "6550672" also returns JP 6550672 B2 (特許第6550672号, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries — an engine/cell-starter unit granted 2019.7.31) and industrial tooling catalog numbers "6550672." These are unrelated, and I have excluded them. Only the US number US 6,550,672 B1 is analyzed below.

Bibliographic data (US 6,550,672 B1)

Note on dates: Google Patents lists the priority date as 1996-09-05, while a third-party aggregator (Unified Patents portal) surfaced a "1996-03-25" date for a related record. I report both literally and do not reconcile them.

Abstract (as published)

"The present invention relates to an improved portable shopping system. The system is provided with improved data presentation system for presenting customer desired data on a portable terminal. The portable terminal includes components for presenting audio as well as video information to the customer. The audio and/or video information corresponds to one or more of the customer's user preferences."

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Uncertainty flag first: the authoritative full text you supplied is truncated in the middle of the "home delivery" passage of the detailed description — the claims section is not included in it. The claim text below therefore comes from third-party reproductions (Trustoria record; FreePatentsOnline record). I verified claim 1 and claim 2 language across sources, but I could not authoritatively confirm the total number of claims; the reproductions I retrieved truncate after claim 3. Treat the set below as complete-through-claim-3, with possible additional dependent claims unverified.

Claim 1 — independent method claim (presenting item information in a self-checkout system). In plain terms: store the product information in a memory at a remote host computer; associate one or more user preferences with the customer; give the customer a portable terminal with a machine-code reader; the terminal transmits the scanned code to the host; the host determines whether product information is available that corresponds both to the scanned product and to that customer's preferences; the host selects and retrieves that information from memory; and the host transmits it back to the terminal, where it is output on a data output device. The conceptual core is host-side selection of product content filtered by a stored customer preference profile, not merely price lookup.

Claim 2 — independent system claim (self-checkout system). In plain terms, a system comprising:

• multiple portable terminals, each with an integrated machine-code scanner, display, wireless radio, rechargeable battery, and at least two data-entry function buttons;
• a terminal dispenser that stores/dispenses the terminals and includes both a terminal lock and a battery-charging circuit that recharges the terminals while docked;
• a self-checkout controller holding (i) a preference file listing customers and categories of information selected from a group, and (ii) a product file per product containing a price component and data for those categories;
• a wireless access point coupled to the self-checkout controller;
• a facility controller maintaining a price look-up table; and
• an interface coupler between the facility controller and the self-checkout controller that passes the price component into the product file.

The operative limitation: upon scanning an indicia, the self-checkout controller transmits to the terminal both the price component for the selected product and the preference-category data from the customer's preference file — i.e., merging live POS pricing with personalized content at the terminal.

Claim 3 — dependent. The system of claim 2 wherein the at least two data-entry function buttons include an add-item button and a remove-item button (the "plus"/"minus" keys described in the specification).

Contextual notes

• The specification's preference list (items (1)–(16)) — cholesterol, calories, fat content, generic/better-buy/brand alternatives, electronic and paper coupons, contests, news, advertising, language, size, family event dates, family members' preferences, frequent-shopper points — maps directly onto the "categories of information" recited in claim 2 and the "user preferences" of claim 1. That list is the practical scope boundary between this patent and plain price-checking self-scanners.
• Because the patent expired on 2016-09-05, any 2026 CAFC appeal would have to arise from conduct during the term; none appeared in my searches.
• The fetched specification text contains transcription artifacts (e.g., "uniform resurrect locators," "SPECTRUM24TM") and inconsistent figure/paragraph numbering. I have quoted literally rather than corrected.

Bottom line: US 6,550,672 is a 2003 Symbol Technologies patent (now expired) claiming personalized, host-selected product information delivered to a wireless self-scanning terminal in a self-checkout system, plus the dispensing/charging/locking terminal-dispenser architecture coupled to a preference file and a POS price look-up table. I found no 2026 CAFC or USPTO proceeding involving this specific number, and I flag the claim-set count and the priority-date discrepancy as unresolved.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 6550672. Let me search multiple sources.

Let me search litigation-specific databases.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Summary of My Search

I ran multiple targeted searches constrained to the literal number 6550672 / 6,550,672, including the Unified Patents litigation portal, the Google Patents page, Docket Alarm, and general litigation coverage. Here is what I found — and, importantly, what I did not find.

Bottom line

I could not identify any known litigation (district court, ITC, or Federal Circuit) involving U.S. Patent No. 6,550,672. The evidence I retrieved is consistent with the patent never having been asserted in a public infringement suit, though I want to be explicit about the limits of that conclusion (see caveats below).

What the searches actually returned

1. Unified Patents portal – /patents/patent/US-6550672-B1 — The page returned only bibliographic data, assignees, and a "Referenced By (252)" citation list (e.g., US-10121133 "Method for Self-checkout with a Mobile Device" to Walmart Apollo; US-7114656 to ECR Software/PSC; US-9256865 "Mobile Point-of-sale" to Target). No "Litigation" or "Cases" section surfaced for this patent.

2. Docket Alarm hit for "6550672" — This was not litigation over the patent. It appeared inside the file history of a different patent (US 12/947,545, the "133 patent") attached as an exhibit in IPR2022-01471, BJ's Wholesale Club Holdings, Inc. v. Walmart Apollo, LLC. In that document, "6550672" appears purely as a prior-art patent number in an examiner's search string (alongside 5825002, 5979757, 6354496, etc.). U.S. 6,550,672 is therefore cited by examiners as prior art against other applications — not asserted in a case.

3. Google Patents page — Confirms the patent is Expired – Lifetime, with an anticipated expiration of 2016-09-05, current assignee Symbol Technologies LLC (originally Symbol Technologies, Inc.). The record shows only security-interest/release and name-change reassignments (JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Symbol Technologies LLC). No litigation events appear in the Google Patents "Also Published As / Similar Documents / Litigation" record.

4. General litigation searches returned only unrelated patents/cases (O2 Micro, Realtime Data, Ameranth, MCOM IP, etc.) — none referencing 6,550,672.

The one "near-miss" worth flagging

The most notable result was an IPR involving Walmart Apollo and BJ's Wholesale Club over Walmart's own self-checkout patents (the "133 patent," U.S. Appl. No. 12/947,545), where Symbol's U.S. 6,550,672 appears as prior art. That is a citation relationship, not litigation on the '672 patent.

Caveats (stated explicitly rather than papered over)

• My search access was cut off before I could fully page through PACER/CAFC-native sources and the Unified Patents caselist endpoint (rather than the single-patent portal page). A definitive "no litigation exists" statement would require confirming zero hits there.
• The '672 patent is a division of Ser. No. 08/771,463 (now U.S. 5,979,757), a CIP of Ser. No. 08/706,579 (U.S. 5,825,002). It is possible that litigation was brought on related family members (e.g., the '757 or '002 patents) rather than on '672 itself; those would be separate patent numbers and I did not locate them either within this search.
• I did not locate any specific case name, case number, filing date, jurisdiction, or outcome for US 6,550,672. I am therefore not supplying any case data, because doing so would require fabricating it.

Recommendation

If you need a definitive litigation history, the reliable next steps are:

• Unified Patents litigation caselist filtered on 6550672 (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist).
• RPX Insight / Docket Alarm patent-litigation search keyed to the exact number.
• USPTO Patent Center "Assignment" and "Litigation" tabs for the patent, and CourtListener/RECAP docket search for "6,550,672".

Based on everything retrieved in this session, the answer is: no litigation is known for US Patent 6,550,672.

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

Initial searches returned noise. Let me target the PTAB dockets and litigation databases directly.

Let me check docket aggregators, litigation history, and any Unified Patents challenges.

⚠️ Verification note

I ran targeted searches against PTAB docket aggregators (Docket Alarm), Google Patents' PTAB/litigation panels, PTAB petition documents, and general web sources. I found no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding naming US 6,550,672 as the challenged patent. That matches the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block, which returned nothing from the USPTO Open Data Portal.

One negative finding worth stating precisely, because it is the kind of thing that gets mistaken for PTAB activity: 6,550,672 B1 shows up in PTAB petition exhibits and IDS listings for other patents — e.g., as a cited reference in the file history/exhibit set of a later self-checkout patent petition, and in IPR exhibit lists for unrelated patents. Being cited as prior art is not a proceeding against this patent. No petition has been filed against the '672 patent itself on the record I could reach.

Proceedings overview

Total PTAB proceedings on file: 0. Breakdown by status: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied. The bottom-line defensive posture is therefore not "hardened by surviving IPRs" and not "claims canceled" — it is untested at the PTAB because it was never worth challenging in that forum: US 6,550,672 expired on or about 2016-09-05, so by the time the AIA trial regime matured there was little forward-looking value in invalidating it. A defendant today faces an expired patent with an unusually short past-damages tail, not a PTAB-hardened war chest.

There are no per-proceeding sections to render — I will not invent proceeding numbers to fill the template.

What the absence does and does not tell you

What it does not mean: "no IPRs" ≠ "valid." It means no party bothered to spend ~$150k–$500k invalidating claims on a patent whose enforcement window closed in 2016.

What it partly does mean: this patent appears to have had little or no assertion history as an asserted patent. Patents that are actively asserted in district court attract IPRs with high reliability; the '672 patent's clean PTAB record is more consistent with non-assertion (or assertion only in the expired-period window) than with a patent that crushed challengers.

Caution on my own confidence: the ODP ingest and my searches are the limit of what I can verify. If a CBM petition was filed between 2013 and 2020 it should appear — this is a G06Q financial/commerce-classified patent (classifications include G06Q20/343, G06Q30/02, G06Q30/06), which is squarely the type that attracted CBM reviews — and I found none. But I cannot prove a universal negative, and I would not stake a brief on it without a direct PTAB E2E / Patent Center trial-number lookup before filing anything.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all claims UNTESTED at the PTAB — none canceled, none sustained in an AIA trial. The AIA trial record tells you nothing about the merits of any claim of the '672 patent. Separately, the patent's legal status per the structured data is "Expired – Lifetime", with an anticipated expiration of 2016-09-05 (20 years from the 1996-09-05 priority date claimed from US 08/706,579). That expiry, not any PTAB outcome, is the dominant fact for a defendant: under 35 U.S.C. § 271 there is no infringement by acts after expiration, and under § 286 damages reach back only six years before the date the complaint is filed. For a demand letter arriving in 2026, the recoverable window is essentially empty absent some continuing or pre-suit claim.

Estoppel landscape: effectively a blank sheet, but not a useful one. Because there is no prior petitioner, § 315(e)(2) estoppel does not exist — no party is barred from raising any § 102/§ 103 ground. In principle a defendant retains the full universe of prior art. In practice this is cold comfort, because the remedy you'd want (canceling claims) buys you nothing on an expired patent; the value of an IPR here would be purely defensive, to knock out a past-damages theory in co-pending litigation. Note also that CBM review is unavailable: the transitional post-grant review program for covered business methods sunset for new petitions on 2020-09-16, so even though this patent is a textbook G06Q commerce patent, CBM is off the table. A petition today would have to be an IPR — and IPR of an expired patent is permissible, but the patent owner cannot amend claims, so the usual settlement leverage (amend to survive) is missing for both sides.

Pattern signals: none — no repeat petitioner, no PTAB appeal to the Federal Circuit, no defensive aggregator. I found no evidence of Unified Patents (or any other aggregator) challenging this patent, and I found no CAFC appeal because there is no FWD to appeal. I did not find any Federal Circuit opinion addressing the '672 patent. Ownership runs to Symbol Technologies LLC (original assignee; current assignee per the record), with a chain of security-interest reassignments (JPMorgan Chase 2005/2010; Morgan Stanley 2014/2015), consistent with Symbol's absorption into the Zebra Technologies corporate family. I could not confirm the present-day ultimate owner from the sources I reached — do not assume it, verify it.

Recommended next steps

1. Don't litigate validity first — litigate the clock first. The dispositive defense is expiry. Pull the certified term calculation: priority date 1996-09-05, filing 1999-11-04, granted 2003-04-22, and the recorded anticipated expiration 2016-09-05. Confirm whether any PTA/PTE extended that date and confirm any terminal disclaimer effects. Source of record: US6550672B1 on Google Patents and the USPTO Patent Center file wrapper.
2. Before responding to any demand letter, demand the assertion theory. Ask the patent owner to identify (a) the accused acts, (b) their dates, and (c) why those dates fall inside both the pre-expiration term and the § 286 six-year lookback. For a 2026 demand, absent continuing post-2016 acts, the answer is likely "none."
3. Verify the zero-PTAB finding directly via the PTAB End-to-End (E2E) system and the USPTO PTAB Decisions page, searching by patent number rather than party name. Also run a CourtListener docket and opinion search for "6,550,672" to confirm there is no CAFC or district-court trail feeding a hidden proceeding. My searches found none, but confirm before you rely on it.
4. If and only if there is live, post-expiration accusation or a § 286-window damages theory, prepare an IPR — recognizing that no estoppel and no CBM route means you build the § 102/§ 103 case from scratch, and that the natural prior art targets are the same family members and references the patent's own specification concedes (Dutch Application 9002296; U.S. Pat. No. 5,468,942 to Oosterveen).
5. Do not cite a "PTAB-hardened patent" narrative. If opposing counsel suggests the absence of IPRs means the claims are bulletproof, the rebuttal is in the record: the patent expired in 2016, and there is no FWD, no settlement, and no appellate holding to sustain any claim — the claims are simply untested.

Sources cited: Google Patents US6550672B1 (authoritative text, claims, dates, assignments); USPTO PTAB E2E; USPTO Patent Center; PTAB Decisions; CourtListener. No PTAB proceeding document, FWD, or CAFC opinion on US 6,550,672 was located; accordingly no such document is linked, and no proceeding number is stated.

I'll start by verifying what I can against live sources before reconstructing the chain.

Ownership Reconstruction — US 6,550,672 B1

Patent: US 6,550,672 B1 — "Method and system for presenting item information using a portable data terminal"
App. No.: 09/434,052 · filed 1999-11-04 · issued 2003-04-22 · priority 1996-09-05 (from US 08/706,579) · Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 2016-09-05)
Family: divisional of Ser. No. 08/771,463 (issued as US 5,979,757), itself a CIP of Ser. No. 08/706,579 (issued as US 5,825,002); related to Ser. No. 08/780,023.

Source-access caveat (read before the timeline). I could retrieve the Google Patents legal-events record for this patent and trade/press corroboration for the corporate chain, but not the Assignment Center reel/frame numbers or the correspondent-of-record fields. assignmentcenter.uspto.gov is a JavaScript application that this session's search tool cannot query directly, and Google Patents' legal-events block for US 6,550,672 publishes dates and conveyance types without reel/frame. Accordingly, the reel/frame and correspondent columns below are marked "not retrievable in this session" rather than guessed. Every date and conveyance type that is listed comes from the Google Patents legal-events record (linked below) and from four contemporaneous press/SEC-coverage items I verified. Where I am inferring a corporate parent relationship that is not itself a recorded assignment, I say so explicitly.

Inventors

Six named inventors on the printed patent:

Basis for employment: the patent issued on its face to Symbol Technologies, Inc., Holtsville, NY (Trustoria/Google front-page data), and the application is a divisional of an application filed 1996-12-20 — i.e., filed before issuance and already under obligation of assignment. Five of six inventors reside within ~30 miles of Symbol's Holtsville, NY headquarters; Robert Beach (Los Altos, CA) is the sole geographic outlier, consistent with a Symbol West Coast engineering/standards presence rather than an independent inventor. I could not confirm individual job titles from a primary source — unverified: trade coverage suggests Thomas K. Roslak later held a senior operating role at Symbol/Motorola, but I did not verify that in this session.

Unusual patterns: No evidence of inventors departing within 12 months of filing (not determinable from the record — no assignment-of-inventor-interest was recorded until 2012; see below). The genuinely unusual pattern is the 16-year lag between filing and the inventors' recorded assignment (2012-05-22), discussed in the timeline.

Original assignee

Symbol Technologies, Inc. (Holtsville, NY) — the entity named on the issued patent.

• Shipped product embodying the claims: yes. Symbol was the largest US maker of bar-code scanning and hand-held data-collection terminals; the specification names the PPT 4100 and PPT 4600 terminals and Symbol's SPECTRUM24™ frequency-hopping WLAN and SPECTRUM ONE® radio as the commercial hardware, and describes an integrated self-scanning/self-checkout retail implementation in detail (FIGS. 4–9). The patent's own claim 2 recites a portable terminal with integrated scanner, display, wireless radio and rechargeable battery plus a dispensing/charging cradle — i.e., the then-current Symbol self-shopping product line.
• Primary line of business: design and manufacture of bar-code scanners, mobile computers and wireless LAN infrastructure for retail, warehousing and logistics.
• Current status: operating, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Zebra Technologies. Chain of corporate control (verified via press/SEC coverage, not as recorded patent assignments): Symbol Technologies, Inc. acquired by Motorola, Inc. for ~$3.9B, acquisition completed 2007-01-09; Symbol folded into Motorola's Enterprise Mobility business, retained inside Motorola Solutions after the 2011 Mobility spin-off; Motorola Solutions' enterprise business (including Symbol) sold to Zebra Technologies for $3.45B, October 2014; record owner renamed Symbol Technologies, LLC effective 2015-07-08 (per recorded change-of-name event). Symbol had a major accounting-fraud scandal (SEC action and criminal indictments against the CEO and seven executives, 2004) but never filed for bankruptcy.

Assignment timeline

Reel/frame and correspondent-of-record: not retrievable in this session for any entry (see caveat above). Do not treat the descriptive "context" text below as a substitute for the recorded document — it is my characterization of the conveyance type plus what is publicly documented about the corporate transactions.

Recorded events, as published in the Google Patents legal-events block for US 6,550,672:

1. Executed date not published / recorded 2005-01-05 — Reel not retrievable in this session

   • Conveyance: Security Interest (Google labels it "SECURITY INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
   • Assignor: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
   • Assignee: JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.
   • Correspondent: not retrievable in this session.
   • Context: securitization — collateral pledge of the IP portfolio to Symbol's secured lender; transfers no title.

2. Executed date not published / recorded 2010-12-03 — Reel not retrievable in this session

   • Conveyance: Release by Secured Party
   • Assignor: JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.
   • Assignee: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
   • Correspondent: not retrievable in this session.
   • Context: release of the 2005 security interest upon payoff/refinancing.

3. Executed date not published / recorded 2012-05-22 — Reel not retrievable in this session

   • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
   • Assignors: Roslak, Thomas K.; Sandler, Robert; Tracy, William X.; Murrah, Judith; Riso, Francis; Beach, Robert (all six named inventors)
   • Assignee: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
   • Correspondent: not retrievable in this session.
   • Context: chain-of-title cleanup — a confirmatory / curative assignment ~16 years post-filing and ~11 years post-issuance, capturing the inventors' interests directly in the assignee. The five-year gap between the JPMorgan release (2010) and this record, and its position two years before the Zebra transaction, are the notable features; the reason for the gap (missing/defective original assignment, late-joining inventor, or diligence-driven housekeeping) is not determinable from the record.

4. Executed date not published / recorded 2014-10-31 — Reel not retrievable in this session

   • Conveyance: Security Agreement
   • Assignors: Symbol Technologies, Inc.; Zebra Enterprise Solutions Corp.; ZIH Corp.; Laser Band, LLC
   • Assignee: Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc., as Collateral Agent
   • Correspondent: not retrievable in this session.
   • Context: securitization tied to Zebra's acquisition financing — the record group is Zebra's legal-entity family at the moment Zebra closed its purchase of Motorola Solutions' enterprise business (announced/closed October 2014). Again a collateral pledge, not a transfer of title.

5. Executed date not published / recorded 2015-07-08 — Reel not retrievable in this session

   • Conveyance: Change of Name (only)
   • Assignor: Symbol Technologies, Inc.
   • Assignee: Symbol Technologies, LLC
   • Correspondent: not retrievable in this session.
   • Context: internal reorganization — same legal person, new suffix; no change in ultimate ownership (Zebra).

6. Executed date not published / recorded 2015-08-17 — Reel not retrievable in this session

   • Conveyance: Release by Secured Party
   • Assignor: Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc.
   • Assignee: Symbol Technologies, Inc. (as named in the record; i.e., the pre- or post-rename Symbol entity)
   • Correspondent: not retrievable in this session.
   • Context: release of the 2014 Morgan Stanley collateral pledge.

Two absences worth stating plainly:

• No Motorola assignment is recorded against this patent, and none should be expected. The 2007 Motorola acquisition was a stock merger; Symbol Technologies, Inc. remained the record owner of its patents while the corporate parent changed twice (Motorola → Motorola Solutions → Zebra). That is consistent with the record: no 2007 or 2014 assignment recorded, only a 2015 change of name to Symbol Technologies, LLC.
• No assignment to any third-party licensing entity, NPE, or defensive aggregator exists anywhere in this chain. The chain terminates inside Zebra's corporate family.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6550672
    1996 : Priority application filed by Symbol
    1999 : Divisional application filed
    2003 : Patent issued to Symbol Technologies
    2005 : Security interest to JPMorgan Chase
    2007 : Motorola acquires Symbol in stock merger
    2010 : JPMorgan security interest released
    2012 : Inventors confirm assignment to Symbol
    2014 : Zebra acquires Motorola enterprise unit
         : Morgan Stanley security agreement recorded
    2015 : Symbol renamed Symbol Technologies LLC
         : Morgan Stanley security interest released
    2016 : Patent expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT. No assignee in this chain carries an "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" suffix. Every post-issuance link is either (a) a Symbol/Zebra operating entity or (b) a secured lender — JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. (recorded 2005-01-05; released 2010-12-03) and Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc. as collateral agent (recorded 2014-10-31; released 2015-08-17). Note the record groups: the 2014 security agreement bundles Symbol Technologies, Inc. with ZIH Corp. and Zebra Enterprise Solutions Corp. — i.e., Zebra's own named corporate family, which is the opposite of a faceless single-member LLC.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT. Assignees of record are Symbol Technologies, Inc./LLC, JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., and Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc. None of these appear on the Acacia / Marathon / Intellectual Ventures / IPNav / Wi-LAN / Conversant / Vringo / Pendrell / Innovatio / MPHJ / Lumen View / Round Rock lists, nor did the Unified Patents page for US-6550672-B1 surface an NPE owner. The current owner (Symbol Technologies, LLC / Zebra) is a product manufacturer.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNRESOLVED / CANNOT ASSESS. This is the one signal I am not clearing. The correspondent-of-record field was not retrievable in this session for any of the six entries, so I have zero basis to assert either recurrence or its absence. Given that only six events span ten years, two different secured lenders and two law-department generations (Symbol → Motorola Solutions → Zebra), a repeat correspondent would in any event be weak evidence here. Do not read this as "not present" — it is unverified.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT. Six records over ten years, no two assignments within 24 months of each other except the 2015 pair (2015-07-08 name change; 2015-08-17 lender release), which are a name change and a security-interest release — not chained LLC-to-LLC transfers. No shared registered-agent addresses or common principals are observable.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT / NOT APPLICABLE. No assignment within six months before any infringement suit naming this patent was found. I could not locate any litigation asserting US 6,550,672 at all. (Symbol/Motorola litigations I verified — ITC Inv. No. 337-TA-551, the 2002–2007 Metrologic dispute, and the 2007 Motorola v. Aruba WLAN suits on US 7,173,922/7,173,923 — involve different patents.) Treat "this patent was ever asserted" as unconfirmed.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. Symbol Technologies never filed Chapter 7/11 despite the 2003–2004 accounting-fraud crisis (SEC suit and criminal indictments of eight former executives, 2004-06-03); the company was sold as a going concern to Motorola for $3.9B in 2007. No §363 sale, no bankruptcy-court assignment.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT. No operating-company → NPE transfer appears anywhere in this chain. There is a haircut on this finding: Symbol/Motorola did assert other portfolio patents aggressively against competitors (Aruba, Metrologic), but that is ordinary operating-company assertion, and it is not visible as a patent-assignment event.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT. No RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents or OIN record appears as assignee or as a recorded interest. The chain does not terminate at a defensive aggregator; it terminates inside a product company.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

Justification: The complete recorded chain stays within one corporate family of product manufacturers — original assignee Symbol Technologies, Inc. (recorded 2012-05-22 inventor confirmatory assignment; recorded 2015-07-08 change of name to Symbol Technologies, LLC), now inside Zebra Technologies following the 2014 Motorola Solutions enterprise divestiture, with the only non-operating parties being secured lenders (JPMorgan Chase, recorded 2005-01-05 / released 2010-12-03; Morgan Stanley Senior Funding as collateral agent, recorded 2014-10-31 / released 2015-08-17) that never took title. There is no shell-entity hop, no name from any public NPE roster, no bankruptcy sale and no defensive-aggregator terminus, and the patent expired 2016-09-05 while still owned by Symbol Technologies, LLC. Honest qualification: the "assertion" prong of this label is not documented for this specific patent — I found no suit asserting US 6,550,672 — so if your taxonomy requires a filed case, the correct alternative label is "operating-company owned, no recorded assertion activity," not NPE. The correspondent-of-record analysis (signal 3) remains open and would need a direct Assignment Center query.

Verify at:

• USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Legacy Assignment Search — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search patent number 6550672 to pull reel/frame and correspondent fields for the six events above)
• Google Patents legal events (the source used here) — https://patents.google.com/patent/US6550672/en
• Unified Patents patent page (for the asserter-directory cross-check) — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-6550672-B1

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 6,550,672. Let me run targeted searches.

Let me retrieve the actual "Patent Citations" table for US6550672B1 and its family-member equivalents.

Let me try to pull the citation table directly and check the parent/family records.

Method and source limitations (read first)

I ran constrained searches against the literal number 6,550,672 (and the kind-code form US6550672B1) targeting the USPTO/Google Patents citation record. I hit the session's tool-step limit before I could page through the full table, so I want to be explicit about what I actually confirmed versus what I could not:

• Confirmed: The Google Patents record for US6550672B1 displays a "Patent Citations (38)" table — i.e., there are 38 patent-document citations on the front face of the patent (U.S. and foreign). Separately, the page shows a large "Referenced By" set (reported elsewhere as 252 forward citations).
• NOT retrieved: I was unable to pull the 38-item citation table line-by-line before the tool cap. I therefore cannot literally enumerate and individually analyze "each patent citation" as the task requests. I will not fabricate that list. Below I give (a) the prior-art references I did confirm from the patent's own text and family record, with per-reference § 102 analysis, and (b) a precise description of what remains unverified.
• Critical distinction: A "Patent Citation" on the front face can be either backward (art the examiner/applicant cited against '672 — true prior art) or forward ("Referenced By" — later patents citing '672, which are not prior art to '672). The task asks for prior art, so only the backward citations matter. Many of the hits my searches returned (e.g., US2003/0132298A1 to Swartz; US7624918B2; US6869013B2) are forward references and must be excluded from a § 102 analysis.

Confirmed prior-art references (from the '672 specification itself)

These are cited in the body of US 6,550,672 (background section) and are unambiguously prior art to it. I verified their citation in the specification text directly.

1. Dutch Patent Application No. 9002296 ("the '296 Application")

• Full citation: Dutch Patent Application No. 9002296 (NL 9002296), Netherlands.
• Date: Literally reported in the '672 text only as "the '296 Application"; I could not confirm the exact filing/publication date from this session's retrievals. The number itself implies a 1990-era filing in the Netherlands. Treat the exact date as unverified.
• Description (as characterized in '672): A system in which "an authorized customer is issued a terminal having an integrated bar code scanner to record merchandise purchases" and the terminal maintains the purchase list "within internal memory means"; prior to exiting, the list is downloaded through a communication port at a terminal dispenser and a printed ticket is produced; the customer then pays at a checkout register.
• § 102 relevance to '672: This is the closest self-scanning-system antecedent. It potentially anticipates only the self-scanning framework, not the core limitation. It lacks host-side retrieval of product information selected by a stored customer preference profile (claim 1) and lacks the dispenser/charging/locking + preference-file + POS price-look-up architecture (claim 2). Assessment: § 102 marginal at best; stronger as § 103 background. The key distinguishing element is that '296 stores the list in the terminal's own memory with no personalized, preference-filtered content delivery from a central host.

2. U.S. Pat. No. 5,468,942 to Oosterveen et al. ("the Oosterveen Patent")

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 5,468,942, inventors Oosterveen et al.
• Date: Issued November 21, 1995 (this is the standard issuance date for US 5,468,942; I flag that I did not re-verify it against the patent's own front page in this session — treat the date as high-confidence but not re-confirmed here). The '672 text gives no date.
• Description (as characterized in '672): Paired with the '296 Application as a self-scanning system where a customer is issued a bar-code-scanner terminal, the purchase list is kept in the terminal's memory, downloaded at a dispenser, and paid for at a register, with occasional audits.
• § 102 relevance to '672: Same analysis as the '296 Application. It is the U.S. counterpart/companion of the Dutch disclosure. It describes self-scanning + dispenser download, but not a central host that (i) maintains a preference file of categories of information per customer, (ii) determines whether product information corresponding to that customer's preferences exists for a scanned item, and (iii) transmits that personalized content to the terminal. Assessment: not anticipatory of claim 1 or claim 2; relevant as § 103 context.

3. Co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/919,410 (EAS activation/deactivation)

• Full citation: U.S. Patent Application Ser. No. 07/919,410, filed July 27, 1992, assigned to Symbol Technologies, Inc. (cited in '672 in connection with the EAS deactivation circuit).
• Description: An electronic-article-surveillance tag activation/deactivation system — the customer terminal activates/deactivates an EAS tag when an item is scanned for purchase and re-activates on de-list.
• § 102 relevance to '672: Directed at the EAS feature described in the '672 specification, not at the claim 1/claim 2 personalized-content limitations. Assessment: not anticipatory; supports the EAS-dependent subject matter only.

4. Related family members cited as prior art / co-pending applications

• U.S. Ser. No. 08/771,463 (now U.S. Pat. No. 5,979,757) — filed December 20, 1996; the immediate parent (division source) of '672. Because '672 is a division of this application, it is the priority-bearing parent, not "prior art" in the anticipating sense.
• U.S. Ser. No. 08/706,579 (now U.S. Pat. No. 5,825,002) — filed September 5, 1996; the CIP grandparent and the source of the '672 priority date.
• U.S. Ser. No. 08/780,023 — filed December 20, 1996 (related pending application incorporated by reference).
• These are same-family / commonly-owned filings. Under § 102, same-inventor-family U.S. applications/patents are generally not "by others" and, given overlapping inventorship and common priority, are weak-to-inapplicable anticipatory art for '672. Assessment: cite for completeness; not substantive § 102 art.

What I could NOT verify (explicit gaps)

1. The other ~34 front-face citations. Of the 38 "Patent Citations," I confirmed only the references that also appear in the '672 specification text. The remaining examiner/IDS citations (the bulk of the 38, likely including the Dutch/German/French/Japanese foreign documents and U.S. patents the examiner relied on) were not retrievable in this session. I will not guess at them.
2. Any cited foreign patent documents. The '672 field (self-scanning/RF retail) commonly draws DE, FR, GB, EP and JP art. I saw such lists only in unrelated documents' search reports, not in a confirmed '672 list, so I have excluded them.
3. Whether a "near-miss" set belongs to '672. Two EPO/PCT search-report excerpts surfaced (for PCT/US 00/10665 → WO 00/62618, and PCT/US 00/06073 → WO 01/30874) listing art such as US 4,396,413 (Miller, 1983-08-02), FR 2 728 143 (Sodifra, 1996-06-21), WO 94/04167 (US Government, 1994-03-03), WO 97/02038 (Capelli, 1997-01-23), US 5,504,055 (Hsu, 1996-04-02), and Japanese abstracts JP 07/138167 and JP 10/338605. These are Symbol-adjacent retail/self-checkout applications from the same era, but I could not confirm they are cited on the '672 face. Do not treat them as '672 prior art without verification.

Bottom-line § 102 assessment

• The only references I can currently tie to US 6,550,672 as prior art are the '296 Dutch Application and the Oosterveen U.S. 5,468,942 patent (both background citations), plus the EAS application Ser. No. 07/919,410.
• None of these, on the descriptions in the '672 text, anticipates claim 1 or claim 2 of '672, because the operative limitations — central-host selection of product information that corresponds to a stored customer preference profile, and the dispenser (lock + battery charger) + preference file + POS price-look-up + interface coupler system of claim 2 — are absent. They are § 103 context art, not § 102 anticipatory art, based on what I retrieved.
• To complete the requested "each patent citation" analysis, the next concrete step is to open the Google Patents "Patent Citations (38)" table at https://patents.google.com/patent/US6550672B1/en (or the USPTO Patent Center full "References Cited" / "Foreign Patent Documents" front page) and enumerate all 38 rows. I could not complete that enumeration here, and I am flagging it rather than filling the gap with invented citations.

Consistency check with prior sections: This is consistent with the earlier litigation summary (no litigation found; '672 cited only as examiner prior art against others) and the bibliographic summary (division of Ser. No. 08/771,463 → US 5,979,757; CIP of Ser. No. 08/706,579 → US 5,825,002). No contradiction found.

I'll gather the prior-art references associated with this patent before building the § 103 analysis.

Let me pull the cited prior-art references directly and a few of the key third-party systems.

I have the core references. Let me verify a few candidate references that bear on the "customer preference" and "personalized information" limitations, plus the "Referenced By" set.

Obviousness Analysis — US 6,550,672 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Analyst note on inputs. The authoritative full text supplied to me was truncated mid–"home delivery" passage and does not contain the claims or the "References Cited" block. The claims below are therefore carried forward from the third-party reproductions used in the prior generated section (Trustoria / FreePatentsOnline), which were verified only through claim 3 — the total claim count remains unconfirmed. Consistent with that, I treat claim 1 (method), claim 2 (system), and claim 3 (dependent) as the working claim set. Everything in this memo should be re-run against a Patent Center / Global Dossier copy of the printed claims before being relied on.

Also note: the patent expired 2016-09-05, so this is a retrospective validity analysis, not live-enforcement advice.

1. What the "Prior Art" section of this page actually supplies

The Google Patents record's prior-art section, as fetched, gives:

• Prior-art keywords: customer, portable terminal, data, item, information
• Prior-art date: 1996-09-05
• Two references named on the face of the specification:
  • Dutch Patent Application No. 9002296 — the "'296 Application"
  • U.S. Pat. No. 5,468,942 to Oosterveen et al. — "the Oosterveen Patent"
• One further co-pending application incorporated by reference: Ser. No. 07/919,410 (filed Jul. 27, 1992) — EAS tag activation/deactivation, assigned to Symbol.
• A "Referenced By" set of 252 documents on the Unified Patents portal (forward citations only — see §2a below).

The fetched text did not reproduce the "References Cited" (Patent/Non-Patent Literature) block. I therefore supplemented with references surfaced in search (marked ⚠ where I could not verify the reference in this session).

2. Reference set — qualification as prior art

2a. On the 252 "Referenced By" documents

The forward-citation set (e.g., US 10,121,133 "Method for Self-checkout with a Mobile Device," Walmart Apollo; US 7,114,656, ECR Software/PSC; US 9,256,865 "Mobile Point-of-sale," Target) is relevant to claim construction and family scope, but is not § 103 art against '672 — every one post-dates the 1996 priority. Do not let a citation list be mistaken for a prior-art ground.

2b. The one evidentiary gap that matters

The only claimed element with no squarely-verified pre-1996 reference in this session is the personalization element: storing a customer preference profile and using it to select which product information the host returns. Candidates from the 1994–1996 one-to-one-marketing art — e.g., Johnsen (US 5,250,789, coupon dispensing on a stored consumer profile); Bianco (US 5,047,614, computer-assisted shopping); Deaton (US 5,592,560, purchase-history marketing research); and the Dedrick/AdHammer-type "selectively distributing commercial messages" disclosure (US 5,717,923) ⚠ — are the references I would expect to close that gap, but I could not verify any of them in this session and I am not asserting their contents as fact. Treat Combination B (§4) as contingent on that verification.

3. Element-by-element mapping

Claim 1 (method — host-selected, preference-filtered item information)

Claim 2 (system — dispenser + charging + preference file + POS price file)

Claim 3 (dependent)

Add-item and remove-item buttons. Disclosed by Miller '413's POS function keys and by Hsu '055; the specification's own plus/minus keys. Nothing inventive.

4. Combinations rendering the claims obvious

Combination A — the baseline architecture (claims 2 and 3)

US 5,468,942 (Oosterveen) + NL 9002296 + EP 0681273 (Heijn) + US 4,396,413 (Miller) [+ optionally US 5,504,055 (Hsu)]

• Oosterveen/'296 supply the dispenser, two-sided rack, customer identification card + PIN keyboard, locking member 44, charging contacts 42, receipt printer, and spot-check — i.e., every limitation of the dispenser/charging/locking sub-system.
• EP 0681273 supplies the wireless (transmitter/receiver) hand scanner operating with in-store transmitter/receivers, plus the store computer 16 that processes identification-device and readout-station data — i.e., the "wireless access point coupled to the self-checkout controller."
• Miller '413 supplies the POS/facility controller with a price look-up table and the function-keyed data-entry layout.
• The interface coupler limitation is met by the '296/EP 0681273 architecture in which the store computer is connected to the dispenser/scanner network; passing a price field from a PLU table into an application product record is a routine integration step.

→ Claim 2 and claim 3 are obvious over Combination A except for the preference-file/personalization limitations. See Combination B.

Combination B — adding the personalization element (claims 1 and 2)

Combination A + a stored-consumer-profile targeted-content reference (candidate class: Johnsen US 5,250,789; Bianco US 5,047,614; Deaton US 5,592,560; Dedrick US 5,717,923 ⚠ all unverified this session)

• The targeting reference(s) supply: a customer file keyed to an identified customer, storing categories of information the customer has elected to receive, and host-side selection of which content to deliver based on that file.
• Substituting the customer's identity (already captured by Oosterveen's card reader 16/17 and PIN 17′) as the key into an existing preference array, and using the scanned UPC as the product key into the existing product file, yields claim 1's "determines whether product information corresponds to both the scanned product and the customer's preference."
• Claim 1 is obvious over Combination B; claim 2's preference-file limitation is likewise met.

Combination C — home/catalog ordering overlay

Combination B + US 5,324,922 (Roberts)

• Roberts supplies bar-code-driven catalog ordering from a home terminal, quantity entry, and host return-messaging to the terminal display — supporting claim 1's "output on a data output device" and the specification's home-shopping/uploaded-shopping-list embodiments. Useful principally as corroboration, not necessity.

5. Motivation to combine (KSR v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007))

The Federal Circuit's teaching–suggestion–motivation test is not the only route post-KSR: "if a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious." Applied here:

1. Predictable combination of known elements. Every sub-system in claim 2 (hand scanner + dispenser + lock + charger + card reader + POS price file) was already integrated in the '296/Oosterveen self-checkout system. Adding a data-bearing display to that scanner is the substitution of a known element for a known function.

2. Known market force: POS congestion + shopper personalization. The '296/EP 0681273 line is expressly motivated by "remov[ing] the queues at a cash desk." The contemporaneous retail-marketing literature (one-to-one marketing, targeted coupon/ad delivery) supplied the independent motivation to push personalized content into the aisle. The specification itself concedes that prior self-checkout systems were "limited to providing simple pricing and product identification information" — i.e., the content was the acknowledged gap, not the architecture.

3. Design incentive to move computation off the terminal. The '672 specification states the central host "performs most of the computing functions, thereby reducing the computational memory and power requirements of the portable terminals." That is a classic, articulated reason to implement preference-based selection host-side — exactly where claim 1 puts it.

4. Use of known, standardized technology. The specification relies on TCP/IP, HTML 3.0, and IEEE Draft D5 802.11 — all admitted conventional. Retrieving a stored record over a packet-switched LAN in response to a scanned key is the ordinary use of those tools.

5. Reasonable expectation of success. All elements were individually proven in commercial retail deployments (the AAPA cites Symbol's own PPT 4100/4600 and SPECTRUM24™; Oosterveen's dispensing device was itself the Symbol "Personal Shopping System" per US 6,354,496's citation). Integration risk was low.

6. Teaching away — none identified. No verified reference in this set disparages personalized in-aisle content, and none disparages wireless self-scanning.

6. Where the claims retain daylight (candid counter-analysis)

• The preference-array limitation is the whole case. If the personalization references in §2b cannot be verified (or if they are coupon-only / broadcast-ad-only rather than host-selected, product-keyed, preference-filtered), then claim 1 and the preference-file half of claim 2 must be attacked with (a) AAPA + common sense (weaker), or (b) an unverified secondary reference. This is the single most likely point of non-obviousness.
• Claim 2's specific concurrency — the controller transmitting, in response to one scan, both the POS price component and the preference-category data derived from a separate preference file whose price field is populated by an interface coupler from the facility controller — is a narrow, architecture-specific limitation. A defendant would argue the '296/Oosterveen system merely uploaded a transaction log at return-time; a plaintiff could argue EP 0681273's in-scanner messaging was not preference-filtered product content. Expect this to be the battle line.
• Date fragility. If the '672's effective date is held to Dec. 20, 1996 (the CIP filing) for the personalization matter, references between Sep. 5 and Dec. 20, 1996 become available (e.g., FR 2 728 143, 1996‑06‑21 is already in; WO 97/02038, 1997‑01‑23 becomes § 102(e)-eligible only if its US filing pre-dates). Conversely, if the priority is held to Sep. 5, 1996, the personalization references must all pre-date that.
• Priority-date discrepancy not reconciled. The prior generated section flagged Google Patents' 1996-09-05 against a third-party 1996-03-25 record for a related filing. I did not reconcile these, and the § 103 window shifts with the answer. Flagging as unresolved rather than resolving it.

7. Conclusion, with confidence levels

Bottom line. The hardware and architecture claims (2's dispenser/lock/charger/PLU combination, and claim 3 entirely) fall to a straightforward KSR combination of US 5,468,942 / NL 9002296 with EP 0681273 and US 4,396,413. The claims survive or fall on one narrow question: whether a pre-September-1996 reference taught host-side selection of product information keyed to a stored customer preference profile. I could not verify such a reference in this session, and I decline to supply one from memory as if it were established. Verifying that single reference, and reconciling the 1996-09-05 vs. 1996-03-25 priority date, are the two tasks that would move this analysis from provisional to conclusive.