US 8843433

I'll search for the specific patent number and related docket information.

Let me search for the abstract and claims text, and verify the litigation status.

Let me check for CAFC 2026 appellate dockets and the abstract text.

Verification note before the summary

I searched for the literal identifier 8843433 (7 digits → US 8,843,433). Searches also surfaced several unrelated "343" documents (e.g., a wheelchair patent and a compound patent bearing unrelated "343" identifiers); these are not US 8,843,433 and I have excluded them. Nothing in the results suggests US 8,843,433 is a reissue or that the number was mistyped.

One caveat: the supplied environment date (2026‑09‑29) is later than the date you gave (April 26, 2026). Material I retrieved includes events dated through September 2026, so I flag that the record below includes post‑April‑2026 activity.

Bibliographic summary — US 8,843,433 B2

Uncertainty: the assignee line on Google Patents lists "Many Worlds 2t Innovations LLC," and a 2026‑04‑15 assignment from ManyWorlds, Inc. → Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC is recorded. I did not independently retrieve the USPTO assignment instrument, so treat the chain as reported rather than certified.

Abstract

I could not retrieve the verbatim abstract text from the sources available (the Google Patents full text you supplied is truncated before the abstract, and the Justia snippet did not expose it). Rather than fabricate wording, here is the invention's own "Definitions" language, which the record identifies as the summary:

"This invention relates to systems and methods for incorporating an adaptive layer of auto-learning capabilities within one or more computer-implemented systems."

"a system and method for generating personalized recommendations based, at least in part, on combining behavioral-based indexing and contents-based indexing is disclosed."

In substance: interest/expertise levels are inferred from behavior (behavioral indexing), document contents are indexed into vectors of informational elements with relevancy values (contents indexing, e.g., by a search engine), topics are mapped between the two, and the comparison of inferred topic interest/expertise against object relevancy values drives selection of objects delivered to the user.

Independent claims — plain-language overview

Justia's claim listing shows three independent claims: 1 (method), 8 (system), and 17 (system). (Note: the Justia rendering shows claims 9–16 reciting "The system of claim 1"; given claim 8 is the system independent claim, these appear to be OCR/transcription artifacts for "claim 8" — flagging as an artifact rather than a claim-dependency oddity I can confirm.)

Claim 1 — computer-implemented method (behavioral affinity + content-relevance filtering):

1. Identify a content object to serve as the contextual reference (the "anchor").
2. Access a first set of values, each an inferred interest level of the user in a topic, derived from tracked behaviors (behavioral side).
3. Access a second set of values, each an inferred degree of relevance of phrases in the content object to a topic (contents-indexing / search side, i.e., an OCV-type vector).
4. Generate a recommendation of one or more objects for delivery to the user, where the recommendation function runs on a processor and uses both sets of values together.

So the core is: combine a behavior-derived user-topic profile with a content-derived topic-relevance vector to pick what to recommend.

Claim 8 — computer-implemented system: the same four operations (identify contextual content object; access behavior-derived interest values; access content-derived phrase-relevance values; generate the recommendation from both) implemented as one or more processors configured to perform them.

Claim 17 — computer-implemented system (use of the behavioral profile as a search vector across systems):

1. Access usage behaviors of a user of a first, behaviorally indexed system (behavioral indexing yields topics).
2. Generate affinities between the user and those topics (i.e., an interest profile such as an MTAV).
3. Transform that affinity/topic profile into an "object contents vector" usable by a search function — converting a behavioral profile into content-index/search-vector form.
4. Execute the user's search request with that vector, against objects in a second computer-implemented system (cross-system search).
5. Deliver the results.

Claim 17 is thus the "integrated search" hook: a behaviorally-derived interest profile is turned into a search vector and used to query a different system's corpus.

Representative dependents (all dependent on claim 1) add: contextualizing on an object the user selected from search results (claim 2); expertise-level inference and user-set expertise tuning (claims 3–4); a behaviorally-indexed contextual neighborhood (claim 5); contextual-affinity tuning (claim 6) and serendipity tuning (claim 16); and generated explanations tying a theme from the content-relevance values to an inferred topic of interest (claim 7).

Litigation status (2026)

• No Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) 2026 docket for US 8,843,433 was found. What I located are district court actions in the Eastern District of Texas.
• Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC v. OpenAI OpCo, LLC, EDTX (Marshall Division), Docket 2:26‑cv‑00774, filed August 31, 2026. The asserted patents are US 8,676,742; US 8,843,433; US 10,699,202; US 12,307,388; and US 12,299,603. The complaint targets ChatGPT features (Memory, Search, Deep Research, Projects, Shopping Research) plus OpenAI's Vector Stores / File Search, and seeks damages (past and continuing royalties), enhanced damages for willful infringement, and an injunction. IPWatchdog independently reports the same filing date and court. Allegations are unproven.
• Google Patents also lists an EDTX family-litigation entry pointing to case 2:26‑cv‑00303, and a first-worldwide-family-litigation entry (Darts‑ip family 47142579). I did not verify those dockets directly.

Confidence / caveats

• High confidence: patent number, title, inventors, filing date (2012‑07‑23), issue date (2014‑09‑23), application number, pre-grant publication, original assignee, and the substance of independent claims 1, 8, and 17 (taken from the supplied authoritative full text and the Justia claim listing).
• Lower confidence / not verified authoritatively: the verbatim abstract wording (not retrieved); the precise claim architecture beyond the three independent claims (Justia's rendering of claims 9–16 appears corrupted); the recorded assignment dates; and any CAFC appellate activity — I found none for this patent, which is itself a limitation of my search rather than proof of absence.
• Per your instruction, I have not substituted or "corrected" any identifier; US 8,843,433 is reported as found.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8843433/en ; https://patents.justia.com/patent/8843433 ; https://patents.justia.com/patent/20120290518 ; https://ailawsuittracker.com/cases/many-worlds-2t-innovations-llc-v-openai-opco-llc-2-26-cv-00774/ ; https://ipwatchdog.com/tag/patent-infringement/

I'll research litigation involving US patent 8843433. Let me search multiple sources.

The first searches are contaminated with other patents sharing "343" (e.g., U.S. 5,855,343 from AdjustaCam, and U.S. 8,815,883). Let me search more precisely for the actual 8,843,433 patent and its owner.

I've found key litigation. Let me gather more detail and check for any other cases.

Litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 8,843,433

Important preliminary note on identifiers: Search engines frequently conflate different patents whose numbers end in "343." I found numerous hits for U.S. Patent No. 5,855,343 (AdjustaCam v. Newegg/Rosewill/Sakar — E.D. Tex. 2010, Fed. Cir. 2012-1062) and for an unrelated "′343 patent" (issued Feb. 14, 2023; expired Oct. 14, 2023; subject of IPR2025-01370 involving Red Hat and CAS). Neither of those is U.S. 8,843,433, and I have excluded them. All results below were verified to concern U.S. 8,843,433 ("Integrated search and adaptive discovery system and method," filed July 23, 2012, granted Sept. 23, 2014, originally assigned to ManyWorlds, Inc., now Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC).

Also note a date discrepancy: your prompt states the current date is April 26, 2026, but the search results include events through late September 2026. I report the dates as found, so you can assess which were on file as of any given date.

Case 1 — Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC v. Spotify Technology S.A., Spotify AB, and Spotify USA Inc.

Status/outcome (as of latest docket entries available):

• Case is open/pending; no final judgment.
• Spotify was served (Spotify USA on 4/17/2026; Spotify AB on 4/27/2026) and obtained extensions to respond.
• On July 16, 2026, Defendants filed a motion to dismiss Plaintiff's claims or transfer venue as to Spotify USA Inc. and Spotify AB (to the Southern District of New York).
• A Docket Control Order (July 23, 2026) set the Markman/claim-construction hearing for Nov. 16, 2027, pretrial conference for April 3, 2028, and jury selection for May 8, 2028.
• Sources: PacerMonitor docket; Justia docket listing; Ex Parte case page

Case 2 — Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC v. OpenAI OpCo, LLC

Status/outcome: Active/pending — complaint filed August 31, 2026. Plaintiff seeks a jury trial, past and continuing royalties, enhanced damages for willful infringement, and an injunction. The ′433 patent is asserted in Count 5 (direct infringement and inducement), alleging OpenAI's retrieval-augmented recommendation platform practices embedded content objects with relevance scores inferring user interest by topic from usage behavior. Commentators expect a Section 101 eligibility challenge.

• Sources: IPWatchdog, Sept. 2, 2026; AI Lawsuit Tracker

Case 3 (referenced by the patent record) — family litigation flag

The Google Patents record for US 8,843,433 carries a "First worldwide family litigation filed" flag with a Darts-IP family link (patents.darts-ip.com, family 47142579). That flag corresponds to the Many Worlds 2T Innovations v. Spotify action (E.D. Tex. 2:26-cv-00303) already described above — Google Patents also links directly to that docket via its Unified Patents litigation feed.

Summary / caveats

• Two known district-court cases assert U.S. 8,843,433, both filed in 2026 by the current assignee, Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC (assignment from ManyWorlds, Inc. recorded April 15, 2026): Spotify (2:26-cv-00303) and OpenAI (2:26-cv-00774). Both are pending; neither has reached claim construction or trial.
• I found no litigation asserting the ′433 patent between its 2014 grant and 2025 — the patent appears to have been litigated only recently, after the 2026 change of assignee.
• I did not find any PTAB/IPR proceeding specifically against U.S. 8,843,433 in these results; the IPR2025-01370 matter surfaced in searching involves a different ′343 patent (2023-issued) and should not be confused with U.S. 8,843,433.
• Because the search results post-date the April 26, 2026 date given in your prompt (and the system date is Sept. 29, 2026), some of the case-status details above (e.g., the Spotify venue motion, the OpenAI filing) may be beyond the April 26, 2026 record. Verify against PACER/Unified Patents for the operative date you need.

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

The first hit is a different patent (US 8,784,343 — Bonutti Research). Let me dig for ManyWorlds-specific PTAB challenges.

No ManyWorlds PTAB hits yet. Let me check the litigation chain and any post-grant challenges more precisely.

PTAB / AIA Trial Landscape — U.S. Patent No. 8,843,433

Verification note: The canonical structured block ("PTAB proceedings on file") returned no AIA trial proceedings from the USPTO Open Data Portal as of the most recent ingest. I ran independent web checks against PTAB decision text, petition repositories (PTAB E2E / PTACTS), and litigation reporting on 2026-09-29. Those checks surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming U.S. 8,843,433. I found two false positives — see the warning box below — that a careless search will hand you as "the IPR on the '433." They are different patents.

⚠️ Do not confuse these with proceedings on 8,843,433:

• IPR2015-00993, Lantz Medical, Inc. v. Bonutti Research, Inc. — this is U.S. 8,784,343 B2 ("Range of Motion System," a physical-therapy orthosis patent), not 8,843,433. Institution denied on 2015-05-14 (Panel: Hyun J. Jung, Scott A. Daniels, James A. Worth). Irrelevant to the ManyWorlds patent.
• Red Hat v. Competitive Access Systems IPR over a '343 patent issued 2023. Again a different patent with a matching last-three-digits.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on U.S. 8,843,433: 0 (zero). Breakdown: 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution-denied — because no petition has ever been filed. The bottom-line defensive posture is neither "hardened" nor "dead": the patent has no PTAB validity adjudication of any kind, so there is no Final Written Decision to lean on, no cancellation to point to, and — critically — no § 315(e)(2) estoppel tying a defendant's hands either. Every printed publication, patent, and public-use/system-art ground is still on the table for the first party willing to file.

No proceedings to enumerate

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} — {Petitioner} v. {Patent Owner} block to populate, because the structured list is empty and independent verification found nothing to add. Per the governing constraint — do not invent proceeding numbers — I am not manufacturing entries. The absence is corroborated by the Google Patents litigation record for US8843433, which flags litigation (TXED case 2:26-cv-00303) and "Family has litigation," but no PTAB/board proceedings anywhere in its event timeline.

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is UNTESTED at the PTAB. U.S. 8,843,433 has never been before the Board, so no claim has been canceled, confirmed, or construed in an AIA trial. That means there is no narrowed, "surviving" claim set to work from — a defendant evaluating exposure must do full independent claim construction and invalidity work on the patent as issued (2014-09-23, from Application 13/555,941, filed 2012-07-23; priority to 2011-03-29). Contrast this with the sibling patents in the same family, which have drawn PTAB attention; the '433 itself has not. Note that 8,843,433 is not the same patent as ManyWorlds' 8,655,829, 8,676,742, 10,699,202, 12,307,388, or 12,299,603 — do not port over findings from those.

Estoppel landscape: empty — and that is the defendant's leverage. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel only attaches to a petitioner (and its real parties in interest/privies) after a claim is instituted in an IPR/PGR. With zero institutions, no party is estopped from anything. A defendant today can raise § 102, § 103, § 112, and § 101 grounds both at the PTAB and in district court without the estoppel trap, subject only to the usual IPR eligibility limits (see below). There is also no petitioner-privity chain (à la Worlds Inc. v. Bungie) restricting who may file. Whoever moves first on this patent gets a clean slate.

Pattern signals: the "patent assertion entity, no IPR backstop" profile. The owner-side chain runs ManyWorlds, Inc. → MANY WORLDS 2T INNOVATIONS LLC (assignment recorded 2026-04-15), and assertion activity is current and accelerating: Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC v. Spotify (TXED 2:26-cv-00303, filed 2026-04-17, Judge Gilstrap) and Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC v. OpenAI OpCo, LLC (TXED 2:26-cv-00774, filed 2026-08-31, Marshall Division), the latter asserting the '433 and four other patents against ChatGPT Memory/Search/Deep Research/Projects, Vector Stores and File Search. No defensive aggregator (e.g., Unified Patents, RPX, Allied Security Trust) appears anywhere in the 8843433 record — the only third-party litigant signal on the Google Patents page is a private co-defendant litigation link, not a PTAB filer. The patent owner has therefore not had to defend a single Board appeal in this family's AIA-trial track, which cuts the other way for them: their PTAB track record on the '433 is untested, and their § 101/practical-application history is the obvious pressure point (see next steps).

Availability of the AIA trial vehicles (a gate, not a count). The '433's application was filed 2012-07-23 — pre‑AIA — so: PGR is unavailable (PGR covers only first-inventor-to-file patents); CBM is unavailable (the program sunset and no petitions could be filed after 2020-09-16); IPR is the only AIA trial option. The older ex parte reexamination avenue (not an AIA trial, so outside the scope of this report) remains separately available.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant: do not wait for an FWD that will never come. There is no PTAB decision to cite in a stay motion, a § 101 motion, or an estoppel argument. Your invalidity case is built from scratch.
• Mind the § 315(b) one-year clock. It runs from your client's service of a complaint alleging infringement. For a defendant served 2026-04-17 (Spotify), the IPR petition deadline was on or about 2017-04-17— correction: 2027-04-17; for OpenAI's complaint of 2026-08-31, the bar date is on or about 2027-08-31. Calendar this against the defendants' answer/venue motions (Spotify has moved to dismiss or transfer to S.D.N.Y.).
• File IPR, since PGR/CBM are off the table. Because the patent is pre-AIA, the IPR grounds are limited to patents and printed publications under § 102/§ 103 — no public-use or system-prior-art ground is available in the IPR itself. Preserve those system-art and § 112/§ 101 attacks for district court (and consider parallel ex parte reexamination for printed-publication art you want a lower-cost shot at).
• Front-load the § 101 argument. The subject matter is quintessentially "abstract idea" territory (behavioral inferencing → recommendations). The Board's appeal docket shows a § 101 rejection of claims on "inferring preferences from usage behaviors" and "recommendations in a temporal sequence" in a related ManyWorlds application (Appeal 2017-011693; application 13/027,042, attorney docket MW‑20B). Caveat: I could not confirm that this appeal belongs to the '433's own application chain — it is a different ManyWorlds application in the same family neighborhood. Treat it as a lead to verify, not as authority about the '433's claims. It is nonetheless a strong signal of how the Office and the Board read this specification's claim language.
• Watch for a late-filed petition and re-verify. Petitions can land any time before the bar dates above, and ODP ingest lags. Before relying on this report, re-check PTAB E2E / PTACTS for U.S. 8,843,433 and confirm the OpenAI and Spotify defendants' filing behavior; a first-institution decision, if one issues, is what converts this from "clean slate" to "estoppel-managed."
• Cite nothing you cannot source. There is no Final Written Decision to link for this patent; the only opinions I could cite publicly relate to other patents (Bonutti's 8,784,343 and the CAS '343), and I have deliberately not attributed their holdings to 8,843,433.

One factual discrepancy to flag rather than paper over: IPWatchdog's 2026-09-02 report describes the '433 as "issued on September 23, 2024." The authoritative patent record (Google Patents, and this patent's own front page) gives a grant/publication date of 2014-09-23. I am reporting the 2014-09-23 date as controlling and treating the 2024 date in the news piece as an error — worth confirming directly against the USPTO PatentCenter file wrapper before using the date in any filing.

I'll research the assignment record for US 8843433 using available sources before assembling the report.

Let me dig into the assignment records, correspondent, and litigation history.

Let me search for the assignment specifics, entity registration, and additional litigation.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US Patent 8,843,433 B2

Patent: US 8,843,433 B2 — "Integrated search and adaptive discovery system and method"
App. No.: 13/555,941 · Filed: 2012‑07‑23 · Granted: 2014‑09‑23 · Priority: 2011‑03‑29
Source of record used: Google Patents legal‑events data (which mirrors USPTO assignment records) and docket/patent records surfaced via search.

Data‑access caveat (read first). I could not open the USPTO Assignment Center record itself in this session, so I do not have the reel/frame numbers or the correspondent of record (recording attorney) for either assignment. Those fields must be pulled directly from Assignment Center (search patent number 8843433). Everything below is grounded in the two assignment events that are documented in the Google Patents legal‑events feed for this patent, plus litigation records. I have not fabricated reel/frame or correspondent data.

Inventors

Notes / patterns:

• Flinn and Moneypenny are the only two inventors across the ManyWorlds corpus (GoodIP lists ~43 ManyWorlds filings; both names dominate). This is a founder‑inventor pattern, not an employee‑division pattern.
• The PCT publication (WO2005054982A3) lists applicant ManyWorlds, Inc., 510 Bering Drive, Suite 470, Houston, Texas 77057, and inventor addresses in Sugar Land, TX and Houston, TX — consistent with a small, founder‑run R&D shop.
• No "all inventors departed within 12 months" signal. Because the inventors are the principals of the assignee, the usual pre‑fire‑sale tell is absent; the relevant exit event is instead the 2026 portfolio transfer (see below).

Original assignee

ManyWorlds, Inc. (Houston, TX) — named on the face of the issued patent ("Current Assignee … ManyWorlds Inc" as original assignee; "MANYWORLDS, INC." recorded assignee).

• Line of business: adaptive systems / recommendation‑engine and "fuzzy network" personalization R&D and software. The patent's own specification is a hedgepodge of recommender search, expertise inference, and fuzzy‑content‑network transformation — a research/IP house profile.
• Did it ship a product embodying the claims? Not established by any source I found. ManyWorlds reads as an R&D / IP‑holding concern rather than a commercial product company; no product line embodying the '433 claims was surfaced.
• Current status: No bankruptcy, merger, or dissolution record surfaced. However, the entity has clearly been divesting patents — e.g., Unified Patents shows US 8,515,900 ("Environment‑responsive People Matching") with Original Assignee ManyWorlds Inc and Current Assignee Nokia OYJ ("Likely Sold"). That is a monetization/divestiture posture, not an operating‑company posture.
• In 2026 ManyWorlds, Inc. transferred the '433 (and family siblings) to Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC.

Assignment timeline

Two recorded conveyance events exist in the Google Patents legal‑events feed for US 8,843,433. Reel/frame values are unavailable to me and are shown as [not retrieved].

• Executed ~2012‑07‑23 / recorded 2012‑07‑23 — Reel [not retrieved] Frame [not retrieved]

  • Conveyance: Assignment (Assignment of Assignors' Interest)
  • Assignor: Steven D. Flinn; Naomi F. Moneypenny (inventors)
  • Assignee: ManyWorlds, Inc.
  • Correspondent: [not surfaced — pull from Assignment Center]
  • Context: Initial inventor‑to‑company assignment executed contemporaneously with filing; standard original‑assignee capture, not a monetization event.

• Executed 2026‑04‑15 / recorded 2026‑04‑15 (per legal‑events feed) — Reel [not retrieved] Frame [not retrieved]

  • Conveyance: Assignment (Assignment of Assignor's Interest)
  • Assignor: ManyWorlds, Inc.
  • Assignee: Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC
  • Correspondent: [not surfaced — this is the field most worth pulling; see Signal 3]
  • Context: Transfer‑to‑asserter / monetization. Two days later this entity filed its first infringement suit (see Signal 5).

D/B/A note: the assignee name is rendered inconsistently across sources — "Many Worlds 2t Innovations LLC" (Google Patents current‑assignee field) and "MANY WORLDS 2T INNOVATIONS LLC" (legal‑events entry). Treat as the same entity.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 8843433
    2011 : Priority applications filed
    2012 : Application filed by ManyWorlds Inc
         : Inventors assign rights to ManyWorlds
    2014 : Patent US 8843433 issues
    2026 : Assigned to Many Worlds 2T Innovations
         : Spotify suit filed in EDTX
         : OpenAI suit filed in EDTX

NPE / troll‑pattern signals

1. Shell‑entity transfer — PRESENT (moderate).
The patent moved from an R&D/operating assignee (ManyWorlds, Inc.) to a newly surfaced, licensing/assertion‑only LLC, Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC, on 2026‑04‑15. Concrete corroboration: (a) the LLC has no product in commerce surfaced in any source; (b) it exists to assert — it filed two EDTX suits within ~5 months of the transfer; (c) the name is templated as an IP vehicle ("…Innovations LLC"), and is conspicuously branded after the accused technology — "2T" mirrors Spotify's accused "Two Tower (2T) recommendation engine." Caveat: I could not verify the LLC's registered‑agent address or single‑membership status; if Assignment Center confirms a registered‑agent service address, this upgrades to strong.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT (by name).
Neither ManyWorlds, Inc. nor Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC matches the listed public NPE rosters (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi‑LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation, Spangenberg entities). This is a new, unlisted entrant, not an established NPE brand — which is itself notable (new entrants are often absent from the lists until they accrue filings).

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR (data gap).
The recording attorney/correspondent of record was not surfaced in any source I could reach, so I cannot confirm or refute a repeating correspondent. This is the highest‑value field to retrieve — compare the correspondent on the 2012 ManyWorlds recording against the correspondent on the 2026 Many Worlds 2T recording; a shared name across those two links is exactly the "lawyer runs the shell" tell. For completeness but not as a substitute: the litigation counsel of record for Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC on the OpenAI docket include Kevin Cadwell (filed the complaint), Mark D. Siegmund, Bradley Bowling, Lisa Maria Thomas, Jack Shaw, William D. Ellerman, Ryan S. Loveless, and Shuya Yang. These are litigation appearances, not assignment correspondents — do not conflate.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT.
Only two assignments exist and they are 14 years apart (2012 → 2026). There is no <24‑month LLC‑to‑LLC cascade for this patent. (The portfolio‑wide transfer to the 2T entity is a single hop.)

5. Pre‑litigation transfer — PRESENT (strong).
Assignment to Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC dated 2026‑04‑15; the first suit naming this entity and this patent, Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC v. Spotify Technology S.A. et al., 2:26‑cv‑00303 (E.D. Tex.), was filed 2026‑04‑17 — two days later. A second suit, v. OpenAI OpCo, LLC, 2:26‑cv‑00774 (E.D. Tex., filed 2026‑08‑31), asserts US 8,843,433 together with US 8,676,742; US 10,699,202; US 12,307,388; and US 12,299,603 — i.e., a portfolio‑level transfer, not a single‑patent deal. This is the classic "arrange the chain, then file" signature.

6. Bankruptcy fire‑sale — NOT PRESENT (no evidence).
No Chapter 7/11 proceeding by ManyWorlds, Inc. was surfaced. The 2026 transfer looks like a negotiated divestiture to an assertion vehicle, not a court‑supervised sale.

7. Privateering — UNCLEAR.
If ManyWorlds principals stand behind Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC, the transfer would be a self‑assertion vehicle rather than classic operating‑company→NPE privateering. No SEC filing, EFF, or Patent Progress coverage establishing a "principal funds the vehicle" relationship was found. Flagged as unresolved pending entity/ownership records.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT.
The chain terminates at a litigating entity, not at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. The patent is being asserted, not neutralized. (Inverse‑signal check: failed.)

Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

Two strong signals drive this: (i) a transfer‑to‑asserter — the original R&D assignee ManyWorlds, Inc. conveyed all right to Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC on 2026‑04‑15, an entity with no evident products whose name mirrors the accused "2T" recommendation engine; and (ii) a pre‑litigation transfer — the first infringement suit (Spotify, 2:26‑cv‑00303, E.D. Tex.) was filed 2026‑04‑17, two days after the assignment, with a second suit (OpenAI, 2:26‑cv‑00774) filed 2026‑08‑31 asserting the '433 alongside four related family members. Confidence would harden to airtight if Assignment Center confirms (a) a registered‑agent service address for the LLC and (b) a single recurring correspondent attorney across the 2012 and 2026 recordings — the two fields I could not retrieve.

Verify the primary record here: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 8843433; equivalent legal‑events view at https://patents.google.com/patent/US8843433/en#legalEvents). Also cross‑check the docket portal referenced on the patent page: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Texas%20Eastern%20District%20Court/case/2%3A26-cv-00303.

Cross‑check discrepancies worth noting

• Issue date: IPWatchdog's September 2026 article describes the '433 as "issued on September 23, 2024." The authoritative full text and the face of the patent state issued 2014‑09‑23. Treat the article's year as an error.
• Priority date: Google Patents shows prior‑art/priority 2011‑03‑29 (with external priorities from US 13/268,035 and US 13/295,414); Unified Patents lists the '518 publication's priority as 2011‑03‑28. One‑day variance only; immaterial to the assignment analysis.

I'll research US patent 8843433 and its cited prior art. Let me start with several searches.

Let me search for the specific prior art citations listed on this patent.

Let me try to retrieve the front-page references cited for this patent from other databases.

Important limitation on this analysis

I must be upfront about a sourcing problem that materially affects the deliverable you asked for. I was able to confirm the patent record below, but I was not able to retrieve the patent's own "(56) References Cited" list — i.e., the examiner-cited U.S. patent documents, foreign documents, and non-patent literature printed on the front page of US 8,843,433. The Google Patents page text I retrieved did not render that table, and my remaining tool budget ran out before I could pull the granted-PDF front page or the USPTO PatentCenter/Global Dossier "References Cited" data.

Because of that, I cannot responsibly list "each patent citation for 8843433" with full citations, dates, and § 102 claim mappings. Fabricating a reference list from memory would violate the analysis standard, so I am not going to guess at patent numbers or attribute them to this patent's front page. What follows is (a) the verified record, (b) the claim architecture you would map any reference against, (c) the confirmed documents I did find that bear on the patent, and (d) the exact sources that will yield the authoritative citation list.

1. Verified bibliographic record (from the fetched Google Patents page)

Continuing-family / priority-chain members confirmed: US 8,650,149; US 8,600,926; US 9,171,263; US 9,454,730; US 10,699,202; US 2020/0074335; US 12,299,602; US 12,299,603; US 12,307,388; US 12,423,603; US 2025/0371392. Two litigations are noted: EDTX case 2:26-cv-00303 and Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC v. OpenAI OpCo, LLC (EDTX 2:26-cv-00774).

2. Claim architecture any § 102 reference must meet

From the granted claims (via the Justia full-text record), independent claims include at least:

• Claim 8 (system): processors configured to generate a recommendation in accordance with a contextual neighborhood associated with the content object, wherein the contextual neighborhood is generated by a behavioral indexing process; dependents 13 (contextual affinity tuning level), 14 (explanation associating a theme from the second values with an inferred-interest topic), 15 (explanation referencing a recommendation tuning control), 16 (serendipity tuning level).
• Claim 17 (system): access usage behaviors of a user; generate user-to-topic affinities (inferred interest levels); transform the affinities/topics into an object contents vector executable by a search function; execute a search request in accordance with the object contents vector against objects in a second system; deliver results. Dependents 18 (expertise level), 19 (control to search only non-behaviorally-indexed objects), 20 (explanation).

The § 102 linchpins are therefore: (i) the hybrid of behavioral indexing (collaborative/affinity-vector) with contents indexing (search-engine OCV), and (ii) transforming a user-topic affinity vector (MTAV/MTEV) into a query/OCV that drives a search across a second system. Any anticipating reference must disclose both a behavioral-affinity vector and its conversion into a content-vector/search query, not merely recommender filtering or content search alone.

3. Documents I did confirm that bear on 8843433

These are confirming/citing documents (they cite 8843433 or share its family), not examiner-cited prior art:

• US 2012/0254075 A1 — "Contextually Integrated Learning Layer" (same ManyWorlds family; lists US 8,843,433 among cited documents).
• US 2012/0078938 A1 — "System and method for context based query augmentation."
• US 2012/0254099 A1 / US 8,600,926 B2 — "Integrated interest and expertise-based discovery system and method."
• Numerous patents list US 8,843,433 in their "Cited By" table (including US 2008/0040239).

Note the distinction: these are later documents citing the '433 patent (forward citations). They tell you about the patent's sphere of influence, not about § 102 prior art. Google showed "Cited By (56)" for the sibling patent US 8,600,926.

4. Where to get the authoritative "(56) References Cited" list

To produce the exact deliverable you specified, pull the front page from one of these (my tool access was exhausted before I could):

1. USPTO PatentCenter → application 13/555,941 → "References Cited" / "Foreign References" / "Non-Patent Literature."
2. Granted-PDF front page (patentimages.storage.googleapis.com PDF for US8843433) — the (56) block.
3. Global Dossier / Espacenet — "Cited documents" tab.
4. Litigation discovery — the EDTX pleadings and any IPR/PGR petitions in the two pending cases will contain the defendant's invalidity reference set, which is your best proxy for "most relevant prior art" against these claims.

5. Framework for the § 102 mapping once the reference list is in hand

For each cited reference, complete this table:

Anticipation under § 102 requires a single reference disclosing every limitation. Given the claimed combination (behavioral indexing and contents indexing and the MTAV→OCV query transformation), most cites in this art will support § 103 obviousness over a recommender reference plus a search-engine reference rather than clean § 102 anticipation — which is precisely how this claim family has been attacked in the parallel IPR/CBM record for ManyWorlds patents.

6. Honest bottom line

• What I can confirm: the patent's identity, dates, claims, family, classifications, and several documents that cite it.
• What I could not confirm: the examiner-cited prior-art list on its face, and therefore any per-reference § 102 anticipation mapping. I am not going to invent those citations.
• Recommended next step: retrieve the (56) block from PatentCenter/Global Dossier/the granted PDF, then run the § 102/§ 103 table in § 5 above. If you can supply that (56) list (or the PDF front page), I will complete the full citation/date/description/claim mapping for every reference in one pass.

I'll note up front: no "Prior Art" section was actually included in what was carried forward to me — the previously generated material I was given covers the bibliographic summary, abstract/invention substance, claim overview, and litigation status, but contains no prior-art search results. So I cannot "use the results from the Prior Art section of this page" as instructed without first retrieving them. Let me search for the record's own prior-art citations and the relevant field art.

The search didn't surface the patent's front-page "References Cited" list. Let me target Justia's citation listing and the field art directly.

I now have the litigation-side context but still not the patent's own cited-art list. Let me verify the key candidate references in the field so I only assert things I can ground.

Scope note before the analysis (read first)

Two procedural flags, because they affect reliability:

1. No "Prior Art section" was actually delivered to me. The previously generated sections I was given contain bibliographic data, invention substance, a claim overview, and litigation status — there is no prior-art search result set to "use." I therefore attempted to retrieve (a) US 8,843,433's own front-page "References Cited" list and (b) the operative field art. I did not obtain the patent's own examiner-cited art list — the searches returned mostly unrelated "References Cited" tables from other documents (hydraulic-tool ISRs, phosphaalkene chemistry, etc.). The analysis below is therefore a reconstructed § 103 analysis grounded in (i) art that surfaced in this session's searches and (ii) well-established field art, with explicit confidence labels. I have not attributed citations to the '433 examiner that I could not verify.

2. Date conflict (unchanged from the prior section, restated per your rule). You set the current date as April 26, 2026; the environment reports 2026-09-29, and the material in the record includes events through September 2026. I flag this rather than silently picking one.

I also flagged, and now resolve, one open item from the prior section: the Google Patents "family has litigation" entry pointing to EDTX case 2:26-cv-00303 is the Many Worlds 2T Innovations LLC v. Spotify Technology S.A. et al. action (Marshall Division) — the complaint in that case expressly asserts the '433 patent (¶ 21: "U.S. Patent No. 8,843,433 … filed on July 23, 2012 and issued on September 23, 2014").

Contradiction flagged: IPWatchdog's September 2, 2026 article states the '433 patent was "issued on September 23, 2024." The authoritative full text you supplied, the prior section, and the Spotify complaint ¶ 21 all say September 23, 2014. The 2024 date is a transcription error in that article; the 2014 grant date governs. (It does not change the § 103 date framework.)

1. Governing legal and temporal framework

Statute. The application was filed July 23, 2012 — before the March 16, 2013 AIA first-inventor-to-file transition. Absent an AIA-transition continuation, pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. §§ 102/103 apply, and § 103(a) is satisfied if "the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art."

Critically prior art date. The '433 does not stand alone. Its § 120/§ 119 chain, per the Spotify complaint ¶ 25, runs to three provisionals:

• 61/469,052, filed March 29, 2011
• 61/496,025, filed June 12, 2011
• 61/513,920, filed August 1, 2011

Google Patents additionally lists claimed external priority from US 13/268,035 (US 8,650,149) and US 13/295,414 (US 8,600,926). This is the single most important § 103 lever: if the asserted subject matter is entitled to the March 29, 2011 provisional date, the prior-art window closes on 2011-03-29; if that priority fails for lack of § 112 written-description support (a very common attack route for omnibus provisionals), the window opens to 2012-07-23. Either way, the relevant window is 2003–2010, which is densely populated with hybrid content/behavior recommender art.

§ 103(c) common-ownership wrinkle — important here. The closest art in the field is ManyWorlds' own earlier family (see § 4). Under pre-AIA § 103(c), subject matter that qualifies as prior art only under §§ 102(e), (f), or (g) is disqualified as § 103 art if it was commonly owned at the time the invention was made. Flinn and Moneypenny are the named inventors of both the '433 and essentially the whole 2003–2008 ManyWorlds estate, and ManyWorlds, Inc. was the original assignee — so ManyWorlds' own earlier applications/patents cannot be combined against the '433 under § 103. However, § 103(c) does not reach art that is prior art under § 102(a)/(b) — i.e., printed publications more than one year before the priority date (before 2010-03-29) are usable regardless of ownership. That distinction is decisive: the ManyWorlds publications of 2005–2008 remain available as § 103 art, while the ManyWorlds patents whose only prior-art status is § 102(e) do not.

2. Level of ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA)

As of March 2011, a PHOSITA in the '433 field would be a person with a bachelor's degree in computer science (or equivalent) and 2–4 years' experience in information retrieval and/or recommender systems, or a master's degree with 1–2 years' experience — with working knowledge of: the vector-space model and term-weighting (TF-IDF), relevance feedback/query-by-example, collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, user profiling from implicit behavioral signals, and graph/network data structures. This is a routine engineering level, which matters: under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), a predictable combination of known elements is obvious, and "obvious to try" is available where there is "a finite number of identified, predictable solutions."

3. The claims to be tested (from the prior section, incorporated)

I build on the prior section's claim overview rather than repeating it. For § 103 purposes, three observations control the whole analysis:

• The three independent claims (1, 8, 17) do not require the fuzzy network. The "fuzzy content network," affinity vectors, and transformation function that dominate the specification and the litigation narrative are not elements of claims 1, 8, or 17 as summarized. The claims are, at bottom: (i) a behavior-derived user/topic value set + (ii) a content-derived phrase/topic relevance value set → (iii) a recommendation. That is a hybrid recommender recitation.
• Claim 17 is a cross-system search recitation: behaviorally-derived user-topic affinities → transformed into an object-contents-vector usable by a search function → search executed against a second system's objects. That is profile-as-query + federated/multi-source search.
• The claims are functional and largely result-oriented, so they are construed to cover any structure/algorithm performing the recited functions — which widens the prior-art net rather than narrowing it.

4. Prior art landscape

Confidence labels: [V] = verified in this session's search results; [K] = well-established from domain knowledge but not independently re-verified in this session; [R] = appears in the record of this page (litigation/quoted material).

4a. Hybrid (content + behavior) recommendation — the core of claims 1 and 8

4b. Behavior-based profiling / "behavioral indexing" (the first set of values)

4c. Content indexing / relevance values (the second set of values)

[K] The vector-space model and TF-IDF weighting (Salton & McGill, Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval, 1983) and latent semantic indexing (Deerwester et al., JASIS 1990) are the foundational, indisputably-known techniques for producing "a vector of constituent elements with associated weights" — i.e., exactly the '433's object contents vector (OCV). The '433 specification itself concedes this: OCVs "may be generated using pattern detection and/or statistical techniques such as Bayesian analytic approaches and/or other statistical pattern matching and/or statistical learning techniques, as are known by those skilled in the art." That concession is an admission that the content-indexing half of claim 1 was known art.

4d. Profile-as-query and cross-system search (claim 17)

4e. Dependent-claim art

• Claim 2 (contextualize on a search-result object): standard "more like this" / item-to-item similarity — e.g., Linden et al., US 6,266,649 (Amazon, item-to-item collaborative filtering) and search-engine "related documents" features. [K]
• Claims 3–4 (expertise inference and user tuning of expertise): expertise-location and expertise-ranking art (e.g., the "referral web" / expertise-finding literature), plus ManyWorlds' own published US 2008/0249967 A1 family. [K]/[V]
• Claim 5 (behaviorally-indexed contextual neighborhood): WO 2005/054982 describes fuzzy-network contextual relationships generated from usage behavior. [V]
• Claim 7 (generated explanation tying a content-relevance theme to an inferred topic of interest): ManyWorlds' own "Adaptive Recommendation Explanations" (US 2008/0249967 A1, published 2008-10-09; later US 7,860,811), which is squarely directed to generating explanations for recommendations. [V] — § 102(b) publication; not removable by § 103(c).
• Claim 16 (serendipity tuning): the Bieganski reference, "System, Method, and Article of Manufacture for Making Serendipity-Weighted Recommendations to a User" (retrieved this session as Exhibit 1005 in a PTAB petition, with quoted passages on serendipity-weighted recommendations and affinity neighborhoods). [R] I did not verify its patent number this session, so I cite it by title only.

5. Combination A — claims 1 and 8

Proposed combination: Chidlovskii (US 6,327,590) [K] or the Balabanović/Adomavicius hybrid-recommender teachings [K], in view of WO 2005/054982 (ManyWorlds, § 102(b)) [V], further in view of the admitted-known vector-space/TF-IDF content indexing [K].

Element-by-element:

Motivation to combine (KSR / MPEP 2143 rationales):

• (A) Known elements combined per known methods, predictable result. Both halves produce a numeric score; combining them by weighted sum (Claypool) is the paradigmatic predictable combination.
• (D) Known technique applied to a known device ready for improvement. Behavioral recommenders had a recognized defect — cold start and content-blindness. Many Worlds itself pleads this defect as the field's state (Spotify complaint ¶¶ 31–32: prior engines were "content-agnostic," suffered "cold-start problems," and operated as a "black box"). A § 103 analysis may take the patentee's own characterization of the prior-art problem as evidence of the known problem, which supplies the motivation to add content analysis.
• (F) Known work in one field prompting variation. Content-based IR had long used document vectors; applying document vectors to recommendation was a design variation within the same field with a reasonable expectation of success.
• Interrelated teachings / same field of endeavor. All references address retrieving and ranking information objects for a user — KSR's "familiar elements … according to known methods."

Secondary indicia: none of the classic objective indicia (unexpected results, long-felt need, industry praise) is apparent from the record; the patent's own specification frames the invention as improving existing recommender systems, which cuts toward obviousness absent evidence of unexpected results.

6. Combination B — claim 17 (cross-system behavioral-profile-as-search-vector)

Proposed combination: WO 2005/054982 / US 2007/0094157 (behavioral affinity generation) [V] + Rocchio relevance feedback [K] + Chidlovskii US 6,327,590 [K] + federated/metasearch art [K]/[R].

Mapping:

Motivation to combine: the problem being solved — "my behavioral profile lives in system A; I want relevant material from system B" — was a recognized interoperability problem, and the references provide complementary halves (profiling in one, profile-to-query searching in the other). The result is predictable (more relevant cross-corpus results) and the number of solutions was small (embed the profile; expand the query; re-rank results). This meets KSR's "finite number of identified, predictable solutions."

7. Dependent claims

Each dependent claim, on the prior-section reading, adds a conventional feature:

• claims 2, 5 — contextual anchoring/neighborhood. Object-anchored relevance is the "related documents"/item-to-item paradigm; WO 2005/054982 expressly describes fuzzy-network contextual neighborhoods from behavior. Individualized and cross-combined, obvious.
• claims 3–4, 6, 16 — expertise inference, expertise tuning, contextual-affinity tuning, serendipity tuning. Tuning controls are predictable GUI design choices applied to a known ranking function (KSR rationale (C)). Serendipity-weighted recommendation is expressly taught by the Bieganski reference retrieved this session [R].
• claim 7 — generated explanations. ManyWorlds' own § 102(b) publication US 2008/0249967 A1 ("Adaptive Recommendation Explanations," 2008-10-09) is directed to exactly this. [V] This is the strongest single-reference obviousness position among the dependents — and, notably, the patentee's own art, so there is no "different field" rebuttal available.

8. Anticipation vs. obviousness (why § 103, not § 102)

I did not identify any single reference disclosing all elements of claims 1, 8, or 17. The content+behavior combination together with the object-anchored contextual reference (claim 1) and the cross-system execution (claim 17) appear to require at least two references. That is the classic § 103 posture, and it is the posture in which the strongest KSR reasoning applies.

A threshold validity question that moots some of the above: whether the '433's claims are entitled to the March 29, 2011 provisional date at all. If any asserted claim lacks § 112 support in provisionals 61/469,052 / 61/496,025 / 61/513,920, the effective date shifts to July 23, 2012, bringing in an additional year of art (including the intervening ManyWorlds sibling filings of Oct/Nov 2011 and any 2010–2012 third-party art). This is worth quantifying before finalizing any invalidity theory.

9. Counterarguments the patentee will press (and how they fare)

1. "The prior art did pure collaborative filtering; we added content." (This is Many Worlds' framing — Spotify complaint ¶¶ 31–32.) Weak. The pleaded framing ignores the hybrid-recommender art (Fab 1997; Claypool 1999; Adomavicius & Tuzhilin 2005 [K]) and ManyWorlds' own content-and-behavior publications [V]. The patentee's characterization of the prior art at the pleading stage is not a substitute for the actual prior art of record.
2. "The fuzzy network is the invention." Weak as to claims 1/8/17, which (per the prior section's reading) do not recite fuzzy-network limitations. It is a stronger argument only for claims that do recite network/affinity structures (and even there, WO 2005/054982's fuzzy-content-network disclosure [V] and US 6,795,826 [K] are directly on point).
3. "Common ownership / § 103(c) disqualifies our own family." Partially right. § 103(c) removes the § 102(e)-only ManyWorlds applications, but not the § 102(a)/(b) printed publications (WO 2005/054982, 2005-06-16; US 2007/0094157, 2007-04-26; US 2008/0249967, 2008-10-09) [V]. An obviousness combination built on published art survives § 103(c).
4. "No motivation to combine." Weak under KSR given same-field, same-problem references and the patentee's own admitted cold-start/black-box defects.
5. Secondary considerations. Not yet visible in the record. Realistically, the strongest patentee responses are objective indicia (copying/commercial success) and, more dispositively, Alice/§ 101 is the patentee's own anticipated battleground (per IPWatchdog's comment that a § 101 challenge "is virtually guaranteed") — meaning the near-term validity fight may be fought on eligibility, not § 103.

10. Confidence and caveats

High confidence:

• Pre-AIA § 102/§ 103 applies (filed 2012-07-23).
• Priority candidates (provisionals 61/469,052 [2011-03-29], 61/496,025 [2011-06-12], 61/513,920 [2011-08-01]) per the Spotify complaint ¶ 25 [R]; the '433 filed 2012-07-23, issued 2014-09-23 [R + authoritative full text].
• The '433's specification expressly concedes content-indexing (OCV) techniques are "known by those skilled in the art" — an admission usable in a § 103 analysis.
• The substantive element mapping for claims 1, 8, 17 (from the prior section and the authoritative full text).
• Case 2:26-cv-00303 = Many Worlds 2T Innovations v. Spotify [R] — resolving the open item from the prior section.

Lower confidence / expressly unverified:

• The '433's actual examiner-cited "References Cited" list was NOT retrieved. I cannot tell you which references the examiner considered or overcame. Do not treat any reference above as "cited on the face of the '433."
• Patent numbers cited by memory [K] — US 6,327,590 (Chidlovskii); US 5,754,939/5,724,567 (Herz); US 6,981,040 (Utopy); US 6,438,579 (Agent Arts); US 5,790,426 (Athenium); US 5,867,799 (Lang); US 6,795,826 (ManyWorlds Consulting); US 6,266,649 (Amazon). I re-ran verification searches but the session's step limit interrupted them. Verify every number and date before relying on it in a petition.
• The Bieganski reference is cited by title only (from a PTAB petition retrieved this session); I did not confirm its patent number.
• Family relationship between the '433 and the 2003–2008 ManyWorlds estate is not confirmed. If the '433 claims § 120 benefit into that chain, those publications are not prior art at all; if it does not (my reading of the Google Patents external-priority entries points this way), they are § 102(b) art. Resolve this first — it is outcome-determinative for the strongest combination.
• Whether any asserted claim is supported by the 2011 provisionals is unverified; this determines the 2011-03-29 vs. 2012-07-23 cutoff.

Rule compliance: no patent number appearing in this record has been auto-corrected; the IPWatchdog "2024" grant date is reported as found and flagged as a contradiction against the authoritative 2014 date rather than silently fixed.