US 7793355

I'll research US 7,793,355 across patent databases and litigation dockets.

Let me dig into the litigation angle and the claim set.

Let me check for IPR/reexam activity and any CAFC appeals specifically naming the '355 patent.

US 7,793,355 — Research Summary

Scope note / confidence: Google Patents and Justia both returned this patent directly. I found no USPTO/PTAB or Federal Circuit 2026 proceeding that names U.S. 7,793,355 specifically, and I found no district-court docket asserting the '355 patent. I did not have access to a live CAFC docket system, so I cannot rule out a 2026 appeal involving it — treat that as unverified rather than negative.

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Bibliographic data

Family: The '355 is the U.S. parent of a continuation chain — US 8,302,185 (issued Oct. 30, 2012), US 2013/0007877, US 9,033,216, US 9,542,571, and US 10,474,841. Foreign counterparts include WO 2004/053618 A2, EP 1 573 473 A2, CA 2,509,358, CN 1748191, JP 4713156 B2, KR 100764585 B1.

Abstract (as issued)

A system and method of owner control of an electronic device. Owner identification information — such as data integrity and source authentication information — is stored on the device. Received owner control information is stored on the device where the integrity of that information is verified and/or the source is authenticated using the owner identification information. In one embodiment, the owner identification information comprises an owner signature private key. (Note: the abstract's phrasing "owner signature private key" is how it appears in the source document.)

Plain-language overview of the independent claim

Based on the claim text retrieved from Justia, the '355 appears to have one independent claim — claim 1 — with claims 2–17 depending directly from it. (The retrieved claim listing was truncated after claim 17, so I cannot fully exclude additional claims beyond that point.)

Claim 1 (method of owner control of electronic devices) — the device is "branded" with owner information in a first step, and then separately controlled later:

1. Receive owner information at the electronic device, where that owner information includes owner identification information, and the owner identification information includes source authentication information.
2. Receive owner control information at the electronic device at a different time than the owner information — a temporal separation that is an express limitation, not incidental. The owner control information is a description of functions or software applications the device is allowed to use.
3. Use the received owner identification information to check the integrity of the received owner control information.
4. Decide whether to use the received owner control information based on that integrity check.
5. The source authentication information exists to authenticate that the owner control information actually came from an owner of the electronic device.

In substance: claim 1 covers a two-phase enrollment/control architecture in which an untrusted or semi-trusted party (e.g., the user's own PC, or a delegated administrator) can later deliver usage policy, because the device can cryptographically verify both the policy's integrity and its origin against credentials locked in at branding time. The dependent claims add conventional fallbacks — data-integrity information embodied as a digital signature (claims 2, 3, 8–11, including symmetric and asymmetric keys), branding information, authorized source / party acting on behalf of the owner (claims 5–7), policy expressed as prohibitions or permitted-with-modification (claims 12, 13), and existence checks for owner information, owner control information, and a permissions list (claims 14–16).

Litigation / PTAB posture (what I actually found)

• The '355 is a family member of patents later asserted by Malikie Innovations Ltd. In Malikie Innovations Ltd. v. Nintendo Co. Ltd., No. 2:24-cv-01490-JLR (W.D. Wash., filed Sept. 17, 2024), Malikie asserted US 9,542,571 (owner application control, a descendant of the '355), along with US 8,115,731, US 8,610,397 and US 7,529,305. That case was terminated Dec. 3, 2025 on a Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(ii) stipulation of dismissal.
• Malikie's 2026 activity (per Unified Patents and CourtListener) centers on other patents — e.g., 12,395,899, 7,372,960, 10,778,989, and a Core Scientific/CoreWeave case, No. 2:25-cv-00519 (E.D. Tex.). I found no 2026 IPR, ex parte reexamination, or CAFC appeal identifying US 7,793,355.

Explicit uncertainties

• Only one independent claim verified. I confirmed claim 1 as independent and claims 2–17 as dependent; the source extract was truncated at claim 17, so a further independent claim cannot be excluded.
• No '355-specific litigation or 2026 PTAB/CAFC record located. Absence in my search results is not proof of absence; the CAFC 2026 docket I could not query directly.
• Assignee chain. The patent text itself lists only Research in Motion as original assignee; the Malikie Innovations / BlackBerry reassignments come from the Google Patents prosecution-history sidebar, which disclaims legal-accuracy guarantees.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 7793355. Let me start with several targeted searches.

The initial results are noisy — they reference unrelated patents ending in "335" (e.g., Gussin's '335, Tex. Instruments '335). Let me search with more specific terms.

Let me search more specifically for this patent in litigation contexts and in the Unified Patents portal.

Summary — Litigation involving US Patent 7,793,355

Bottom line: I found no litigation specifically asserting US Patent 7,793,355 ("System and method of owner control of electronic devices"). No district‑court complaint, no CAFC appeal, and no PTAB proceeding that I could confirm identifies this patent number as a patent‑in‑suit or challenged patent.

I want to be explicit that this is a negative finding based on the searches I ran, not a certification that no such case exists.

Sources checked and what they showed

Important caveat — heavy false‑positive contamination

The "335" string produces many unrelated patents whose numbers end in 335 or whose numbers contain those digits. Results I had to discard included:

• Gussin v. Nintendo of America — a different '335 patent (a joystick/drawing patent), not US 7,793,355.
• A Pennsylvania case referencing a Texas Instruments‑style '335 patent about tungsten/glue layers in semiconductor processing — unrelated.
• EpicRealm references to U.S. Pat. No. 6,415,335 — unrelated.
• U.S. Pat. No. 8,793,336 and similar (Mobile Data Technologies v. Samsung) — different number, different family.

None of these should be attributed to US 7,793,355.

Relevant contextual facts (ownership / monetization activity)

These bear on the likelihood of future litigation but are not confirmed suits on the '355 patent:

• Current assignee: Malikie Innovations Ltd. (assignment recorded June 2023 from BlackBerry Limited; original assignee Research In Motion Ltd.). Malikie is a subsidiary of Key Patent Innovations Ltd. ("KPI"), a patent‑monetization entity.

• Real parties‑in‑interest in Malikie PTAB matters are identified as Malikie Innovations Ltd. and Key Patent Innovations Ltd. (e.g., Patent Owner's Mandatory Notices in IPR2026‑00120 re U.S. Pat. No. 11,119,756, which references Malikie Innovations Ltd. v. Vivint Smart Home, Inc., No. 2:25‑cv‑00555‑JRG‑RSP, E.D. Tex., filed May 19, 2025).

• Malikie/KPI have filed numerous suits asserting other patents from the former BlackBerry/Certicom portfolio, including:

  • Malikie Innovations Ltd. v. Core Scientific, Inc., 2:25‑cv‑00519 (E.D. Tex.) — asserting U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,788,827; 10,284,370; 8,666,062; 7,372,960; 8,532,286.
  • Malikie Innovations Ltd. v. Bumble Inc., 1:25‑cv‑00258 (W.D. Tex.) — asserting U.S. Pat. Nos. 10,779,156; 8,334,847; 8,671,208; 8,688,152; 8,175,625; dismissed with prejudice by joint stipulation (Dec. 2025).
  • Malikie Innovations Ltd. v. SAP America, Inc., 2:25‑cv‑00946 (E.D. Tex.) — dismissed with prejudice Dec. 15, 2025.
  • Malikie Innovations Ltd. v. MARA Holdings, Inc., 7:25‑cv‑00222 (W.D. Tex.) — dismissed June 2026.
  • Malikie Innovations Ltd. v. Foundry Digital LLC, 7:25‑cv‑00567 (W.D. Tex.) — active as of 2026.
  • Malikie Innovations Ltd. v. Toyota Motor Corp., 2:26‑cv‑00469 (E.D. Tex.) — filed June 2026.
  • Malikie Innovations Ltd. v. American Honda Motor Co., 3:26‑cv‑01503 (N.D. Tex.) — filed May 11, 2026.

  In none of these did I see US 7,793,355 listed among the asserted patents.

Suggested next steps for a definitive answer

Because my searches are not exhaustive of PACER/derwent litigation databases, to confirm a true negative I recommend:

1. Direct PACER / CourtListener "party" and "patent number" docket searches for "7,793,355."
2. Unified Patents litigation portal and Lex Machina/Docket Navigator patent‑number lookups.
3. CAFC docket search for appeals referencing the patent.
4. A check of the patent's statutory‑disclaimer/reexamination certificate, since an adverse PTAB or reexam outcome could affect enforcement.

If you can tell me which product or defendant you suspect, I can run a narrower search — but as of the searches above, no litigation is known involving US 7,793,355.

I'll start by verifying the structured data against live sources.

The initial hits are for unrelated patents sharing the number "335." Let me search more precisely.

Let me query PTAB dockets and litigation databases directly.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 7,793,355: 0. No active proceedings, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained, no settlements, no institution denials — the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal, most recent ingest) returns an empty set, and my independent web checks surfaced no IPR/PGR/CBM naming this patent. Bottom line for a defendant: there is no canceled claim to point to and no PTAB precedent either way — but there is also zero § 315(e)(2) estoppel against anyone, so the prior-art field is wide open for a first-filer IPR, and the patent is unusually close to end-of-life (see Strategic summary).

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Proceedings

None to report. There is no proceeding number to list, and I will not invent one. The following format is preserved for completeness:

{No proceeding on file} — {n/a} v. {n/a}

• Type: n/a
• Filed: n/a
• Status: No AIA trial proceeding on file per the USPTO ODP structured data (AIA trial list). No IPR, PGR, or CBM identified via web search as of 2026-09-30.
• Judge panel: n/a
• Petition grounds: n/a
• Institution decision: n/a
• Final Written Decision: n/a
• Settlement / termination: n/a
• Appeal: n/a
• Defensive value: The patent is an untested target. Nothing in the PTAB record helps or hurts you; the entire § 102/§ 103 prior-art question is unresolved at the Board.

False positives you must not confuse with this patent

Patent-number-keyed searches for "'335" and "7,793,355" return unrelated patents. I flag these explicitly because a careless vendor search will hand you a false "claims canceled" hit:

• IPR2023-01396 (Banner Witcoff copy of the institution decision, bannerwitcoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/IPR2023-01396.pdf) concerns a different '335 patent — an on-body medical device/inserter patent (claim 1 recites "a plurality of recesses disposed on a periphery of the on body electronics unit housing"; Figures 17, 135). That is not US 7,793,355 (BlackBerry owner-control), and the Board there declined to find the recess limitation taught by Stafford/Raymond/Turner.
• C.D. Cal. No. 8:23-cv-… (docket gov.uscourts.cacd.689840), a Nikon '335 patent case (camera patent) with § 112 written-description/enablement attacks on claims 5, 7, 9 and prior art Takahashi, Matsunaga, Dickinson, Gowda. Also not this patent.

No PTAB proceeding on this patent came up. Search-result noise is the reason I am stating the negative affirmatively rather than staying silent.

Records I could not confirm (stated as uncertainty, not findings)

• The ODP AIA-trial dataset does not capture ex parte reexamination or pre-AIA inter partes reexamination. I found no evidence of either on US 7,793,355, but I could not verify the file wrapper contents; confirm via Patent Center → "Transactions"/"Reexamination" and the PTAB E2E reexam tab.
• I could not verify current or past district-court assertion history for this specific patent (my litigation search was cut short). The owner chain shows Research In Motion Ltd → BlackBerry Limited (2016-02-17) → Malikie Innovations Limited (2023-06-16 / 2023-06-19, nunc pro tunc). A 2023 transfer to a monetization entity is a strong assertion-risk signal, but I am not asserting that Malikie has sued on this patent — that would need a PACER/Docket Alarm/Lex Machina check.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is UNTESTED. No claim of US 7,793,355 has been canceled, confirmed, or even construed by the PTAB. There are no surviving-narrowed claims to point to and no dead claims to exploit. For a defendant this is a genuinely neutral PTAB posture — it neither arms you (no FWD to cite in an invalidity contention or on summary judgment) nor disarms you (no adverse FWD estoppel-locking the patent owner's constructions). Two structural facts matter more than the empty PTAB docket:

1. Priority and AIA regime. The patent claims benefit of provisional 60/432,610 (filed 2002-12-12), was filed 2003-12-10, and issued 2010-09-07. It is a pre-AIA patent. Consequently: PGR is unavailable (only patents filed on/after 2013-03-16), and CBM is both inapplicable and sunset — this is a device-security/access-control patent (G06F 21/30, 21/62, 21/64; H04L 9/32), not a "financial product or service" patent. IPR is your only AIA tool, and § 311(b) confines it to § 102/§ 103 over patents and printed publications only.

2. Term. Google Patents shows legal status Active, with an adjusted expiration of 2027-04-06 (an assumption, not a legal conclusion, and subject to PTA/terminal-disclaimer verification). As of 2026-09-30 that is roughly six months of remaining term. Run the economics before funding an IPR: a petition filed today would likely not reach an FWD before expiration, so the value of an IPR here is mostly (a) knock-out leverage/§ 101–style fee-shifting narratives in co-pending litigation, or (b) a stay in district court.

Estoppel landscape. Because no IPR has ever been instituted on this patent, no petitioner, real party in interest, or privy is subject to § 315(e)(2) estoppel. Every ground — including art you would expect a prior petitioner to have exhausted — remains available. The only constraints on a defendant today are (i) the § 315(b) one-year clock running from service of a complaint alleging infringement of this patent, and (ii) the practical fact that an untested patent means no free claim-construction wins at the Board. A prior-filed IPR by a co-defendant would not time-bar you (§ 315(b) is petitioner-specific), though discretionary-denial considerations could arise for a later follower — note that the Board's Fintiv-based denial practice was substantially curtailed under Director Vidal's June 2022 guidance, but this area has continued to shift; re-verify the discretionary-denial posture as of 2026-09-30.

Pattern signals. No repeat-petitioner pattern is possible (no petitions). No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) appears anywhere in the record. The one pattern signal that is present is on the patent-owner side: the rights moved out of an operating company (BlackBerry) into Malikie Innovations Limited in 2023, which historically correlates with assertion campaigns rather than defensive accumulation. Also note the continuation family — Google Patents records later filings claiming priority back to application 10/732,132, including US 8,302,185, US 9,033,216, US 9,542,571, and US 10,474,841. If you are facing a demand or suit on US 7,793,355, assume sibling filings covering the same owner-control disclosure may be in play, and price your license/defense against the family, not the single patent.

Why the absence of IPRs is itself a signal — but a weak one. Well-asserted software patents of this vintage normally attract IPRs; the empty docket suggests either limited assertion of this specific member of the family, art-difficulty, or defendants winning on other grounds. It does not suggest the patent is strong. Practically, the more likely explanation for a 2002-priority BlackBerry security patent surviving unchallenged is that the market moved off the accused functionality before monetization began.

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Recommended next steps

• Treat the PTAB docket as empty, not as adverse. There is no FWD to link to; do not let any third-party search vendor show you IPR2023-01396 or the Nikon C.D. Cal. case as "this patent." Both are different '335 patents (see above).
• Verify the file wrapper before relying on the empty docket. Pull the Patent Center record for US 7,793,355 and and check for ex parte reexamination or pre-AIA inter partes reexamination — neither appears in the ODP AIA-trial dataset. Links: USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov), PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/), and the patent's Google Patents page (https://patents.google.com/patent/US7793355/en).
• If you are a defendant and want a cancellation-style win, note that no claim is canceled. Any representation that "claims 1–5 have been canceled" would be fabricated. The only path to cancellation is a new IPR — yours.
• Calendar the § 315(b) deadline. One year from service of the first complaint alleging infringement of this patent. Because no IPR exists, there is no institution deadline, no oral hearing, and no statutory FWD date to track — the trial milestones start only if you file.
• Scope an IPR to § 102/§ 103 patents-and-printed-publications only. This patent's real vulnerabilities (written description/enablement; system-art/public-use prior art) are not IPR-eligible under § 311(b) and must be litigated in district court or the ITC; that is exactly the mix the C.D. Cal. Nikon defendant used in the unrelated '335 case, and it is the correct template here.
• Check the family and the chain. Docket-check Malikie Innovations Limited as plaintiff in 2023–2026 for assertions of US 7,793,355, US 8,302,185, US 9,033,216, US 9,542,571, and US 10,474,841 (CourtListener: https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%227%2C793%2C355%22). Confirm the 2027-04-06 adjusted expiration against Patent Center before you price any settlement or license — if it holds, the remaining term is about six months and should dominate your negotiating posture.
• This analysis is current as of 2026-09-30. Re-run the ODP/PTAB E2E check before filing anything; a petition may have been filed since the last ingest.

I'll research the assignment record for US 7,793,355 across the USPTO assignment database and cross-referencing sources.

I found confirmation that the BlackBerry→Malikie transfer was recorded. Let me try to pin down specific reel/frame entries and the correspondent of record.

Let me dig into the specific assignment records and correspondents.

US 7,793,355 — Ownership Chain & NPE Analysis

Verification caveat up front (important): I could reach the USPTO Assignment Center index and corroborating sources, but I was not able to retrieve the specific reel/frame numbers for this patent's own post-issuance records before my tool budget ran out. The assignment events below are grounded in (a) the Google Patents legal-events record for this patent, (b) the EP counterpart register for the same transaction, and (c) RPX / BlackBerry SEC reporting. Where a reel/frame is stated, it is stated only where documented; elsewhere I say "reel/frame not retrieved" rather than guess. Do not treat any reel/frame below as verified unless it is explicitly attributed.

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Inventors

Both are named on the originally filed application No. 10/732,132, filed 2003-12-10, claiming priority to provisional 60/432,610 (2002-12-12). The recorded 2004 inventor→company assignment (Google Patents legal events, recorded 2004-05-07, "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST … Assignors: CLARK, DAVID R.; LITTLE, HERBERT A.") confirms both were obligating to RIM at grant. Both inventors appear on numerous other RIM/BlackBerry communications and security filings, which is consistent with long-tenure RIM personnel rather than a hire-and-depart pattern. No evidence of an inventor-departure/fire-sale pattern — no 12-month post-filing departure signal is determinable from the record, and I found none.

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Original assignee

Research In Motion Limited (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), the issuer on the face of the granted patent.

• Business: RIM was the operating maker of the BlackBerry handheld line and its associated secure push-email infrastructure (BES). It is not an NPE — it had a substantial commercial product line at the relevant time (the 2002–2010 era), and the '355's subject matter (owner/branding control of corporate-issued devices) tracks RIM's enterprise IT-administration model.
• Product embodiment: The claims (owner-branding followed by digitally signed owner-control policy) describe the device-management/branding architecture RIM used for enterprise-issued BlackBerry devices. I did not locate a specific RIM product SKU marketed on these claims, so treat "shipped a product embodying the claims" as probable-but-not-documented.
• Current status: RIM changed its name to BlackBerry Limited (shareholder vote July 2013; ticker change Feb 2013). BlackBerry remains an operating company today (cybersecurity software and IoT/QNX), not bankrupt. It divested "substantially all of its non-core patents and patent applications" in 2023 — a strategic asset sale, not a Chapter 7/11 liquidation.

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Assignment timeline

Chronological recorded chain. Reel/frame numbers could not be retrieved for the patent-specific records — see caveat above.

• 2004-05-07 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest (inventor→company, worldwide assignment)
  • Assignor: Herbert A. Little; David R. Clark
  • Assignee: Research In Motion Limited
  • Correspondent: not retrieved (RIM's patent-filing agent of record; the contemporaneous RIM worldwide-assignment PDFs in this era were filed with an Ottawa/Waterloo-area fax correspondent — I could not confirm the name for this patent).
  • Context: Ordinary inventor-to-employer ownership vesting.

• 2016-02-17 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Change of Name
  • Assignor: Research In Motion Limited
  • Assignee: BlackBerry Limited
  • Correspondent: not retrieved. (Note: a TTAB filing cites Reel/Frame 5112/0971 for the RIM→BlackBerry change of name, but that is a trademark reel/frame in the 4-digit trademark series — it is NOT the patent record and should not be cited as the patent's reel/frame. The patent record's own reel/frame remains unretrieved.)
  • Context: Internal name change only — no change in beneficial ownership. (Name change legally effective 2013; recorded against this patent in 2016.)

• 2023-06-16 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignor's Interest
  • Assignor: BlackBerry Limited
  • Assignee: Malikie Innovations Limited
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — flag as a research gap, since the correspondent here is the highest-value tell in an NPE chain.
  • Execution date: the corresponding EP register entry for the same transaction records the deed of assignment as dated 11 May 2023 (BlackBerry's fiscal-2023 10-K reports the Malikie transaction closing in Q1 FY2023). So: executed ~2023-05-11, recorded 2023-06-16.
  • Context: Transfer-to-asserter / portfolio divestiture — BlackBerry sold ~32,000 non-core patents to Malikie, an Irish subsidiary of patent-monetization firm Key Patent Innovations Limited (KPI), for $170M at closing + $30M within three years + a back-ended profit share.

• 2023-06-19 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Nunc Pro Tunc Assignment
  • Assignor: BlackBerry Limited
  • Assignee: Malikie Innovations Limited
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: Corrective / back-dating recordation in the same week as the primary assignment — consistent with perfecting the May 11, 2023 transfer and with the contemporaneous standing dispute (Catapult IP Innovations had sued in E.D. Va. in June 2023 seeking to unwind the BlackBerry–Malikie deal; Catapult voluntarily dismissed, per RPX, July 2023).

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7793355
    2002 : Provisional filed
    2003 : Application filed
    2004 : Inventors assign to RIM
    2010 : Patent issues
    2016 : Name change recorded to BlackBerry
    2023 : BlackBerry sells to Malikie
         : Nunc pro tunc recordation

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT. Malikie Innovations Limited is not an operating company: it is a newly formed subsidiary of Key Patent Innovations Limited (an Irish IP-monetization firm), created expressly to acquire and license the BlackBerry non-core portfolio. Supporting evidence: BlackBerry's FY2023 10-K and press coverage of the ~$900M-max transaction ("Key Patent Innovations subsidiary … buying 32,000 of its patents"); KPI's own post-closing interview describes the entity as running "licensing programmes," a "portfolio," and "campaigns" — not products. Concrete: licensing-only purpose, monetization-parent ownership, no commercial product line. (Reel/frame not retrieved; dates 2023-05-11 / 2023-06-16 / 2023-06-19.)

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT. Malikie Innovations appears as a high-frequency patent plaintiff in third-party NPE directories (Unified Patents patent pages list "Malikie Innovations Ltd" as assignee; RPX tracks its litigation). It has asserted family/portfolio members in district court — including Malikie Innovations Ltd. v. Nintendo Co. Ltd., No. 2:24-cv-01490-JLR (W.D. Wash. filed 2024-09-17), which asserted US 9,542,571, a continuation descendant of this very patent, alongside US 8,115,731, US 8,610,397 and US 7,529,305. Malikie is independently on RPX's and Unified's radar as an active monetizer. (Case terminated 2025-12-03 on stipulation.)

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR / NOT RETRIEVED. This is the one signal I could not adjudicate because I could not pull the correspondent-of-record field for any of the four records. Recommend a manual pull from Assignment Center (search by patent number 7793355) to obtain the correspondent for the 2023-06-16 and 2023-06-19 recordings — that single field is likely decisive here (a repeat KPI/Malikie outside-recording attorney would upgrade signals 1 and 4).

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT. There is effectively one substantive transfer in the chain (BlackBerry→Malikie, 2023) preceded only by a no-change-of-ownership name change (2016). That is not a chain of LLC-to-LLC hops within 24 months.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT (for this patent). No infringement suit naming US 7,793,355 was located. The nearest downstream event is the 2024 Nintendo suit on descendant US 9,542,571 — roughly 16 months after the May 2023 acquisition (and after the '355's own chain), so the classic ≤6-month pre-suit venue-arranging pattern is not established for the '355 itself.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. BlackBerry was solvent and continues as an operating cybersecurity/IoT company; the 2023 disposal was a going-concern, board-approved divestiture of non-core patents (10-K, fiscal 2023), not a bankruptcy estate sale.

7. Privateering — PRESENT. This is the sharpest signal. BlackBerry — an operating company — sold the portfolio to an NPE while retaining a back-ended economic interest in the NPE's licensing recoveries (guaranteed $30M plus a tiered profit share: 8% of the first $500M, 15% of the next $250M, 30% of the next $250M, 50% thereafter, capped at $700M). The operating company therefore profits when the NPE asserts and licenses. That is the defining privateering structure.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at an asserting monetizer, i.e., the inverse outcome.

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Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

Three strong signals converge on a single transaction: (i) shell/licensing-only transfer — the patent moved from operating-company BlackBerry to Malikie Innovations Limited, a purpose-built subsidiary of monetization firm Key Patent Innovations (executed 2023-05-11; recorded against this patent 2023-06-16 as an assignment and 2023-06-19 as a nunc pro tunc assignment, per Google Patents legal events and the EP counterpart register); (ii) known asserter — Malikie is a tracked high-frequency plaintiff that sued on descendant US 9,542,571 in Malikie v. Nintendo (W.D. Wash. 2:24-cv-01490, filed 2024-09-17); and (iii) privateering — BlackBerry retained a tiered profit share (8%–50%, $700M cap) in Malikie's licensing recoveries, so the seller profits from assertions against its former competitors. The verdict is not driven by naming alone; it rests on the documented monetization-only purpose, the retained royalty economics, and Malikie's own litigation record. Confidence is capped by the missing reel/frame and correspondent fields, which should be pulled manually to confirm and to complete signal 3.

Verify at:

• USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Search mirror by patent number — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (query "7793355")
• Google Patents legal events — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US7793355B2](/patent/US7793355B2)/en
• RPX Insight (Malikie/BlackBerry transfers) — https://litigation.rpxcorp.com/news/76087-malikie-takes-ownership-of-former-blackberry-patents-as-catapult-ip-drops-suit

I'll search for US 7,793,355's cited references and prior art.

The general searches didn't surface the citation list. Let me target the patent's own citation records.

I have family/priority data. Now let me get the actual "References Cited" list from the patent.

Status: search incomplete — and I won't fabricate the citation list

I need to be direct about a limitation before giving you anything usable. Within the search budget available in this session, I was able to confirm and fully identify the patent, but I was not able to retrieve the operative "(56) References Cited" list that appears on the face of US 7,793,355. That list is exactly what your task requires me to enumerate claim-by-claim. Rather than invent patent numbers and map them to § 102, I'm reporting what I verified, what I did not, and where the authoritative list lives.

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1. Patent-number verification (literal match, no auto-correction)

I searched the specific number 7793355. The results return that exact patent — this is not a near-miss (e.g., 7,793,355 is not being confused with 7,793,553 or similar).

This is consistent with the previously generated section, so no contradiction there.

2. What I could verify about the '355's citation record

Applicant/description-level citation (confirmed by the patent text itself):

• U.S. Pat. No. 6,219,694 — cited in the specification as the "message forwarding or redirection system," expressly "incorporated into this application by reference." The patent text is authoritative on the number. (My recollection is that this is the RIM "pushing information from a host system to a mobile data communication device" patent, Lazaridis et al., issued Apr. 17, 2001 — but I flag the title/date as training-data recall, not something confirmed by my searches this session.) This type of reference is a background citation, not typically an anticipation reference, and it supports the messaging/redirection context rather than the owner-control claims.

Family / equivalents (these are the same invention, not prior art):

• WO 2004/053618 A2 and EP 1 573 473 A2 — confirmed from the EPO PISE record, which states the EP search report contents as "See references of WO 2004053618A2." The EP/WO search report is the place where the examiner's cited art for this invention is listed.

A candidate surfaced only as a "similar document," not as a citation (I am explicitly not asserting it is in the (56) list):

• EP 1 168 141 A2, "A secure and open computer platform," appeared under Google Patents' "Similar Documents" panel for the '355 family. Similarity listings are algorithmic, not examiner citations, so this cannot be treated as a § 102 reference without the actual list.

3. What I did NOT retrieve (explicitly stated)

• The complete (56) "References Cited" table (US patent documents, foreign patent documents, and other publications) printed on US 7,793,355. My searches for the citation table returned citation lists belonging to unrelated patents (e.g., US 10,510,536; US 10,877,731; US 10,194,266), which I am disregarding.
• The PTO-892 / Notice of References Cited form from the 10/732,132 prosecution file.
• The full EP/WO search report for WO 2004/053618 A2, which would reproduce the same prior art considered for the family.

Consequence for your request: Because I cannot read the actual cited references, I cannot in good faith assign any reference to "claim 1," "claims 2–3," etc., under 35 U.S.C. § 102. Producing that mapping now would mean inventing citations and anticipation findings, which the strict rules for this task prohibit.

4. Grounded anticipation analysis I can offer without the list

Two items of record are genuinely relevant to § 102 and are supportable:

1. Applicant-Admitted Prior Art (AAPA) — the "owner policy file" scheme. The '355 Background states: "an owner loads a policy file onto a device to restrict the type of operations or software applications that may be executed by the device," and that this "is sometimes circumvented by a user by either deleting the owner policy file or replacing the owner policy file with a user policy file." This admitted art describes a policy-restriction scheme but lacks the claimed integrity/source-authentication check on separately-received owner control information, so it would not anticipate claim 1 as previously summarized; it is relevant only as a § 103 starting point.

2. U.S. Pat. No. 6,219,694 (incorporated by reference) — directed to message redirection, not owner control, and thus not an anticipation reference against the owner-control claims.

5. Where the authoritative list actually is (to complete the task)

To do the claim-by-claim § 102 work properly, retrieve:

• Google Patents, US7793355B2 → "Citations" / "Cited By" panels (front-page (56) list), or
• USPTO Patent Center for application 10/732,132 → the PTO-892 "Notice of References Cited" and the examiner's Non-Final/Final Office Actions (the Office Actions also identify which claims the examiner applied each reference against), or
• EPO Register / Global Dossier for EP 1 573 473 A2 (or WO 2004/053618 A2), which packages the search-report citations for the whole family.

If you let me continue searching, I will pull that (56) table and the PTO-892, then produce the reference-by-reference format you asked for — full citation, publication/filing date, brief description, and the specific claim(s) each reference potentially anticipates under § 102.

One contradiction to flag with the prior section: the earlier draft stated it could not "fully exclude additional claims beyond claim 17" because the claim listing was truncated. My searches did not resolve that gap either, so the independent-claim count remains unverified.

I'll start by looking for the prior-art references actually cited on this patent's face and during its prosecution, plus the closest art in the owner-policy/device-branding space.

Let me pull the patent's own front-page references and the PCT/EP search reports for this family.

Preliminary note on the "Prior Art section" of the supplied page

I checked the supplied Google Patents text for a prior-art citation list before doing anything else, and I have to flag a sourcing problem up front:

The supplied page contains no (56) "References Cited," no "Citations," and no "Similar Documents" section. What it does contain, under the heading "Prior art keywords," is only the classifier string used by Google's internal index:

"Prior art keywords: owner / electronic device / control information / information / owner control" — and "Prior art date: 2002-12-12"

So there is no enumerated prior-art set on this page for me to "use." Every US/EP/WO citation, claim chart, or combination below therefore comes from one of three sources, and I label which:

A full §103 contention cannot be written without the actual (56) list and the IDS from PAIR. I say that plainly rather than dress up memory as a record. Two candidate references I name below carry an explicit "number not verified" flag.

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1. Governing law and critical dates

• The '355 was filed December 10, 2003, claiming benefit of provisional 60/432,610, filed December 12, 2002. Pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) therefore governs (the AIA first-to-file §102/§103 regime applies only to applications filed on or after March 16, 2013). The pre-AIA framework — §§102(a)/(b)/(e), the §103(c) common-ownership safe harbor, and the Graham/KSR obviousness inquiry — is the correct frame.
• §102(b) statutory-bar window: anything publicly available before December 10, 2002 is a bar (measured one year back from the non-provisional filing date). If the provisional is used to carry the §102(b) measurement back, the window tightens to December 12, 2001. I will be conservative and treat "before Dec. 10, 2002" as the bar date.
• §102(a)/(e) window: art publicly available before December 12, 2002, and U.S. patents/publications whose effective U.S. filing dates precede December 12, 2002.
• Legal standard. KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) — the teaching-suggestion-motivation test is one of several, and predictable combinations, design incentives, and market forces count. The Federal Circuit formulations surfaced in my search are directly on point and worth using: In re Mouttet, 686 F.3d 1322, 1330 (Fed. Cir. 2012) (the inquiry "focuses on what the combined teachings would have suggested"); Uber Techs., Inc. v. X One, Inc., 957 F.3d 1334, 1341 (Fed. Cir. 2020) (whether one reference can be "bodily incorporated" into another is "basically irrelevant").
• §103(c) caveat. Much of RIM's own 2003 art sits in the same corporate family. Pre-AIA §103(c) (and its current 102(b)(2)(C) analogue) removes §102(e)/(f)/(g) art that was commonly owned at the time the invention was made — but it does not remove §102(a)/(b) art. This matters for the "RIM's own prior IT-policy implementation" line in Ground 5 below.

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2. Person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA)

I would propose, and a petitioner should propose, a two-discipline POSITA:

• a B.S. in electrical engineering, computer science, or equivalent, plus 2–4 years developing mobile/embedded device software; and
• working familiarity with applied cryptography as of 2002: RSA and DSA signature generation/verification, SHA-1/MD5 digests, public-key distribution, and OS-level access-control mechanisms.

Nothing in the '355 suggests the art was unusually unsophisticated. To the contrary, the specification's cryptography section reads like a textbook recitation — "Known digest algorithms include Secure Hashing Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) and Message-Digest algorithm 5 (MD5)" — which is itself useful to a petitioner as an admission that the cryptographic primitives were routine.

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3. The claim, broken into limitations

Relying on the earlier-generated summary (claim 1 independent; claims 2–17 dependent; text truncated after claim 17), claim 1 decomposes as:

Three observations that materially shape the §103 analysis:

1. Most of the specification's apparent novelty is unclaimed. The detail that makes the disclosed system actually work — that the owner information store 36 and authorization record store 38 are write/erase-restricted, that "only the insertion module 44 has write and erase access to these stores," and that owner information is inserted "before the mobile device 30 is operable by a user" — does not appear as a limitation of claim 1 as characterized. Claim 1 requires only that the owner control information arrive "at a different time." A petitioner should hammer this: the non-obviousness story lives in the unclaimed implementation.

2. The abstract/claim mismatch is a real construction problem. The abstract states that "owner identification information comprises an owner signature private key," while the specification repeatedly and correctly describes a public key being stored on the device ("a digital signature public key associated with a digital signature private key of the owner"). A device storing the owner's private key would be cryptographically incoherent with independent verification. The earlier-generated summary already flagged that the abstract's phrasing is verbatim from the source. Practically: (i) the claim term "source authentication information" will be construed against the spec's public-key disclosure, not the abstract; and (ii) expect a §112(a) written-description/clarity cross-attack that runs parallel to the §103 attack.

3. An internal antecedent slip in the spec. The description says "The owner control insertion point 220 is associated with an owner of the electronic device 210" — but 220 is defined two paragraphs earlier as the owner information insertion point, while the owner control information insertion point is 230. This is a §112(b) indefiniteness point and a claim-construction nuisance, and it belongs in a broader invalidity contention rather than the §103 chart.

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4. Prior-art landscape (with verification status)

Note on self-collision: RIM's own BlackBerry Enterprise Server IT-policy push predates the '355's bar date in some deployments (public use/on-sale). That is §102(a)/(b) art against the applicant itself and is not removed by the §103(c) common-ownership safe harbor. It is worth checking, but it is a double-edged sword (the same product is the commercial-success evidence), and it will require documentary proof of public availability ≥ Dec. 10, 2002 — so I would not lead with it.

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5. Grounds of rejection

Ground 1 (primary) — P10 (enterprise Group Policy / System Policy) in view of P9 (trust-management credentials), and optionally P3

Why the combination is obvious.

P10 supplies L2 essentially wholesale: machine policy that specifies which executables may run, authored centrally, pushed to a machine after the machine is already deployed (satisfying "at a different time"), cached locally, and — critically — protected from user modification by the operating system's ACLs so that a user cannot delete or replace it. That is the same problem the '355's Background states verbatim: an owner policy file that a user circumvents by deleting or replacing it.

P10's weak point is exactly where the '355's own Background says P10 fails: "if a user is using a computer outside the LAN 18 ... network-based controls in place at the LAN 18 can sometimes be bypassed." P9 supplies the fix. PolicyMaker/SPKI/KeyNote teach the identical architecture at the protocol layer: authorization statements are signed by a principal, and a verifier that already holds the principal's public key checks the signature and decides whether to honor the statement — with no requirement that the transport be trusted. Substituting a cryptographic signature check for OS-enforced ACLs is the substitution of a known technique for a known technique to obtain its predictable advantage (KSR, slip op. at 17), i.e., enforcement that survives the user's control of the operating system.

The articulated reason to combine (the KSR/PTAB "rational underpinning" a petition must state): the market and design pressure of a mobile workforce — the '355's own Background concedes network-based controls are bypassed off-LAN — created an incentive to move policy enforcement onto the endpoint; the endpoint, unlike a LAN-managed PC, may be controlled by the user; settled cryptographic practice for exactly that situation was "sign the artifact, verify it against a key the verifier already trusts."

P3 (Broyles) is a useful add-on for L1: it teaches device-resident owner/administrator identification information that the administrator can update remotely over a network, establishing that placing an owner identifier on the device and keeping it owner-updatable was known.

Residual gap: the reference set needs at least one reference that places the verification key itself on the endpoint ahead of the policy in a write-restricted location. P8 or P11 fills it (Grounds 3 and 5), and the art is abundant.

Ground 2 — P1 (admitted policy-file art) + P4/P7 (software authorization lists) + secure-package-verification art

P1 is an admission in the specification, which is the single most useful tool available against this patent: the applicant conceded that loading a policy file to restrict executable operations/applications was known, and that the only failure mode was user deletion/replacement. That concession does most of the work on L2 and frames the problem for everything else.

P7/P4 supply the content of the policy as a list of authorized applications rendered by hash/identifier rather than filename — and the family's own prosecution proves it. The '571 file history shows the Examiner repeatedly asserting that Fisher discloses an ACL-style mechanism, and shows allowance finally issuing only after the applicant amended to "a list of applications permitted for installation" — i.e., applications not yet present on the device — with the Notice of Allowance reasoning that this is "markedly different from an access control list, because the access control list is a list of permissions for current applications and other files." Whatever one thinks of that distinction, the examiner's position — that an ACL reads on "permissions associated with applications executable by the device" — is strong evidence that the broader '355 claim 1 language ("description of functions or software applications the electronic device is allowed to use") reads on ordinary ACL art. That is a §103 argument built out of the family's own record.

The remaining piece — verifying the policy package against a resident key before honoring it — comes from signed-code/secure-package-delivery art and P9.

Ground 3 — P8 (TCPA integrity measurement) + P1/P10 policy distribution

Caveat first: this is the weakest of the grounds, and I want to be explicit about why. TCPA's integrity measurement is directed at the platform's own loaded software, whereas L3 checks the integrity of the received owner control information. Those are different objects. TCPA is better used as corroboration that "verify a cryptographic integrity value before relying on a component" was a routine, well-documented design pattern in this exact product space by 2001, and to supply the motivation (TCPA was expressly aimed at letting a third party decide whether to trust a platform).

Ground 4 — P11 (conditional access / entitlement management) applied to a mobile device's function and application set

P11 is, structurally, claim 1 with different nouns. In conditional-access systems a subscriber-bound key or entitlement lives in a secure element (smart card/SIM); the operator later sends entitlement/control messages over an untrusted broadcast channel; the device validates them against the resident key and enables or disables services. Swap "entitlement" for "owner control information describing permitted functions or applications," and "operator" for "owner," and L1–L5 are met.

Motivation: the mobile-handset world already used the SIM as the secure store for operator-provisioned control, and handsets were already being configured over-the-air. A POSITA seeking to keep an owner's policy on a device a user controls has an established, fully analogous architecture one field over. This is the ground where KSR's "finite number of identified, predictable solutions" framing lands hardest.

Gap to address in any petition: conditional-access art typically emphasizes confidentiality (encryption) and subscriber authentication rather than a detached signature over the policy payload. Claim 1 requires integrity-checking using the owner identification information, which the art's message-authentication step can be shown to satisfy — but this requires careful mapping, not hand-waving.

Ground 5 — P6/secure-firmware/secure-code delivery + P10

Secure over-the-air firmware and code delivery — resident verification key, later-delivered package, verify signature, install only if valid — was conventional well before 2002. Combined with P10's policy content, this is a clean, low-risk mapping onto L1, L3, L4, and the "different time" aspect of L2. I flag P6's specific references (US 6,356,947; US 6,104,694) as unread — I have their citations from the WO 03/107651 ISR but not their disclosures, so I cannot yet say whether they are the right anchors for this ground.

Grounds are alternatives, not cumulative. A petition should run Ground 1 as the lead (best motivation story, least claim-construction friction) with Ground 4 as the independent, second line (best structural correspondence), and hold Grounds 2/3/5 as supporting/corroborating art. Grounds 2 and 4 can also be run together: the '571 examiner reasoning plus the conditional-access architecture jointly cover L2–L5.

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6. Dependent claims

Subject to the truncation caveat in the prior summary, the dependents appear to be dominated by routine fallbacks, which is where a §103 attack is easiest:

I cannot chart any claim beyond 17, and I cannot rule out a second independent claim (e.g., an apparatus/system claim mirroring claim 1). That changes the number of charted elements but not the analysis.

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7. Objective indicia and rebuttal considerations

• Long-felt but unmet need cuts against patentability here. The need was articulated by the applicant in its own Background (users delete or replace policy files), and the solution — sign the policy, verify with a resident key — is the canonical solution. KSR treats a known problem with an obvious solution as strong evidence of obviousness, not the reverse.
• Commercial success: the BlackBerry/BES IT-policy feature is genuine, but nexus is a serious problem. The '355 is one member of a five-patent continuation chain and its practice is entangled with the rest of the chain plus US 8,429,410, US 7,546,956 and US 8,887,988. Establishing that the '355's claimed two-stage verification architecture drove the success — rather than the broader owner-application-control system — will be hard.
• Licensing/monetization evidence (the Malikie activities discussed in the prior summary) is not probative of non-obviousness.
• Unexpected results / teaching away: I see no teaching-away argument available. Storing a verification key in a protected store is the natural, and in some fields the required, design.
• The "different time" limitation is the applicant's best rebuttal point, but it is fragile: any later policy update or re-provisioning satisfies it, and the specification's own FIG. 2 contemplates the owner control information insertion point being the user's own PC, which removes any implication of a special enrollment ceremony.

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8. Where the §103 case is strongest and weakest

Strongest: claims 1–13, via Ground 1 or Ground 4, using the patent's own Background admission as the anchor. The claimed advance over the admitted art is essentially "cryptographically sign the policy and verify it against a previously installed key" — and the specification concedes that all the cryptographic tools were known.

Weakest: claims 14–16's specific three-state refusal behavior; and the possibility that a court reads "at a different time" more narrowly than its plain language, requiring a genuine manufacture-time branding step. Even then, Ground 4 (conditional access) and Ground 5 (secure code delivery) both feature a pre-provisioned credential followed much later by control information, so the limitation is not a safe harbor.

Parallel non-§103 exposure worth raising in the same contention: (i) §112(a)/(b) for the abstract's "owner signature private key" versus the specification's public key, and for the mis-numbered "owner control insertion point 220"; (ii) obviousness-type double patenting across US 8,302,185 / 9,033,216 / 9,542,571 / 10,474,841, all claiming the same 2002 priority; (iii) the possibility that claim 1's scope, read on the specification, is not enabled across the full range it recites. None of these is §103, but for a patent listed "Active" with an adjusted expiration of 2027-04-06, they matter as much.

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9. Confidence and open items

Before this becomes a filing-grade contention, three things must be pulled: the '355's actual front-page (56) references and IDS from PAIR; the identity and text of the "Fisher" reference from the '571 file history; and the full claim set past claim 17. I could not retrieve any of those three within this session, and I am not going to represent otherwise.