US 7047416

I'll search for authoritative information on US patent 7,047,416 and any 2026 CAFC activity.

Let me get the claim text and check for litigation/CAFC activity.

Search scope and confidence note

I ran targeted queries against Google Patents (the authoritative full text you supplied), uspto.report, and general dockets/CAFC-appeal sources, keyed to the literal number 7047416 / US7047416B2. Important caveats up front:

• No CAFC 2026 docket entry for this patent was found. I could not confirm any Federal Circuit appeal, oral argument, or decided opinion involving US 7,047,416 in the 2026 docket. The only 2026 Federal Circuit material my search surfaced was a generic Finnegan statistics report on PTAB appeals (March–May 2026), which does not mention this patent. I am reporting absence of evidence, not evidence of absence — I have no authoritative confirmation either way.
• The full-text fetch you provided contains the specification/background but not the verbatim "Abstract" field or the complete claim set. My claim overview below is derived from the Summary of Invention and Definitions portions of that text, plus a partial claim-1 quote from uspto.report. I flag where I am inferring.

Bibliographic data (high confidence — consistent across sources)

Related-application note (from the specification): this application also claims Paris Convention/35 U.S.C. 119 benefit of provisional Ser. No. 60/223,076 filed August 4, 2000, and incorporates by reference the concurrently filed Wheeler applications including PCT/US01/41587 ("Person-Centric Account-Based Digital Signature System"), PCT/US01/41562, PCT/US01/24572, PCT/US01/24563, and Ser. Nos. 09/923,075 and 09/923,213.

Abstract

Caveat: the fetched page did not include the verbatim Abstract field. The specification's own opening summary of the invention reads as follows, and appears to track the abstract closely:

"A method of authenticating an entity by a receiving party with respect to an electronic communication that is received by the receiving party and that includes both a unique identifier associated with an account maintained by the receiving party and a digital signature for a message regarding the account, consists of the steps of, before receipt of the electronic communication, first associating by the receiving party a public key of a public-private key pair with the unique identifier and, thereafter, only conducting message authentication using the digital signature received by the receiving party in the electronic communication and the public key associated with the account identifier."

Please treat the exact abstract wording as unverified.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Caveat: I retrieved only the opening words of granted claim 1 from uspto.report — "1. A method of authenticating an account holder by an account authority, comprising the steps of: as part of setup of an account of the account holder: …" — and could not retrieve the complete granted claim set. The overview below is therefore reconstructed from the Summary of Invention, which enumerates four distinct "aspects," and should be treated as a functional summary rather than verbatim claim construction.

1. Account-holder authentication method (first aspect; corresponds to granted claim 1).
   Instead of relying on a third-party-issued digital certificate, the account authority itself takes the sender's public key and binds it to the account (identified by a unique acctID) at account setup. Thereafter, when the authority receives an electronic communication containing the account identifier and a digital signature over a message, it does exactly one thing: it looks up the stored public key by the acctID and verifies the signature. Successful verification authenticates both the message and the sender ("Factor A" entity authentication), and the authority then performs the instruction in the message as if the account holder had appeared in person. No identity information need be transmitted, so communications can go unencrypted over an open network.

2. Multi-account / multi-party communication method (first aspect).
   A method of communicating electronically about accounts where, for each of two separate accounts held at separate third parties, account information is stored retrievably by unique identifier and a public key is associated with that identifier; a message containing an instruction and the identifier is digitally signed with the corresponding private key; the message is authenticated using the public key found via the identifier; and on success the instruction is executed against the account so identified.

3. Central Key Authority (CKA) database maintenance (third aspect).
   Covers maintaining a central record for a user that holds the user's device public key plus third-party account identifiers, each identifying (to the respective third party) an account of the user that the third party has associated with that public key — enabling one key/device to be used across many accounts and institutions.

4. Device security-feature database method (fourth aspect's database variant).
   A method of managing a database that, for each of many signature-generating devices, records the device's public key together with that device's security features (tamper-resistance, key-inaccessibility, manufacturing history, etc.), associated with the public key; and then supplying those security features to a recipient of a message signed by a particular device — underpinning the patent's dynamic risk analysis of a given transaction.

The specification also describes a fourth aspect (applying dynamic risk analysis to a specific message to judge the probability the signature was fraudulently originated before executing the instruction) and a second aspect (associating multiple accounts with the same public key, the "person-centric device").

What I could not confirm (explicit uncertainty)

• Complete granted claim set (exact number and wording of independent claims) — not retrieved.
• Verbatim abstract field — not retrieved.
• Any 2026 CAFC activity — nothing found; no docket number, appeal number, panel, or opinion can be attributed to this patent on the evidence I gathered.
• Any IPR/PGR or district-court litigation tied specifically to 7,047,416 — searches returned only generic patent-litigation boilerplate and citation tables, not case records for this patent. I did not locate an authoritative docket, so I am not asserting that none exists.

If you need claim-by-claim text or a docket confirmation, the authoritative next steps would be the USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Public Search document viewer for application 09/923,179, and a docket query on the Federal Circuit's own CM/ECF or CourtListener for the patent number as a keyword.

I'll search for litigation involving US Patent 7047416 across patent litigation sources.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me search litigation-specific databases more directly.

Litigation Search Results for US Patent 7,047,416

Based on my searches across patent litigation sources (including the Unified Patents portal, Docket Alarm references, PACER/CAFC-style docket aggregations, and Google Patents' litigation metadata), I was unable to identify any known litigation involving US Patent 7,047,416 (the "Account-based digital signature (ABDS) system" patent).

What I searched

• Generic litigation queries for the number "7047416" / "7,047,416"
• Defendant/plaintiff-oriented queries ("patent lawsuit defendant," "infringement complaint")
• The Unified Patents litigation/PTAB portals
• Assignee-based queries (First Data Corp; inventors Lynn Henry Wheeler / Anne M. Wheeler)
• Case-number/district-court docket queries

What the searches actually surfaced (none is litigation for this patent)

The results returned the patent's own bibliographic/ prosecution record rather than any court case:

Additionally, the search results showed citations to the patent in other patents (e.g., US 2013/0246342, US 2002/0157029, WO 2014/150277 A3, DE 69311331 T2, NO 975670) and the related First Data family (US 7,017,691; US 6,978,369; US 7,127,606; US 7,941,664). These are patent-to-patent citations and priority linkages — not litigation.

Important caveats

1. This is a negative finding, not a certification of non-litigation. My search was limited in depth and did not exhaustively query paywalled dockets (PACER full-text, Lex Machina, Docket Navigator, RPX). A patent can be asserted in a case without the number surfacing prominently in general web results.
2. This patent has been expired since 2020-12-22, which reduces the likelihood of recent assertion, but does not preclude earlier litigation (e.g., during its enforceable life, 2006–2020).
3. It belongs to a large First Data / Wheeler ABDS patent family (the "VS Applications," TADS, person-centric ABDS variants). It is possible that related family members — rather than this exact patent — were the subject of any known disputes.

Recommendation

For a definitive answer, the following should be checked directly:

• PACER (Civil case search by patent number) for D. Del., E.D. Tex., N.D. Ill., and other frequent venues.
• Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist), searching by patent number.
• Docket Alarm / Lex Machina / Docket Navigator for a patent-number-based docket query.

If you can share access credentials to PACER or a commercial docket tool, or confirm which assignee/venue you suspect, I can refine the search. As of the sources reachable in this session, no litigation involving US 7,047,416 could be verified.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" block against live sources before writing the analysis.

Let me probe a few more angles — CBM filings against First Data's ABDS family, and any PTAB docket hits.

PTAB / AIA Trial Analysis — US 7,047,416 B2 ("Account-based digital signature (ABDS) system")

Canonical source control: The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied in this prompt (USPTO Open Data Portal ingest) is treated as authoritative. It returns no AIA trial proceedings. I ran four independent live searches (patent-number queries, petitioner/assignee queries, CBM-specific queries, and a Google Patents/PTAB-proceedings cross-check) and found nothing that contradicts it. The only hits were the patent's own bibliographic record, its citation neighborhoods, and generic PTAB practice documents — no petition, no institution decision, no FWD, no CAFC appeal.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 7,047,416: 0. Breakdown by status: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0.

Bottom-line defensive posture: This is not "the patent was tested and survived" (which would be bad news) and it is not "claims 1–5 are canceled" (which would be good news). It is the third, less-discussed scenario: the patent's validity has never been adjudicated at the PTAB at all, so there is no claim-level disposition to lean on and no § 315(e) estoppel to exploit. A defendant must build its invalidity case from scratch — but gets an unusually strong non-PTAB exit ramp instead (see Strategic summary: the patent expired 2020-12-22, putting nearly all realistic new suits outside the § 286 damages window).

Per-proceeding detail

None available. There is no proceeding number to report, and I will not manufacture one.

The requested per-proceeding template cannot be populated because no petition was ever filed that reached the ODP docket for this patent. For the record, the fields would read as follows:

(none) — No petitioner v. First Data Corporation

• Type: n/a — neither IPR, PGR, nor CBM
• Filed: n/a
• Status: n/a
• Judge panel: n/a
• Petition grounds: n/a
• Institution decision: n/a
• Final Written Decision: n/a
• Settlement / termination: n/a
• Appeal: n/a (no FWD existed to appeal; CourtListener shows no appeal tied to this patent number)
• Defensive value: The defensive value of this proceeding is zero, because it does not exist. The corollary is that the absence of any adjudication means no claim of the '416 patent — independent or dependent — has been canceled, narrowed, or held unpatentable in an AIA trial. Do not let a demand letter imply otherwise, and do not assume a prior-IPR roadmap exists for the family.

Why the proceeding count is zero (structural, not accidental)

Three program-design facts explain the null docket and matter for strategy:

1. No PGR was ever legally possible. The '416 patent claims priority to 1998-11-09 and was filed 2001-08-06 — a pre-AIA application. Post-Grant Review under 35 U.S.C. §§ 321–329 applies only to patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. PGR was off the table from day one. (35 U.S.C. § 321, Google Patents record)
2. The CBM window is now shut. The AIA § 18 transitional CBM program sunset on 2020-09-16, and the patent itself expired 2020-12-22. Even though this patent (cryptographic account authentication, financial-services specification) would have been a plausible CBM candidate, CBM is no longer an available vehicle for anyone — the program no longer exists.
3. IPR is available-in-theory but now nearly pointless. IPR became available 2012-09-16 and was technically available against this patent even after expiry (the Board does institute on expired patents, construing claims under Phillips). But with the patent expired since 2020-12-22, the economic case for an IPR collapsed years ago — which is the most likely reason none was filed. This is a negative finding with a strong structural explanation, not a data gap.

Caveat on my verification: my searches did not exhaustively query paywalled docket tools (Lex Machina, Docket Navigator, PACER full-text, RPX) or a raw PTAB-API pull. A petition filed and terminated before ODP ingest could in principle be missing. If you have access to those, run the patent number directly. I am reporting the ODP-canonical answer as the default, per the source hierarchy, and I found nothing live that overrides it.

Strategic summary

Claim-status picture: everything is UNTESTED. Unlike a patent that has been through IPR — where you can say "claim 1 is canceled, claims 6–9 survived as amended" — the '416 patent stands exactly as issued on 2006-05-16. There are no canceled claims, no sustained claims, and no claim-level rulings whatsoever. Every claim is "untested." That cuts both ways: you get no free invalidity win from a prior FWD, but you also face no prosecution-history-style narrowing or claim-amendment record generated by a PTAB trial. The specification's own claim 1, as issued, is a method of authenticating an account holder by an account authority that begins with ab initio setup steps ("as part of setup of an account of the account holder…"), which is at least a candidate for early-claim-construction and § 101 / § 112 attack — but that is a district-court or examiner argument, not something a prior AIA trial resolved.

Estoppel landscape: empty, which is a rare advantage for a defendant. Because no petitioner ever reached a final written decision, no § 315(e)(2) estoppel has attached to anyone, and no real-party-in-interest or privy of a prior petitioner is barred from anything. Practically, the entire universe of § 102/§ 103 prior art remains available to you in district court and — if the math ever justified it — in a fresh IPR. Contrast the usual posture, where you inherit a predecessor petitioner's estoppel footprint. Here, your prior-art search is bounded only by § 315(b)'s one-year clock (which is moot for an expired patent with no live service) and by § 102/§ 103 itself. There are no "already-argued" grounds to avoid and no procedural trap waiting from a prior trial.

Pattern signals: none, and the family context explains why. No serial petitioner, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents or RPX-filed challenge is visible in the ODP docket or in Unified Patents' own patent pages for this family), and no aggressive patent-owner appeal campaign — because there was never a trial to appeal. The '416 patent is one node in a large First Data / Wheeler ABDS family (US 6,978,369; US 7,017,691; US 7,127,606; US 7,941,664; US 7,143,284; US 7,096,354; etc.). It is plausible that any real-world validity fight in this family, if one ever occurred, targeted a sibling rather than the '416. Cross-checking siblings' docket histories is the single highest-value follow-up if the family is being asserted against you. This is consistent with the previously generated Litigation Summary, which likewise found no verified litigation on this exact patent — the two negative findings reinforce each other, though both carry the same "not a certification" caveat.

Recommended next steps

1. Tell yourself the truth about what the null docket means. There is no FWD to link to and no disposition to quote. Do not let a counterparty assert that the patent "has been upheld by the PTAB" — it has not been tested at the PTAB at all. Ask them, in writing, to identify any AIA proceeding by number; there isn't one for this patent in the ODP record. Verify live via USPTO PTAB E2E / PTAB Center and the PTAB decisions search, and cross-check CourtListener for any CAFC appeal.

2. Lead with the calendar, not with invalidity. The patent expired 2020-12-22 (term-adjusted). Under 35 U.S.C. § 286 there is a six-year damages lookback from the date the complaint is filed. Because all potential infringement ended on 2020-12-22, a complaint filed after roughly 2026-12-22 can recover nothing — the six-year window will contain no infringing acts. As of today (2026-09-29) that door is closing in under three months. For any demand letter or suit received now, § 286 is a cheaper and faster dispositive argument than any prior-art challenge. (Laches is unavailable post-SCA Hygiene v. First Quality, so § 286 is the right vehicle.)

3. If you must prepare an invalidity defense regardless (e.g., the demand covers 2014–2020 conduct and suit is filed promptly), build it without any PTAB anchor: run a full pre-1998/2001 prior-art search on the account-based signature architecture (account number → stored public key, no certificate), target the § 101/§ 112 exposure of the setup-step framing in independent claim 1, and preserve the IPR option only if the dollar exposure justifies the filing fee — noting that IPR against an expired patent proceeds under Phillips construction, which changes your claim-construction strategy.

4. Escalate the family check. Search elder siblings (US 6,978,369; US 7,017,691; US 7,127,606; US 7,941,664) and the First Data patent portfolio in Lex Machina/Docket Alarm for any CBM, IPR, or district-court docket. If a sibling was challenged and its claims were canceled or narrowed, that record may supply useful collateral-estoppel-adjacent arguments or claim-construction positions even though it does not touch the '416 directly.

Explicit uncertainty statement: I could not verify the absence of a long-since-terminated petition using only open web sources, and I will not state that none ever existed with certainty. What I can state with confidence, sourced to the ODP-derived block and corroborated by live search, is that no AIA trial proceeding on US 7,047,416 is on file today, and no proceeding number for this patent can be identified. Treat any claim of a prior PTAB outcome on this patent as unsubstantiated until a proceeding number is produced.

I'll research the assignment record for US 7047416 across USPTO Assignment Center and related sources.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US Patent 7,047,416 B2

Patent: US 7,047,416 B2 — "Account-based digital signature (ABDS) system"
App. No.: 09/923,179 (filed 2001-08-06) · Priority: 1998-11-09 (parent 09/189,159) · Granted: 2006-05-16 · Status: Expired – Lifetime, adjusted expiration 2020-12-22

Methodology note / data gap up front. The USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) is a JavaScript application that does not expose record text to plain web retrieval, so I could not scrape reel/frame rows, correspondents, or execution dates directly for this patent. The reel/frame numbers below are taken from Google Patents' legal-events records for US 7,047,416 and cross-checked against the identical bulk recordings that surface on sibling First Data patents in the same family (US 7,246,740; US 7,580,857; US 8,672,216). First Data recorded its 2007 and 2010 security agreements as single blanket filings covering many patents at one reel/frame, so the same reel/frame appears across the family. I flag each item's verification status rather than presenting inferred values as confirmed. Correspondent-of-record data could not be recovered and I will not invent it.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check: The specific "all inventors left the assignee within 12 months of filing" signal is not determinable from the assignment record — inventors do not appear again in the ownership chain (there are no later inventor-to-third-party assignments), which is normal for an employer-owned patent. The inventors also appear as the named inventors on the entire First Data / Wheeler "ABDS + TADS + VS Applications" family (e.g., US 6,978,369; US 6,789,189; US 7,087,533; US 7,096,354; US 7,127,606; US 7,941,664), all assigned to First Data — a coherent corporate R&D grouping, not a fire-sale pattern.

Original assignee

First Data Corporation (Greenwood Village, Colorado; Delaware corporation).

• Line of business: Payments processing / merchant acquiring / card-issuer processing — an operating company, not a licensing vehicle. The ABDS/authentication family is part of First Data's electronic-commerce and authentication R&D (the patent cross-references the "VS Applications," "TADS," and person-centric ABDS filings of 2000–2001).
• Product embodiment: First Data was the operating entity in this space; however, the sources reviewed do not document a specific commercial product that shipped with a claim chart against US 7,047,416, so I will not assert product-embodiment as fact. What is certain is that First Data was a large operating payments company, not a shell.
• Current status: Acquired. First Data was taken private in the 2007 KKR LBO (~$29B, closed September 2007 — the source of the 2007 Credit Suisse security agreement), relisted in 2015, and then acquired by Fiserv, Inc. The Fiserv/First Data merger closed July 29, 2019 — which is exactly the effective date of the Credit Suisse lien release below. No assignment of this patent to Fiserv is recorded; First Data Corporation survives as a Fiserv subsidiary and remains the recorded owner. Google Patents lists "First Data Corp" as current assignee.

Assignment timeline

The chain contains one true ownership transfer (inventors → First Data) followed only by security interests and their releases — i.e., the patent never changed corporate hands. Reel/frame noted with verification status.

• 2001-08-06 (recorded; execution date not captured) — Reel not recovered

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest
  • Assignor: Lynn Henry Wheeler; Anne M. Wheeler
  • Assignee: First Data Corporation
  • Correspondent: not retrievable (data gap)
  • Context: original inventor → employer assignment; the only genuine ownership change in the chain.

• 2007-10-19 (effective) / recorded 2007-10-31 — Reel 020045/0165

  • Conveyance: Security Agreement (collateral grant; not an ownership transfer)
  • Assignor: First Data Corporation and subsidiary grantors (CardService International, FundsXpress, and others)
  • Assignee: Credit Suisse, Cayman Islands Branch, as Collateral Agent
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: securitization — collateral for the Credit Agreement dated 2007-09-24 in connection with the KKR take-private. (Reel 020045/0165 confirmed on sibling First Data patents; the identical event appears in US 7,047,416's legal events.)

• 2010-08-20 (effective) / recorded 2010-11-17 — Reel 025368/0183

  • Conveyance: Security Agreement (collateral grant)
  • Assignor: DW Holdings, Inc.; First Data Resources, Inc. (n/k/a First Data Resources, LLC); FundsXpress Financial Networks, Inc.; et al.
  • Assignee: Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., as Collateral Agent
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: securitization/refinancing of the First Data credit facilities.

• 2010-12-17 (effective) / recorded 2011-01-31 — Reel 025719/0590

  • Conveyance: Security Agreement (amended-and-restated collateral grant)
  • Assignor: same First Data grantor group
  • Assignee: Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., as Collateral Agent
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: securitization — companion/refinanced lien.

• 2019-07-29 (effective) / recorded 2019-07-30 — Reel 049902/0919

  • Conveyance: Release by Secured Party (lien release; not an ownership transfer)
  • Assignor (secured party): Credit Suisse AG, Cayman Islands Branch
  • Releasee: First Data Corporation and the grantor group
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: release of collateral — effective the day the Fiserv/First Data merger closed. (Reel 049902/0919 confirmed on siblings US 7,246,740 / US 7,580,857. A separate Credit Suisse release at reel 049899/0001 covers a different First Data patent sub-group such as US 8,672,216 — note the two should not be conflated.)

• 2019-08-19 (recorded) — Reels 050090/0060, 050091/0474, 050094/0455

  • Conveyance: Termination and Release of Security Interest in Patent Rights
  • Assignor (secured party): Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.
  • Releasees: First Data Corporation; TeleCheck International, Inc.; FundsXpress Financial Network, Inc. (and related grantors)
  • Correspondent: not retrievable
  • Context: release of collateral following the merger/refinancing. ⚠️ The Google Patents events show three 2019-08-19 release entries for this patent; my mapping of each entity to its exact reel/frame (050090/0060 vs 050091/0474 vs 050094/0455) is inferred from sibling patents and is not fully verified per-entity.

Bottom line on the timeline: everything after 2001 is a security interest or a release of one. The patent's ownership stayed inside First Data (now Fiserv) for its entire life.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7047416
    1998 : Priority application filed
    2001 : Application filed
         : Inventors assign to First Data
    2006 : Patent issued
    2007 : Security interest to Credit Suisse
    2010 : Wells Fargo security agreement
    2011 : Second Wells Fargo security agreement
    2019 : Credit Suisse release
         : Wells Fargo releases security interest
    2020 : Patent expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. There is no assignment to any "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" entity. The only ownership assignee is First Data Corporation; every other recorded party is a lender acting as collateral agent (Credit Suisse 020045/0165; Wells Fargo 025368/0183, 025719/0590). No single-purpose LLC ever appears.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No assignee or appointee in the chain (First Data Corporation; Credit Suisse; Wells Fargo) appears on any public NPE list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Round Rock, etc.). This is consistent with the litigation section's negative finding of no suits on this patent.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear (data gap). Correspondent-of-record could not be retrieved for any entry (see methodology note). I can neither confirm nor deny a recurring attorney; this signal is unresolved, not negative.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. There are no consecutive assignments through chained LLCs. The 2019 entries are releases out of a security interest, not transfers.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No litigation naming this patent was found, so no pre-suit assignment exists to flag.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. First Data's 2007 event was an LBO/refinancing (Credit Suisse 020045/0165), not a bankruptcy. Its 2019 event was an acquisition by Fiserv (an all-stock, solvent merger), not a Chapter 7/11 sale.

7. Privateering — not present. No operating-company-to-NPE transfer; the operating company (First Data/Fiserv) retained the patent.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. Ownership ends with the operating company itself.

Signal count: 0 strong, 0 weak (one unresolved data gap on correspondent).

Verdict

Insufficient data — with the substantive caveat that this is a clean-chain result, not an inability to find records.

Justification. The assignment record for US 7,047,416 contains exactly one ownership transfer — the inventors' assignment to First Data Corporation (recorded 2001-08-06) — after which the patent is encumbered only by lender liens at reel 020045/0165 (Credit Suisse, eff. 2007-10-19), reels 025368/0183 (eff. 2010-08-20) and 025719/0590 (eff. 2010-12-17) (Wells Fargo), and then released at reels 049902/0919 (eff. 2019-07-29) and 050090/0060 / 050091/0474 / 050094/0455 (2019-08-19). Because no ownership change beyond the original assignment is recorded, the rubric's post-issuance NPE/aggregator analysis has nothing to bite on — hence "Insufficient data" (the "only the original assignment" prong). Substantively, every signal tests negative: the patent stayed with an operating payments company (First Data, now a Fiserv subsidiary), was never transferred to an NPE or shell, and never reached a defensive aggregator; the lien-release dates line up precisely with the KKR-financing unwind and the Fiserv/First Data merger close of 2019-07-29, i.e., ordinary corporate finance — not assertion-driven ownership engineering. The only unresolved item is correspondent-of-record, which I could not obtain.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ → search by patent number 7047416 (same records indexed at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Confirm reel/frames 020045/0165, 025368/0183, 025719/0590, 049902/0919, 050090/0060, 050091/0474, 050094/0455, and pull the correspondent field for each.

Flagged inconsistencies / limitations

• No contradiction with the prior litigation section: its negative litigation finding is consistent with my finding of zero NPE/asserter signals.
• Unverified items, stated as such: (a) correspondent-of-record for every entry — not recovered; (b) the original 2001 assignment's execution date and reel/frame — not recovered; (c) the entity-to-reel mapping of the three 2019-08-19 Wells Fargo releases — inferred from sibling patents; (d) the two Credit Suisse 2019 releases (049902/0919 vs 049899/0001) cover different patent sub-groups and were kept separate.
• Do not treat the security-interest entries as ownership changes — they are collateral grants; the only ownership assignee throughout is First Data Corporation.

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 7,047,416. Let me run several targeted searches.

I need the actual "References Cited" list from the patent's front page. Let me try to retrieve it directly.

I ran out of tool steps mid-research, so let me give you what I actually verified plus an explicit statement of what I could not retrieve.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 7,047,416 B2

Strict-ID note first. Everything below keys to the literal number 7047416 / US 7,047,416 B2. I encountered one Google Patents data-table artifact in which a 1916 brake-beam patent (US 1,175,575 A) displays "US7047416A" in its priority-application table — that is a Google Patents rendering/mismatch bug, not a second patent bearing this number. I am not auto-correcting it, but I am also not treating it as relevant art.

1. What I could and could not retrieve (read this before using the list)

Consequence: I cannot present the '416's own (56) U.S.-patent list as fact. I can present (a) the applicant-cited NPL references that are the '416's citation record, and (b) the U.S. patent references from the parent US 6,820,202, which shares the same specification and priority chain (the '416 is a CIP of '159). I label (b) as a proxy set, not as the '416's own list. Treat the numbering below as provisional.

2. The '416's citation record — applicant-cited non-patent literature (verified)

These were cited by the applicant (not the examiner) in the '416 file, per uspto.report:

Assessment: The applicant-cited NPL is background/enabling art, not § 102 anticipation of the core ABDS claims. None of it discloses the two-step "account authority binds the sender's public key to the account identifier at setup, then authenticates solely with that stored key" architecture.

3. U.S. patent references — proxy set from parent US 6,820,202 (label carefully)

Source: the granted front page of US 6,820,202 B1 (parent, same spec/priority). Dates below are as printed on that page (one OCR artifact noted). Descriptions are marked by confidence; a few I could not verify and I say so rather than guess.

Additionally, the published application of the '416's sibling (US 2002/0129248 A1) carries a cited-reference set including US 4,405,829; US 4,868,877; US 4,865,?…; US 5,563,946 A; US 5,659,616 A (Certco, "Method for securely using digital signatures in a commercial cryptographic system"); US 5,970,147 A (Micron, "System and method for configuring and registering a cryptographic device"); US 6,081,551/6,104,815; US 6,154,543 A (Hush, public-key cryptosystem with roaming user); US 6,192,130 B1 (Entrust, trust-authority transfer); US 6,202,151 B1 (biometric certificates); US 6,233,565 B1 (Saranac, internet financial transactions with evidence of payment); US 5,881,?…; US 6,081,?…; US 5,636,280 A (dual-key reflexive encryption) — sourced from the Unified Patents family page. These are family citations, again not confirmed as the '416's own (56) list, but they are the kind of art the examiner considered in this family.

4. My substantive § 102 assessment

Bottom line: On the record I could retrieve, no cited reference appears to be a single-reference § 102 anticipation of the '416's core independent claims. The cited patent art is classic 1976–1996 public-key/digital-signature material — RSA, Diffie–Hellman, DSA, Fiat–Shamir, Fischer's PK/signature cryptosystem — plus PIN/access-control and funds-transfer art. That art supplies the building blocks (asymmetric key pair, signing a digest with a private key, verifying with a public key, entity authentication), but none of it discloses the patent's distinguishing step: the account authority itself, at account setup, associates the sender's public key with the account's unique identifier, and thereafter authenticates using only that stored key — with no third-party-issued certificate.

• Closest single-reference art: US 4,868,877 (Fischer) — binds public key to signed-message certification, but through a certification hierarchy, i.e., the CADS model the '416 criticizes. Best § 102 arg on signature-verification elements; fails on the account-bound-key limitation.
• Best § 102 candidate on the "signature algorithm" elements: US 5,231,668 (Kravitz/DSA) and US 4,405,829 (RSA).
• Best § 102 candidate on account-transaction elements: US 5,453,601 (Rosen) and, from the family list, US 6,233,565 B1 (Saranac) — both address authenticating then executing financial instructions, but via account number + PIN/certificate rather than account-bound public key.
• All U.S. patent references here are § 102(a)/(b)-eligible by date (all pre-date the 1998-11-09 priority date), so the § 102 predicate is satisfied; the failure is on disclosure, not date.
• The genuinely dangerous § 102 art is the inventors' own earlier disclosure — the parent Ser. No. 09/189,159 (filed 1998-11-09; granted as US 6,820,202; published as US 2002/0032860 A1). Because the '416 is a CIP of '159, any claim of the '416 that is not supported by the '159 disclosure and therefore does not earn the 1998-11-09 priority date is exposed to the '159/'202 disclosure under § 102(e). This is the single most significant § 102 exposure in this family, and it is an intra-family issue, not a third-party-reference issue. (Confidence: high on the CIP relationship — confirmed by the US 7,941,664 continuity paragraph: "09/923,179 … now U.S. Pat. No. 7,047,416, which is a continuation-in-part of … 09/189,159 … now U.S. Pat. No. 6,820,202.")

Claim-mapping caveat: I could not retrieve the granted claim set, so I cannot give you claim-by-claim § 102 charts with numbers beyond claim 1. Any claim numbers I give would be inferred and should not be relied on. You previously flagged this gap too — it still stands, and it is the binding constraint on rigorous § 102 claim mapping here.

5. Flags / contradictions to note

1. No contradiction with your prior sections on bibliographic data (filing 2001-08-06, grant 2006-05-16, priority 1998-11-09, First Data). The Limestone and Google Patents records agree.
2. New fact not in your prior sections: the '416 has a child US 7,127,606 B2 (from divisional 10/095,367) and a grandchild US 7,941,664 B2 ("Account-based digital signature (ABDS) system using biometrics"). This matters for prior-art/§ 102 analysis across the family and for any obviousness-type double-patenting exposure among the family members.
3. Google Patents artifact (US 1,175,575 showing "US7047416A" as an application number) — recorded, not corrected, disregarded as prior art.
4. OCR artifacts carried forward: "Shamli et al." = Shamir; "5,018,196 A 13/1992" = 1992 date typo; "Content Authority Digital Signature" in the fetched spec = the same CADS acronym used elsewhere. I did not silently fix these.
5. Your prior sections correctly reported no verified 2026 CAFC activity; nothing in this search changes that.

6. What I recommend to close the gap

The only way to produce a defensible, claim-by-claim § 102 chart is to pull the '416's own front page (56) block and the granted claims, directly from:

• USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter document viewer for application 09/923,179 (the file wrapper will also show which references were actually applied by the examiner in rejections, vs. merely listed), and
• the granted PDF front page for US 7,047,416 B2.

Until that is done, treat Section 3 as a proxy citation set and Section 4's § 102 conclusions as provisional — with the one robust conclusion being that this family's cited art is foundational crypto/PKI material and the real § 102 pressure point is the parent '159/'202 disclosure relative to the CIP-added claims.

I'll ground this analysis in the actual prior-art record for US 7,047,416, then build the § 103 combinations. Let me pull the cited-references list and any admitted prior art.

Obviousness Analysis — US 7,047,416 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Analyst note on evidence base. The authoritative full text you supplied (Google Patents fetch) contains the Abstract/summary, Definitions, and Figures list, but it does not include the "References Cited" tables — the fetch truncates before them. I therefore went and retrieved the cited-reference record from secondary sources (uspto.report grant page, the Unified Patents entry for the sibling ABDS publication US 2002/0129248 A1, and Google Patents family/citation listings). Everything below is tagged with its provenance and confidence. I have not verified the interior disclosure of any reference I did not fetch full text for; where I rely on a reference's title/assignee/date only, I say so.

A. Framework and the claim under test

Reconstructed element set of claim 1 (the model I test for obviousness):

• (P) A method of authenticating an account holder by an account authority;
• (a) as part of account setup, the account authority associates a public key of a public/private key pair with a unique account identifier of the account (stored in the authority's account database);
• (b) receiving an electronic communication containing the account identifier and a digital signature for a message regarding the account;
• (c) authenticating the message using the digital signature and the public key located via the account identifier — i.e., message authentication only, without recourse to a third-party certificate;
• (d) upon successful authentication, performing the instruction contained in the message.

The patent's own Summary characterizes step (c) as the point of novelty: "only conducting message authentication using the digital signature … and the public key associated with the account identifier."

PHOSITA: a person with a bachelor's degree in CS/EE and ~2 years' experience in applied cryptography/electronic-payment systems, familiar (as of 1998) with RSA/DSA signatures, hashing (SHA‑1), X.509/PKIX certificate practice, smart-card private-key storage, and ATM/POS account-record architectures.

B. The prior-art universe actually on the record

B.1 Applicant-admitted prior art (highest-probative, no §102 date proof needed)

The Background of the Invention (in your authoritative fetch) is a detailed admission of the "CADS" system — the Applicant's own characterization of the state of the art. Under MPEP § 2129 this is usable as admitted prior art (AAPA). It expressly teaches:

1. Digital-signature origination = hash the message (SHA‑1) + encrypt the digest with the signer's private key (Background, citing FIPS PUB 180‑1 and FIPS PUB 186‑2);
2. Factor A entity authentication — verifying the signature confirms the sender possessed the private key;
3. Binding a public key to a person's identity via a third-party Certification Authority (X.509 digital certificate, "the electronic counterparts to driver licenses, passports…");
4. The merchant then submits the account information to the relevant financial institution for approval (FIG. 1, ref. 112);
5. The recognized drawbacks: certificate expiration, revocation only via CRL cross-reference, and the burden/liability of the CA.

The AAPA therefore already discloses (P), (b)-type messaging, (d), and the "message authentication using a digital signature and a public key" step — but binds the key to an identity/certificate, not to the account identifier, and does not perform the binding at account setup by the account authority.

B.2 U.S. patent references in the family's cited-reference record

Retrieved from the Unified Patents entry for US 2002/0129248 A1 (the sibling ABDS publication) — provenance: Unified Patents portal; confidence that these overlap with the references cited in 09/923,179: moderate-high, but not confirmed against the '416 file itself:

Unverified bonus candidate: US 5,937,396 (Konya), "Method for digital signature authentication of pin-less debit card account transactions" (Aug. 10, 1999). It surfaced only in the "References Cited" list of an unrelated later patent (Justia entry for US 9,418,501), not in the '416 record I retrieved. If it in fact pre-dates and is properly citeable, it is the single most on-point U.S. reference (debit-card account + digital-signature authentication). Flagging, not asserting.

B.3 Non-patent literature in the '416 cited-reference record

Retrieved from uspto.report's grant page — these are shown as "cited by other," i.e., largely Applicant/attorney-supplied prior art or post-allowance submissions, not necessarily examiner-applied:

C. Combination analysis

C.1 Primary combination — renders claim 1 obvious

AAPA (CADS/PKI, as admitted in the Background) + US 5,970,147 (Micron, registering a cryptographic device with a server) + US 5,961,956 (Signals, key distribution over a non-secure network).

Why the POSITA would combine: (i) the AAPA itself identifies the CA's expiration/revocation/liability as problems to be solved — a classic "known problem in the field" motivation (KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007)); (ii) the account authority already has the pre-existing, trusted, pre-contractual relationship with the account holder that a CA is artificially created to supply — so moving the key-binding function to the party that already maintains the account record is an efficiency-driven, predictable design choice; (iii) device-key registration with servers was a known, off-the-shelf technique (US 5,970,147; US 5,961,956); (iv) Moreau (Mar. 1998) supplies contemporaneous, explicit industry motivation to say "no" to CA-based public-key infrastructures.

C.2 Alternative primary combination (equally viable)

AAPA + US 5,778,072 (smart-card private-key integration) + US 4,405,829 (RSA) + US 4,408,203 (Mastercard EFT).

• US 5,778,072 supplies the "device that securely holds a private key and signs, with the host/counterparty supplying the message" architecture that the ABDS spec relies on (the ATM/IC-card embodiment of FIGS. 6–9).
• US 4,408,203 supplies the account-indexed EFT authorization model.
• Combining these with the AAPA's signature-verification-by-public-key yields every element of claim 1.

C.3 Dependent-claim features (as described in the Specification)

D. Critical date caveats

1. The NPL is a mixed-date record. Several cited items post-date the asserted Nov. 9, 1998 priority but pre-date the Aug. 6, 2001 filing — notably: TCPA (Jan. 2000), NIST SP 800‑21 (Nov. 1999), VeriSign PKI (1999/2001), RSA Cryptography Standard (Jan. 2001), Apostolopoulos (Jul/Aug 2000). Under § 102(b) with a 2001 filing date these qualify; with a 1998 priority date they do not. Which set applies turns on whether every claim element finds § 112 support in the 1998 parent — a priority/§ 112 question that the face of this record does not resolve. If the ABDS claim set is only entitled to Aug. 6, 2001 for the security-profile/risk-analysis subject matter, the January 2000 TCPA document becomes squarely available and materially strengthens the obviousness case against those dependent claims.
2. § 103(c) common-ownership carve-out. The concurrently filed Wheeler applications incorporated by reference — PCT/US01/41587, PCT/US01/41562, PCT/US01/24572, PCT/US01/24563, Ser. Nos. 09/923,075 and 09/923,213 — share inventors/owner with the '416 patent. Under pre‑AIA § 103(c) (as amended by CREATE Act), such commonly-owned material cannot be used as prior art in an obviousness rejection. Any combination built on those sibling disclosures would be improper. This is important because the sibling "Person-Centric," "TADS," and "Gauging Risk" applications are the most topically identical documents in existence — precisely why they are unusable here.

E. KSR / general-principles overlay

• Predictable combination. Each claimed step (key registration, signature generation, lookup by identifier, verification, execute instruction) was individually known and each performs its known function; the combination is the predictable sum of its parts (KSR; Perfect Web Techs. v. InfoUSA).
• Design incentive / market pressure. The AAPA + Moreau supply the "known problem" (CA cost, expiration, CRL latency, CA liability) and the "known solution market" (server-registered device keys). In re Peterson / In re Kahn motivation may be found in "market forces."
• Obvious to try. Where the prior art discloses a finite number of identified, predictable solutions to the CA-dependency problem (keep CA; move trust to the transaction counterparty), a POSITA's choice of the latter is obvious to try (KSR).

F. The patentee's strongest rebuttals (which an obviousness holding must overcome)

1. Teaching away. If Moreau (Mar. 1998) is read (as its title literally says) as counseling against public-key cryptography generally, a respondent would argue it teaches away from the very signature-based approach the claim requires (In re Gurley; DePuy Spine v. Medtronic). The better reading, however, is that Moreau criticizes PKI/CA deployments — which supports rather than negates the motivation to retain signatures while shedding the CA.
2. Specific data architecture. The claim does not merely add a signature; it changes the index of the key store from identity/certificate to account identifier, and moves the binding to account setup by the account authority. A respondent can argue the entire CA-centric art (X.509, PKIX, VeriSign, Entrust, Boeyen) is structured around identity↔key binding and gives no reason to re-index by account — the asserted "hindsight" objection.
3. Asserted unexpected results / secondary considerations. Elimination of CRL lookups, ability to transmit unencrypted because no identity data is on the wire, and revocation handled by the pre-existing account-closing/relationship mechanism. Whether these rise to non-obviousness is an evidentiary question (nexus required).
4. Priority defense. If all claims are entitled to Nov. 9, 1998, the TCPA/FIPS‑190-era NPL portions lose § 102(b) status, weakening the security-profile dependent claims.

G. Bottom line

On the record I can assemble, the strongest § 103 case is AAPA (admitted CADS/PKI system) in view of one or more device-key-registration references (US 5,970,147 and/or US 5,961,956), optionally with US 5,778,072 + US 4,405,829 + US 4,408,203, and — for the multi-factor and security-profile dependent claims — FIPS PUB 190, US 6,202,151, US 5,887,131, and the Jan. 2000 TCPA document. The motivation is supplied by the Applicant's own admission of the CA's drawbacks plus Moreau's 1998 anti-PKI argument.

The single most vulnerable point is claim 1's re-indexing of the public-key store to the account identifier and moving key-binding to account setup. Whether that is an inventive contribution or merely "arranging old elements with each performing the same function" depends on facts I cannot yet verify from the record available to me.

H. Confidence and verification gaps (explicit)

• Confidence: High — that the AAPA/Background admission alone discloses elements (P), (b), (d), and the signature-verification mechanism.
• Confidence: Moderate — that US 5,970,147 and US 5,961,956 are cited references of the '416 record; I retrieved them from the sibling ABDS publication's reference list, not from the '416 file, because the supplied fetch omitted the "References Cited" tables. Verify against the front page of the '416 grant or USPTO PatentCenter for App. 09/923,179.
• Confidence: Low/None — the exact wording and numbering of the granted claims; the verbatim Abstract; whether US 5,937,396 (Konya) appears in the '416 record; and whether any reference's interior says what its title implies. I did not fetch full text for US 5,961,956, US 5,970,147, US 5,778,072, US 4,408,203, US 6,202,151, US 5,887,131, or US 5,659,616.
• Contradiction flagged: the earlier sections state a priority date of Nov. 9, 1998 as a CIP of Ser. No. 09/189,159 and recite a provisional Ser. No. 60/223,076 (Aug. 4, 2000). The authoritative Google Patents fetch confirms only the 1998‑11‑09 prior-art date and shows a Mar. 11, 2002 continuation (US 7,127,606). I could not independently confirm the 60/223,076 provisional from the authoritative text. Treat the provisional claim as unverified; it matters because it affects which 1999–2001 NPL is § 102(b) art.

Recommended next steps to convert this into a defensible rejection: (1) pull the granted claim set and the front-page "References Cited" from the '416 image file at PatentCenter; (2) fetch full text of US 5,961,956 and US 5,970,147 to confirm they teach server-side device-key registration; (3) confirm the § 112 support date for each claim so the applicable § 102(b) art window is fixed.