US 7949604

I'll search for authoritative information on this patent number, including any litigation or CAFC docket activity.

The initial searches returned nothing relevant. Let me try more targeted queries.

Let me do one more targeted check for any litigation or CAFC docket activity.

US Patent 7,949,604 — Summary

Important scope note up front: I searched for this specific number in connection with USPTO records and 2026 CAFC/litigation dockets. I found no CAFC 2026 appeal and no district-court case asserting US 7,949,604 in the search results. The Sony-related patent suits that surfaced in 2026 (e.g., SensoSure LLC v. Sony Group Corp., 2:26-cv-00177; ImberaTek LLC v. Sony Group Corp., 2:26-cv-00547; Tau Ceti Ventures v. Sony Group, 3:26-cv-03738; Genuine Enabling Tech. v. Sony Group, Fed. Cir. 24-1686) do not name this patent number. I cannot confirm or deny absence of litigation authoritatively — a PACER/Docket Navigator query per patent number would be required. Below is grounded in the patent text itself (patents.google.com/patent/US7949604B2).

Bibliographic data

Abstract (paraphrased)

A broadcasting receiving/recording device records a broadcast content; a terminal edits the recorded content and generates corresponding metadata describing which portions to reproduce and in what order. The metadata is uploaded over the Internet to a metadata delivery server, which (using pre-held utilization-availability information about the content) registers it only if the content may be secondarily used. Registered metadata is delivered to other terminals on request. The stated goal is enabling secondary use of broadcast content while protecting copyright (including preserving mandatory portions such as advertising/sponsor announcements).

Plain-language overview of the claims (7 total)

The claims as presented include two recurring limitations: (a) registration is rejected when a "zone which should be viewed and heard by all means" is not included in the reproduction data (i.e., must-include/mandatory-view segment, such as an ad or sponsor segment); and (b) the utilization information is determined from data that cross-references multiple contents with respective utilization information (the content-management table of FIG. 8) and specifies a predetermined portion of the content that must always be reproduced.

• Claim 1 – System. A first apparatus transmits reproduction data (defining the content to be reproduced and reproduction order) over a network to a second apparatus. The second apparatus registers the data and adds utilization information about content utilization, but rejects registration if a mandatory-view zone is missing. A third apparatus receives delivery of the annotated reproduction data and can use the content accordingly.
• Claim 2 – Information processing method (server/authoring side). Obtains reproduction data; specifies the content it defines; judges a utilization condition (rejecting registration if the mandatory-view zone is absent); adds utilization information based on the judgment; outputs the annotated reproduction data.
• Claim 3 – Non-transitory recording medium storing a program that performs the claim-2 steps.
• Claim 4 – Non-transitory computer-readable medium storing a program implementing the claim-2 method.
• Claims 5 – Information processing method (receiver/viewer side). Obtains reproduction data; judges the utilization information contained in it (rendering a judgment that registration is rejected when the mandatory-view zone is absent); and utilizes the content per the reproduction data based on that judgment.
• Claim 6 – Non-transitory recording medium storing a program performing the claim-5 steps.
• Claim 7 – Non-transitory computer-readable medium storing a program implementing the claim-5 method.

Note on claim form: the patent has no system/apparatus claim set for the second and third apparatuses; instead it claims the server-side method/media (claims 2–4) and the receiver-side method/media (claims 5–7). Notably, the "registration … rejected when a zone which should be viewed and heard by all means is not included" limitation appears even in the receiver-side claims 5–7, which is unusual because registration logic normally resides on the server side — I flag this as an observation from the claim text, not a legal conclusion.

Uncertainty

• The claim text above is taken from the Google Patents rendering; I did not independently retrieve it from USPTO PatentCenter/PAIR, so exact claim wording and any certificate-of-correction content should be verified at the USPTO source.
• The specification also describes electronic signatures (RSA, MD5) and certificate-based public-key delivery (FIGS. 10–14), but these features are not recited in the granted independent claims as shown.

I'll research litigation involving US Patent 7949604.

Initial searches returned unrelated patents. Let me search more targeted litigation sources.

Let me check dedicated litigation databases and the patent's assertion history.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 7,949,604

Bottom line

No litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 7,949,604 was found.

Based on searches of patent-litigation databases and public sources, I could not identify any district court action, ITC investigation, PTAB proceeding, or Federal Circuit appeal in which U.S. Patent No. 7,949,604 is the asserted or challenged patent. I am reporting this as a negative finding, not as proof that none exists.

What the patent is

Before explaining the search, it's worth confirming which patent this is, because several similarly-numbered patents surface easily and could be confused with it:

This is a Sony patent on delivering "metadata" (reproduction data) that defines which portions of a recorded broadcast content to reproduce, with utilization/license information and electronic-signature verification. Its US publication is US20040249966A1.

Searches performed and what they returned

1. General web search for "7949604" + litigation/lawsuit. Returned only the Google Patents page for US7949604B2 itself — no case dockets.

2. Search for "7,949,604" / "7949604" in infringement complaints. Returned unrelated patents whose last three or four digits happen to match — e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,101,534 (RDMI v. Sony Computer Entertainment), the Illumina '794 patent in Ariosa v. Illumina (N.D. Cal.), and U.S. Pat. No. 8,605,794 in VideoLabs v. Unified Patents (Fed. Cir. 2024-1890 / 2024-1684, IPR2022-00044, IPR2023-00891). None of these is U.S. Pat. No. 7,949,604. I am flagging them specifically so they are not mistaken for hits.

3. Search restricted to Unified Patents' litigation portal and RPX Insight. No record of 7,949,604 appearing in any Unified Patents caselist entry or RPX litigation document in the results returned.

Result table

There is therefore nothing to populate for plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome.

Confidence and caveats (please read)

• Confidence: moderate. My searches did not surface any assertion of this patent. Given that it is a Sony-owned, software/DRM-adjacent patent that expired for failure to pay maintenance fees (adjusted expiration listed as 2026-07-09), the practical likelihood that it was actively litigated is low — patents near expiration and fee-lapsed patents are rarely asserted.
• This is not exhaustive. I was unable to directly query PACER or run a full docket-level search in this session, and the tool returned a "maximum steps reached" message on several additional queries I attempted (RPX Insight, direct "7,949,604" district-court complaint search, and the Google Patents litigation tab). A negative result from web search is not equivalent to a certified PACER/RPX clearance search.
• Recommended definitive checks if you need a litigation-grade answer:
  • PACER – Case Locator / party search for "Sony Corporation" portfolios and for the patent number in complaint text.
  • RPX Insight (insight.rpxcorp.com) – patent-level "litigation" tab for US7949604.
  • Unified Patents Portal – https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist, and the patent-specific page for US-7949604-B2.
  • Lex Machina or Docket Navigator – patent-number query.
  • PTAB / P-TACTS – confirm no IPR/PGR/CBM naming US 7,949,604 (nothing appeared in searches, but a direct P-TACTS patent search is confirmatory).
  • USPTO Patent Center / Assignment records – to confirm the patent never left Sony and was never transferred to an NPE (a common precursor to assertion). The record shows only the 2004-06-23 assignment to Sony Corporation.

One important clarification

If the litigation you are looking for actually concerns a different patent commonly called "the '794 patent," the likely candidates are:

• U.S. Pat. No. 7,955,794 (Illumina) — litigated in Ariosa Diagnostics v. Illumina, N.D. Cal., and related appeals; and
• U.S. Pat. No. 8,605,794 (VideoLabs) — challenged in IPR2022-00044 / IPR2023-00891 and affirmed in In re VideoLabs at the Federal Circuit (2024-1684, judgment April 10, 2026).

Per the strict instruction to interpret identifiers literally, I am not substituting either of these for 7,949,604. I am noting them only because they are the most common sources of confusion when someone searches for “the '794 patent.” If your interest is one of those, tell me which and I'll report on it specifically.

I'll verify the structured-data default ("no PTAB activity on file") against public sources before writing up.

Let me run a few more targeted checks before concluding the default.

Two more checks to complete the sweep.

PTAB Proceedings — US 7,949,604

Verification note: I ran independent web checks (Google Patents, P-TACTS/PTAB petition document hits, Docket Alarm PTAB pages, CourtListener) in addition to the structured feed. The USPTO ODP AIA-trial feed returns zero proceedings for this patent, and nothing in the public searches contradicts that. The listing below reflects that.

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — 0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials. There is no IPR, PGR, or CBM (including no post-Unwired Planet CBM, which in any event could not have been filed after 2020-09-16) naming U.S. 7,949,604 as the challenged patent. Defensive posture: there is no PTAB roadmap and no estoppel to inherit — but there is also no claim-level reprieve. Every one of the seven granted claims remains presumptively valid and wholly untested before the Board, so a defendant cannot point to a Final Written Decision cancelling anything. The sharper defensive point on this patent is not PTAB at all: the term has run (see below).

Do not conflate this with related Sony work. Searches surfaced IPRs involving other Sony patent owner/petitioner roles — e.g., Sony Group Corp. v. VisionX Technologies, LLC, IPR2023-00298 (U.S. 7,868,366, terminated-settled 2023 per the parties' 35 U.S.C. § 317(a) joint request) and Sony Corp. v. Optimum Imaging Technologies LLC, IPR2024-00924 (U.S. 7,612,805). Those are different patents and are not proceedings on 7,949,604. I found no Sonic-lineage IPR against the 7,949,604 family.

No per-proceeding entries follow, because there are no proceedings to describe. Fabricating IPR numbers, panels, or FWD dispositions for this patent would be worse than reporting the null.

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Claim status of the granted patent (as issued; no PTAB alteration)

The granted claim set in the authoritative text is 7 claims, structured in two mirror-image families:

Every independent claim carries two limitations added relative to the published application US20040249966A1 (see the family's other versions on Google Patents):

1. The mandatory-view-zone hook: "registration of the reproduction data being rejected when a zone which should be viewed and heard by all means is not included in the reproduction data" — i.e., the advertiser-protection carve-out described at the "advertising image portion / portion of announcing a sponsor" passage of the specification.
2. The look-up-table hook: "the utilization information being determined according to data that cross-references a plurality of contents with respective utilization information" — i.e., the FIG. 8 content management table (ID / broadcasting station / broadcasting date / start time / finish time / utilization availability flag).
3. The utilization information must also "specify[] a predetermined portion of the content as a portion which should always be reproduced."

That matters for both invalidity and infringement: because these limitations were recited in all independent claims, any § 103 theory must teach or suggest the mandatory-view zone and the cross-referencing table, not merely generic metadata delivery.

A threshold fact that may moot the entire analysis: the record's legal-status field reads "Expired - Fee Related" with an adjusted expiration of 2026-07-09. Today is 2026-09-30, i.e., after that date. If that status is accurate, the patent is not in force, and the practical analysis shifts from validity to past damages and revival risk. Two cautions: (a) Google's legal-status field is expressly an assumption, not a legal conclusion; and (b) a fee-related lapse can in some circumstances be revived by petition (unintentional-delay standard), which would restore enforceability retroactively as to intervening acts. Treat "expired" as a working hypothesis to confirm against the USPTO Patent Center fee/status record, not as settled.

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Strategic summary

Canceled vs. sustained vs. untested. Nothing is canceled. Nothing is sustained by adjudication. All seven claims (1–7) are UNTESTED. The patent therefore arrives at any assertion with § 282's presumption of validity fully intact and no prosecution-disclaimer or IPR-estoppel history. Correspondingly, a defendant has no Inter partes FWD to point at, and a demand letter citing claims 1–7 cannot be met with "those claims are already dead." The only narrowing on the face of the documents is the amendment history built into the granted claims (the mandatory-view-zone and cross-reference-table limitations described above), which narrows the infringement case the patent owner can run but does not invalidate anything.

Estoppel landscape. Because no third party ever petitioned, § 315(e)(2) estoppel is a blank slate. Unlike the more heavily-litigated Sony patents in the same general technology area, there is no petitioner — and no privy of a petitioner — precluded from re-raising a ground it raised or reasonably could have raised. All § 102 and § 103 grounds, and any § 112 challenge, remain available in a district court invalidity defense. Any new IPR petition would itself be subject to § 315(b)'s one-year bar running from service of the complaint on that petitioner; with the patent apparently expired, the cost/benefit of filing is poor — the Board can and does review expired patents (with claims construed under Phillips), but with no prospective injunctive relief the petitioner's return is limited to estoppel and leverage value.

Pattern signals. There is no serial petitioner, no repeat-filer dynamic, and no defensive aggregator (e.g., Unified Patents, RPX) activity on this patent in anything I could find. Nor is there a PTAB appeal to the Federal Circuit — an FWD is a prerequisite to the § 6(c)/§ 319 appeal route, and none exists. The patent appears never to have been the subject of a contested AIA trial at all. Take the absence as signal in both directions: an untested patent is an unknown-quantity risk, but a 2001-priority Sony patent that reached its term end without ever drawing an IPR in the busiest filing era in PTAB history (2013–2020) tends to suggest it was not a high-value assertion vehicle. Nothing in my searches tied 7,949,604 to a public district court assertion campaign.

Bottom line for a defendant. You are not facing a hardened, thrice-defended patent, and you are not facing one that has been administratively gutted either. You are facing an untested, apparently expired patent whose only meaningful exposure is back damages. Confirm the fee/expiration and revival posture first; it may resolve the matter before validity ever comes up.

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Recommended next steps

1. Confirm status before anything else. Pull the fee history and legal-status record from USPTO Patent Center and the Global Dossier entry for US 10/481,846. Verify (a) whether the "Expired - Fee Related" determination reflects a lapsed maintenance fee, (b) the exact adjusted-expiration basis for 2026-07-09, and (c) whether any petition to revive or acceptance of a delayed maintenance payment has been filed or granted. If the patent is expired and not revived, prospective relief is off the table.
2. If expired, pivot to the damages window. Under 35 U.S.C. § 286, recovery is limited to infringement occurring within six years before the complaint is filed — i.e., roughly back to 2020-09-30 for a complaint filed today, and less as time passes. Map the accused conduct to that window and check for intervening licenses, exhaustion, or releases. (SCA Hygiene removed laches as a defense, but § 286 remains a hard cut-off.)
3. If not expired, the claim set is your validity target. Every independent claim (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) requires the mandatory-view-zone rejection logic and the cross-referencing utilization table. Build the invalidity case around art that discloses (i) an advertiser-mandated viewing zone enforced at registration, and (ii) a content management table mapping content IDs to utilization flags. The specification's own admission of the earlier JP-A-2000-237671 proposal is relevant art context — note that the specification characterizes that earlier work as already teaching metadata-driven secondary utilization of recorded broadcasts.
4. Preserve IPR optionality — but price it correctly. With the one-year § 315(b) clock and an expired term, an IPR on 7,949,604 is likely to be a leverage play rather than a merits necessity. If the patent owner revives and asserts, the calculus changes; re-run this analysis then.
5. Keep the PTAB record clean. Verify directly via PTAB E2E / P-TACTS and CourtListener before filing anything that represents "no prior PTAB proceedings" to a court. My search was thorough but not a substitute for a docket-of-record check, and the ODP feed can lag newly filed petitions.

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Confidence and limits

• High confidence: no AIA trial proceeding naming US 7,949,604 appears in the ODP structured data or in my public searches. No FWD, no institution decision, no settlement, no Federal Circuit appeal exists for this patent, because none of the predicate events ever occurred.
• Lower confidence / verify: the expiration and fee status. The structured field says "Expired - Fee Related" with adjusted expiration 2026-07-09 and labels itself an assumption. I am reporting it as such, not as a legal conclusion, and I have not independently confirmed the maintenance-fee history or the PTA calculation.
• I did not invent any proceeding numbers, panels, or dispositions. The IPR numbers cited above (IPR2023-00298, IPR2024-00924) belong to different patents and are offered only to prevent misattribution.

I'll research the assignment record for US 7949604 before writing up the analysis.

Let me dig into the specific assignment data and litigation history.

Ownership Analysis — US 7,949,604 B2

Patent: US 7,949,604 B2 — "Information providing system, and information processing apparatus and method"
Application: 10/481,846 (US national stage of PCT/JP2002/006387) · Priority: JP 2001-195789, 2001-06-28 · Filed: 2002-06-26 · Granted: 2011-05-24
Family: WO 2003003739 A1 · EP 1401204 A4 · JP 3932476 B2 · KR 100920279 B1 · CN 1294754 C

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Inventors

Pattern note — no unusual attrition signal. This is a corporate captive filing, not a startup filing: all four inventors appear only on internal Sony disclosure families, and the PCT was filed by Sony as applicant with no third-party co-owner. There is no evidence of inventors departing within 12 months of filing. The inventors each executed the assignment to Sony Corporation, which was recorded at the USPTO on 2004-06-23 (the date the national-stage file was docketed; the underlying documents were executed earlier — Google Patents lists only the recordation event, not the individual execution dates).

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Original assignee

Sony Corporation — the entity named on the face of the issued patent.

• Primary line of business: Consumer and professional electronics; at the 2001–2002 filing date this was Sony's networked-AV / home-server and digital-broadcast receiver business (HDD recorders, set-top boxes, VAIO/Giga Pocket-class PC recording software, and the metadata delivery service concept described in the specification).
• Product embodying the claims: Unclear / not confirmed. The claims cover a system — a metadata delivery server that registers user-authored reproduction data ("metadata"), applies a content management table to gate registration, attaches utilization/<License> information, and signs the result for delivery to a receiving device. The specification's architecture (metadata delivery server 2, authoring system 3, broadcasting receiving and picture recording device 5) reads as Sony's internal service infrastructure rather than a discrete retail SKU. I did not locate public evidence of a shipping Sony product or service that practices the asserted claims, and I did not locate any assertion of this patent. Treat "shipped an embodying product" as unproven.
• Current status: Operating. Sony Corporation remains a going concern (now Sony Group Corporation / Sony Corporation reorganized under Sony Group). No bankruptcy, dissolution, or IP-holding-company transfer is on record for this patent.

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Assignment timeline

Evidence provenance caveat (read first): I could not open a live per-patent query on USPTO Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) or its legacy mirror (https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) within this session. The chain below is reconstructed from the USPTO assignment data as mirrored in the legal-events record at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US7949604B2](/patent/US7949604B2)/en, which is my best available substitute. I could not retrieve the reel/frame number or the correspondent of record for the single recorded assignment, and I will not invent them. A direct Assignment Center pull on patent 7,949,604 should be run to confirm the reel/frame and correspondent.

Only one assignment is recorded against this patent:

• 2004-06-23 (recorded) — execution date not separately shown in the mirror; Reel/Frame not retrieved
  • Conveyance: Assignment (Assignment of Assignors' Interest — "see document for details")
  • Assignor: Ohnuma, Kensuke; Asazu, Hideki; Matsuzaki, Katsuro; Yamamoto, Tomoyuki (all four named inventors)
  • Assignee: SONY CORPORATION
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved — the mirror does not expose the correspondent field. Because there is only one link in this chain, the "repeat correspondent" tell is structurally inapplicable here regardless of who the correspondent was.
  • Context: Routine inventor-to-employer assignment perfecting title in the U.S. national stage of the PCT filing. Not an acquisition, fire-sale, reorg, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

No post-issuance assignment is on record. There is no transfer to an IP-holding LLC, no security agreement, no merger, no change of name, and no license recorded against US 7,949,604. The Google Patents legal-events feed shows only: 2002-06-26 application filed by Sony; 2004-06-23 inventor assignment recorded; 2011-05-24 granted/published; 2026-07-09 adjusted expiration.

Related event worth flagging (not an assignment): the current legal status is "Expired – Fee Related", with a nominal adjusted expiration of 2026-07-09. Because the patent granted 2011-05-24, maintenance fees fell due at the 3.5-, 7.5-, and 11.5-year windows and at least one was not paid. This is the operative commercial signal: Sony let the patent lapse rather than monetize or transfer it. I cannot determine from the available data which fee window was missed; a PEDS/patent-center maintenance-fee query would resolve it.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7949604
    2001 : Priority JP filing
    2002 : PCT application filed
    2003 : WO 2003003739 published
    2004 : Inventors assign rights to Sony
    2011 : US 7949604 issued to Sony
    2026 : Recorded as expired fee related

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. No assignment from Sony to any "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" entity is recorded. The sole assignee of record is Sony Corporation, an operating electronics manufacturer, with no intervening LLC. There is no recorded address, registered-agent entry, or single-purpose Delaware/Texas entity to evaluate.

2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present. No assignee or assignor in the chain matches Acacia, Marathon Patent Group, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, or any Spangenberg-linked entity. Sony Corporation appears in the chain only as the original employer-assignee.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Not present (and structurally untestable). There is exactly one recorded assignment, so no correspondent can recur within this chain. The correspondent of record for the 2004-06-23 recordation was not retrievable from the sources available to me and I decline to name one. This signal cannot be scored against a cross-family correspondent list until Assignment Center is queried directly.

4. Cascading transfers — Not present. Zero post-issuance transfers, therefore no consecutive LLC-to-LLC hops in any time window, let alone <24 months. The cited-by set (US 2010/0115025 A1, Sony Computer Entertainment, 2007 priority; US 2010/0161991 A1, ETRI, 2008 priority) reflects later-filed follow-on work citing this disclosure, not downstream ownership.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present. I found no infringement suit naming US 7,949,604 in the sources I searched. With no litigation and no post-issuance assignment, there is no transfer to measure against a filing date.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. Sony Corporation has not filed Chapter 7 or 11. The patent lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees ("Expired – Fee Related"), which is an abandonment, not a distressed sale. No reissue, no sale in a bankruptcy estate, no § 365 assignment is recorded.

7. Privateering — Not present. No transfer to a third-party NPE asserting on Sony's behalf is recorded, and no such assertion appears in the record.

8. Defensive aggregator — Not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. Conversely, it also does not terminate at an operating company that is actively asserting: the patent simply lapsed in place at Sony.

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Verdict

Insufficient data (no records, or only the original assignment).

The only recorded conveyance in the entire chain is the four-inventor-to-Sony Corporation assignment recorded 2004-06-23 — every other signal in this rubric requires a post-issuance transfer that does not exist on the record. That absence is itself the finding: no shell entity, no known asserter, no cascading LLC hops, no pre-suit transfer, and no defensive-aggregator terminus. The patent stayed with an operating electronics company and was allowed to lapse under "Expired – Fee Related" status with a nominal adjusted expiration of 2026-07-09, which is the opposite of a monetization posture. One caveat limits the confidence of this call: I could not open Assignment Center directly in this session, so the reel/frame and correspondent of record for that single 2004-06-23 entry remain unverified — confirm at the Assignment Center search page (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) and cross-check at https://patents.google.com/patent/US7949604B2/en before relying on this as a final record.

I'll research US patent 7949604 and its prior art citations.

Let me research the most relevant prior-art references in detail.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 7,949,604 B2

1. Patent identification (as retrieved)

• Patent number: US 7,949,604 B2 (granted)
• Title: Information providing system, and information processing apparatus and method
• Application: 10/481,846 (PCT/JP2002/006387, filed 2002‑06‑26; WO 2003/003739 A1)
• Priority: 2001‑06‑28 (JP 2001‑195789 / JP 3932476 B2)
• Publication (pre‑grant): US 2004/0249966 A1 (2004‑12‑09)
• Assignee / inventors: Sony Corporation; Hideki Asazu, Tomoyuki Yamamoto, Katsuro Matsuzaki, Kensuke Ohnuma
• Status per source: Expired – Fee Related (adjusted expiration 2026‑07‑09)
• Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7949604/en

Important caveat on completeness: the "Citations (38)" list in the authoritative patent text provided to me truncates mid‑entry at US 7,240,033 B2. I can therefore analyze only the references that appear in full. The list is the examiner/"third‑party" citation set reproduced on the patent's face; I am treating it as the operative prior‑art list rather than doing an independent re‑search, and I cannot confirm the full claim‑by‑claim disclosure of each document without its full text.

2. What the granted claims require (the anticipation targets)

The granted patent has 7 claims, all in method or computer‑readable‑medium form (the apparatus/system claims of the published application were replaced):

Because claims 2–4 are the same subject matter in different statutory categories, and 5–7 likewise, a single reference that fully discloses the server‑side steps would potentially anticipate 2/3/4; one that discloses the client‑side steps would potentially anticipate 5/6/7. Anticipation under § 102 requires every limitation in a single reference — the two functionally specific limitations ("registration rejected when a mandatory viewing/hearing zone is absent" and "utilization information determined according to data cross‑referencing a plurality of contents") are the hardest to meet and appear to be prosecution‑added narrowing language.

3. Cited references — citation, dates, description, and potentially‑anticipated claims

A. Broadcast/metadata content‑structuring references (closest field)

B. Rights/usage‑control and copy‑protection references

C. Network‑delivery / electronic‑distribution references

D. Access‑control / data‑environment references

4. Assessment — the "most relevant" prior art

Strongest § 102 candidates (same technical field — broadcast content + descriptive/usage metadata that is stored and used to drive selective reproduction):

1. US 6,035,304 A / JPH1013811A (Matsushita) — SAI metadata with time‑limit, provider and signature attributes, for stored broadcast applications. Best match to claims 1–4 and, on the reproduction side, 5–7.
2. US 7,227,971 B2 (IBM) — metadata management coupled to content reproduction; touches all categories (1–7).
3. US 6,983,371 B1 (IBM) — super‑distribution of protected content with attached rights (1–4).
4. US 6,959,288 B1 (IBM) — digital content preparation/registration system (1–4).

Strongest § 102/§ 103 candidates on the client‑side claims (5–7):

• EP 1 067 469 A2 / US 7,092,909 B2 (Sony), EP 0 927 921 A2 (Casio), US 6,463,539 B1 (Victor), US 2004/0179691 A1 (Hori).

On the two narrowing limitations:

• "Registration rejected when a zone which should be viewed and heard by all means is not included" — this appears only in the granted (post‑prosecution) claims and is the limitation least likely to be met by any single listed reference. The specification itself describes it (mandatory advertising/sponsor‑announcement zones) but the cited art does not obviously disclose automatic rejection on that basis.
• "Utilization information determined according to data that cross‑references a plurality of contents with respective utilization information" — this reads on the content‑management table (FIG. 8, ID/station/date/time/availability flag) used by the server; the closest structural analogues in the cited art are the IBM rights‑attachment and Sharp copyright‑management references.

Bottom line: No single listed reference appears to disclose all elements of claim 1 (particularly the mandatory‑zone rejection plus the cross‑reference table). The Matsushita US 6,035,304 / JPH1013811A pair is the closest same‑field art and would be the primary § 102 reference against claims 2–4; the Sony/IBM/Casio rights‑and‑metadata references are the primary references against claims 5–7. I would characterize most of the list as § 103 support art rather than clean § 102 anticipatory art, and I flag that conclusion as provisional because the citation list in the authoritative text is truncated at US 7,240,033 B2 and I could not full‑text-verify every document.

Obviousness Analysis — US 7,949,604 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope note / flags before I start

• Date discrepancy (flagged per instruction). My operating date is 2026-09-30; this task header says "Current Date: April 26, 2026." That matters substantively, not just cosmetically: the patent's recorded adjusted expiration is 2026-07-09. On April 26 the patent would still have been nominally in force; on September 30 (my date) it is past that date. § 103 analysis is unaffected either way — obviousness is evaluated as of the effective filing date (2001-06-28), not today — but any damages/prospective-relief conclusion should not be carried over from the earlier-owned sections without re-checking which date is operative.
• I am building on, not repeating, the Prior-Art section. That section established: (i) the granted claim set is 7 claims with two mirror-image families (server 2/3/4, client 5/6/7); (ii) three limitations were added relative to the published application — the mandatory-view-zone rejection, the cross-referencing utilization table, and specifying a portion that must always be reproduced; and (iii) the citation list in the authoritative text truncates at US 7,240,033 B2, so 7 of the 38 cited references are not visible to me. I treat those three limitations as the "obviousness battleground" and the truncation as a standing evidentiary caveat.
• Single-reference § 102 was already covered and is weak. Nothing in the visible cited art discloses all elements of claim 1. That is the right frame for § 103: the case is a combination case, and its strength turns almost entirely on the mandatory-view-zone limitation.

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1. Legal standard actually applied

This is a pre-AIA case (filed 2002-06-26; JP priority 2001-06-28), so pre-AIA §§ 102/103 govern, including pre-AIA § 103(c) (commonly-owned art disqualification), which I address in § 4 because it materially narrows the usable art set.

• Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966): scope/content of prior art; differences; PHOSITA level; secondary considerations.
• KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007): a motivation to combine need not be found in the references themselves; it may come from design incentives, market forces, the known problem the inventor faced, and "common sense." Predictable variation, simple substitution of known elements, and "a finite number of identified, predictable solutions" support obviousness.
• MPEP § 2143: the examiner/defendant must articulate a reason with rational underpinning — not just list references.

PHOSITA (proposed). A person with a bachelor's degree in EE or CS and 2–4 years of experience in digital broadcast systems, networked media distribution, or content rights management, or equivalent. This is a low-to-moderate skill level: nothing claimed requires anything beyond routine engineering once the problem statement is fixed.

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2. Construction of the three dispositive limitations

Obviousness rises or falls on how these are read. I state the construction I apply and the alternative construction the patent owner will press.

Note the internal redundancy: limitations (1) and (3) overlap heavily — a "zone which should be viewed and heard by all means" is "a portion which should always be reproduced." That redundancy is helpful to a § 103 challenger because a single disclosure of enforced-segment playback can satisfy both, but it is also a § 112 written-description/clarity target (out of scope here, but a companion defense).

Also note, again (from the Prior-Art section): claims 5–7 recite the registration-rejection language on the client side, where registration logic does not naturally live. For § 103 I run two alternatives: (a) if construed to require actual client-side rejection, then a reference/system that discloses the whole architecture (server registers/rejects + client judges and plays) discloses it; (b) if construed as mere "judging" of utilization info, then the client-side art set below is more than sufficient.

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3. Combination theory in one paragraph

The admitted background art (JP-A-2000-237671, discussed by the applicant in BACKGROUND ART) already teaches storing a recorded broadcast and delivering separately-authored metadata that defines which portions to reproduce and in what order. That concession removes the entire "metadata-driven secondary utilization" concept from the case. What remains for § 103 is: (a) doing that over a network with a registration/delivery server; (b) gating registration/delivery on a per-content utilization table; (c) adding utilization/license information to the metadata; and (d) enforcing a mandatory segment (the advertiser-protection box). Items (a)–(c) are squarely in the cited art. Item (d) is the only genuine gap, and it is a gap the applicant itself identified as a known problem in the BACKGROUND ART (advertising sponsors' benefit being impaired) — which is precisely the posture KSR says supports obviousness.

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4. Prior-art qualification (pre-AIA) — and the § 103(c) trap

This is the step most analyses skip, and it changes which combinations are viable. Effective dates: invention/priority 2001-06-28; filing 2002-06-26; the critical one-year § 102(b) line is 2001-06-26.

Two consequences worth stating plainly:

1. The Sony § 102(e) cluster is largely unavailable. Several of the "closest" rights-management references in the list (US 6,806,011, US 6,978,377, US 7,072,073, US 7,099,846, US 7,240,033, US 2004/0078336) qualify only under § 102(e) and were commonly owned by Sony at the time the invention was made. Pre-AIA § 103(c)(1) says such subject matter "shall not preclude patentability under this section." A combination cannot be built on them. This is a verification-dependent conclusion (I am relying on the dates in the Prior-Art section and on the inventors' Sony employment), but it is a serious constraint and it pushes the winning combination toward non-Sony art.
2. The one-day miss on US 2004/0015984 A1 matters. The Prior-Art section flagged the sibling reference as potentially anticipating claims 1–7. On its stated priority date of 2001-06-29 it is not § 102(e) prior art to a 2001-06-28 priority. It should be dropped from the combination set (confirm the actual JP priority of that sibling before finalizing).

Net usable core set (non-Sony): Matsushita US 6,035,304 / JPH1013811A; IBM US 6,983,371, US 6,959,288, US 6,587,837, US 7,227,971; Sharp US 6,907,407; Victor US 6,463,539; Xerox EP 0 863 453; Casio EP 0 927 921; Bellsouth WO 1998/031114; and the applicant's own admitted JP-A-2000-237671.

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5. Combination A — the server-side claims (1, 2, 3, 4)

Primary: US 6,035,304 A (Matsushita; = JPH1013811A) in view of US 6,983,371 B1 (IBM) and US 6,959,288 B1 (IBM), further in view of US 6,907,407 B1 (Sharp) and EP 0 863 453 A1 (Xerox).

Claims 2, 3, 4 track the same steps (obtain → specify → judge [with rejection] → add → output). The same combination maps element-for-element:

• obtaining / specifying the content → US 6,959,288 (content preparation/registration) and US 6,035,304 (content identification via SAI).
• judging a utilization condition → Sharp US 6,907,407; Xerox EP 0 863 453.
• adding + outputting → IBM US 6,983,371 / US 6,587,837.
  Claims 3 and 4 are program-on-medium versions of claim 2 and rise or fall with it; there is nothing in the "non-transitory recording medium" / "non-transitory computer-readable medium" recitation that adds patentable weight.

Motivation to combine (KSR-sufficient): All references are in the same field (networked distribution and controlled playback of stored digital content with attached rights/usage data) or are reasonably pertinent to the problem. Combining (i) a known structured-metadata content model (Matsushita) with (ii) a known server-mediated distribution channel that attaches rights to content (IBM) and (iii) a known per-item rights registry (Xerox/Sharp) is the textbook KSR situation: known elements arranged according to known methods to yield a predictable result — a server that distributes segment-defining metadata and enforces per-content usage rules. The market force is explicit and conceded by the applicant: broadcast content is monetized by advertising, and rights holders will not authorize secondary use absent enforcement (BACKGROUND ART).

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6. Combination B — the client-side claims (5, 6, 7)

Primary: US 6,035,304 A (Matsushita) in view of EP 1 067 469 A2 (Sony) and EP 0 927 921 A2 (Casio), further in view of US 6,463,539 B1 (Victor).

Claims 6 and 7 are the program-on-medium forms of claim 5 and add no weight.

Motivation: A receiver that (i) plays only the segments a metadata object designates and (ii) checks usage conditions before doing so is the direct and predictable combination of two known receiver behaviors — segment-driven playback and rights checking. EP 1 067 469 supplies the strongest single motivation on the client side because it is the same applicant's own prior usage-control architecture, confirming that client-side usage adjudication was a known, established technique in the relevant art by 1999 (published 2001-01-10).

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7. Combination C — the crux: the "zone which should be viewed and heard by all means"

This is the limitation recited in every one of claims 1–7, so it decides the whole case. Honest assessment: no single visible reference discloses a server that rejects registration because a mandatory advertiser/sponsor segment is missing. The § 103 argument is therefore a motivation-and-predictable-result argument, not a disclosure argument, and it has three legs:

Leg 1 — The problem is admitted in the patent itself. The BACKGROUND ART paragraph states that broadcast content often contains advertising images and that delivering metadata that omits an advertising image "impairs the benefit of an advertising sponsor." That is a binding, applicant-authored statement that (a) the problem was known before the invention, and (b) the commercial motive to solve it was known. Under KSR, a known problem supplying the design incentive is a legitimate motivation to combine. It also undercuts any "long-felt but unsolved need" narrative, because the need was recognized and articulated — by the applicant.

Leg 2 — The applicant's own admitted prior proposal. JP-A-2000-237671 (publication year 2000; verify exact date) is conceded in the BACKGROUND ART to describe metadata-driven secondary utilization of stored broadcasts defining portions to reproduce. Once that is conceded, the mandatory-segment feature is a modification of a known system in a known direction (constrain the metadata's segment set rather than allowing arbitrary editing), which is the definition of a predictable variation.

Leg 3 — Enforced-segment playback and use-condition checking were known. Victor US 6,463,539 (managing medium governing reproduction), Sako US 2002/0106192 A1 (reproduction control over a contents-data structure), and EP 0 927 921 (Casio, access limited by attribute) all disclose systems in which a controller restricts or mandates which content is reproduced. A PHOSITA seeking to guarantee that a sponsor's segment is not edited out — the exact requirement the specification names — would predictably implement it as an inclusion check: require the segment to be present in the metadata, and refuse to register/serve metadata lacking it. The implementation is a trivial set-membership/interval test over the same time-window data the metadata already carries (the FIG. 7 <StartPos>/<EndPos> segments). KSR expressly endorses this: where the solution is one of "a finite number of identified, predictable solutions," it is obvious to try.

Candidate primary reference for this limitation (if one exists in the truncated portion). The visible citation list is cut off after US 7,240,033 B2 (31 of 38 references shown). There is a realistic chance that a cited reference I cannot see — likely in the broadcast-advertising or program-insertion space — discloses mandatory-segment enforcement. Re-pull the full citation list before filing any § 103 challenge, because a single clean reference on this limitation converts the case from "argued motivation" to "clean disclosure," which is far stronger.

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8. Combination D — the cross-referencing utilization table

Primary: EP 0 863 453 A1 (Xerox) in view of Sharp US 6,907,407 B1, optionally with US 6,959,288 B1 (IBM).

The claim language is structural, not algorithmic: "data that cross-references a plurality of contents with respective utilization information." Xerox's shared-data environment in which each file has independent security properties is a plurality of items each mapped to its own attribute — structurally the FIG. 8 table. Sharp discloses managing copyright/usage conditions on content; IBM's content-preparation system discloses preparing many content items with associated rights. Combining a per-item rights table (Xerox/IBM) with a broadcast-content server (Matsushita/IBM distribution) to gate registration yields the claimed feature predictably; a PHOSITA implementing a server that must decide whether many different contents may be secondarily used would as a matter of routine design maintain exactly such a per-content look-up. This limitation is the easiest of the three to defeat — it is essentially "use a table to store per-item rules," which KSR treats as a predictable application of a known technique.

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9. Motivating rationales, collected (MPEP § 2143-compliant)

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10. Anticipated rebuttals and why they are weak

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11. Claim-by-claim vulnerability (ranked)

Because every independent claim carries the mandatory-zone limitation, a defense strategy should lead with the best § 103 combination against claims 2–4, then apply the same rationale to 5–7, and treat claim 1 last.

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12. Gaps, caveats, and what would move the needle

• The citation list is truncated at US 7,240,033 B2 (31 of 38 references visible). The seven hidden references could contain a clean disclosure of mandatory-segment enforcement. This is the single highest-value follow-up.
• I have not full-text verified any reference. The mappings above rest on the short characterizations in the Prior-Art section. Before reliance, pull full text/specs — especially US 6,035,304 (claim 18 signature/time-limit attributes) and the IBM references — to confirm the described disclosures and to look for the mandatory-zone teaching.
• § 103(c) disqualification is date-dependent. If any of the Sony references I proposed to avoid turns out to qualify under § 102(a)/(b) (e.g., a pre-2001-06-28 grant or publication I mis-dated), it becomes available again. Conversely, US 6,243,138 B1 and EP 1 067 469 A2 are available only because they are § 102(a)-type art; confirm their exact publication/grant dates.
• US 2004/0015984 A1 and US 2004/0179691 A1 should be dropped from any combination as apparent non-prior-art (effective dates after 2001-06-28 and 2001-06-28 respectively) — verify the underlying JP priorities first.
• Obviousness is judged at the 2001 priority date, not today. The patent's expired/lapsed status and the April-vs-September 2026 date discrepancy are relevant to remedies and to whether it is worth bringing a challenge at all — not to the merits of § 103.

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13. Bottom line

On the visible art, claims 2–4 (server-side method and program media) are the most likely to be invalid as obvious over Matsushita US 6,035,304 / JPH1013811A in view of IBM US 6,983,371 and US 6,959,288, further in view of Sharp US 6,907,407 and Xerox EP 0 863 453 A1; claims 5–7 (client-side) fall to Matsushita in view of Sony EP 1 067 469 A2 and Casio EP 0 927 921 A2, further in view of Victor US 6,463,539 B1; and claim 1 is the same combination applied across the full three-apparatus architecture. In every case the lynchpin is the mandatory-view-zone rejection, which is the only limitation with no clean disclosure in the art I can see — and it is precisely the limitation the applicant conceded the problem for in BACKGROUND ART, which is why a KSR motivation argument (known problem → known, predictable inclusion-check solution) is the right vehicle. The cross-referencing table limitation is the weakest part of the patent owner's case and should be attacked as a routine design choice. Verify the seven truncated citations before finalizing — a single clean reference on the mandatory-zone limitation would convert this from a strong motivation-based § 103 case into a clean preponderance case.