Invalidity dossier
US 7040541
Portable shopping and order fulfillment system
Current assignee: Symbol Technologies LLC
Added 9/23/2026, 10:39:40 PM
Active provider: DeepSeek · deepseek-flash
Patent summary
Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.
US 7,040,541 — Concise Patent Overview
Title: Portable shopping and order fulfillment system
Patent number: US 7,040,541 B2
Application number: US 09/487,923
Inventor(s): Jerome Swartz; Thomas K. Roslak; Judith Murrah; Robert Beach; John Klein; Mauro Premutico
Original assignee / current assignee (as listed): Symbol Technologies LLC (a later reassignment to "SYMBOL TECHNOLOGIES, INC." is recorded in the excerpt).
Priority date: 1996-09-05 (claimed from US 08/706,579; also linked to US 08/780,023, filed 1996-12-20)
Filing date: 2000-01-19
Publication date: 2006-05-09 (application published as US 2002/0050526 A1 on 2002-05-02)
Legal status: Expired – Fee Related; adjusted expiration 2017-06-01
Purpose and plain-language scope (from the supplied excerpt): The patent relates to a portable shopping and order fulfillment system — a customer-operated portable terminal used in a shopping environment, where customer, portable-terminal, data, order, and items appear as the recurring prior-art keywords, indicating the subject matter concerns capturing item/order data on a handheld device and fulfilling orders. The classification entries place it in payment architectures/protocols using cards and wireless/wearable devices, cooperative data-reading arrangements, commerce/marketing and buying-selling transactions, coin-freed or like apparatus actuated by credit-registering devices, and checkout procedures (e.g., G06Q20/00, G06Q20/34, G06K17/00, G06Q30/00, G07F7/00, G07G1/0036). This suggests a checkout-oriented portable shopping/order system involving card-based or wireless payment and item registration.
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7040541/en
What the excerpt does not establish: It does not contain the abstract, claims, written description, or drawings. Therefore it does not establish the specific claimed elements, the precise scope of any claim, the actual operation of the system, embodiments, or the cited prior art. The classification codes given are office-assigned categories, not statements of claim scope. Dates and legal status are noted as assumptions in the source itself. No litigation, ownership-transfer, validity, or prior-art research is included here.
Generated 10/1/2026, 9:33:15 PM
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Litigation summary
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Proceedings on file (0)
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No PTAB proceedings on file. This patent has not been challenged via IPR, PGR, or CBM. The absence is itself a signal — well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs. The LLM analysis below may surface filings the ODP feed hasn’t indexed yet.
PTAB challenges
AIA trial proceedings at the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board — IPR, PGR, and CBM. Petitioners, judge panels, claim-level invalidation outcomes from Final Written Decisions, and Federal Circuit appeals. The single most important defensive datapoint after litigation history.
Assignment history
Inventors, original assignee, and the chain of ownership recorded with the USPTO — including the correspondent attorney who recorded each assignment, since shell-LLC chains often share one repeat-player attorney even when the entity names look unrelated. Surfaces NPE / patent-troll patterns: shell-entity transfers, known asserters in the chain, repeat correspondent fingerprints, pre-litigation assignments, and bankruptcy fire-sales.
Prior art
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Obviousness
Combinations of prior art that suggest the claimed invention would have been obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103.
Extensions
Patent term adjustments, term extensions, continuations, divisionals, family members, and expiration dates.
Derivative works
Defensive disclosure: derivative variations of each claim designed to render future incremental improvements obvious or non-novel.