US 9124982

I'll verify the patent details and check for any 2026 litigation activity before summarizing.

Let me pull the full claim set and confirm the PTAB/CAFC litigation posture.

US 9,124,982 B2 — Verification Summary

All identifiers below are reproduced literally as they appear in the patent record. Where the supplied full text conflicts with a search result, I note it rather than silently reconciling it.

1. Bibliographic data

Continuity chain (from the patent's own Cross-Reference section): 14/021,011 is a continuation of 13/352,694 (filed Jan. 18, 2012), which is a continuation of 12/100,281 (filed Apr. 9, 2008), which claims benefit of provisional 60/910,808 (filed Apr. 9, 2007). The '982 patent is a member of the same family as US 8,111,839 ("Always on headwear recording system," Goldstein et al., original assignee Personics Holdings Inc.); the Federal Circuit described the '982 as the '839 patent's "grandchild."

Classifications: G06F3/16; G10L15/26; H04R1/10; H04R29/00; H04R3/04; G06F1/163; H04R2420/07; H04R2460/15.

2. Abstract (verbatim from the patent record)

"A system that records audio and stores the recording is provided. The system includes first and second monitoring assemblies mounted in an earpiece that occludes and forms an acoustic seal of an ear canal. The first monitoring assembly includes an ambient sound microphone (ASM) to monitor an ambient acoustic field and produce an ASM signal. The second monitoring assembly includes an ear canal microphone (ECM) to monitor an acoustic field within the ear canal and produce an ECM signal. The system also includes a data storage device configured to act as a circular buffer for continually storing at least one of the ECM signal or the ASM signal, a further data storage device and a record-activation system. The record-activation system activates the further data storage device to record a content of the data storage device."

⚠️ Important discrepancy to flag: the abstract (and virtually the whole specification) is written around an earpiece/ear-canal embodiment, but the granted independent claim 1 is not. This is the single most consequential fact about this patent and is discussed in §3.

3. Independent claim — plain-language overview

Claim 1 is the only independent claim. This is stated in the patent owner's own district-court filing: "Claim 1 of the '982 patent—the only independent claim—requires 'a monitoring assembly mounted on a mobile phone.'" (E.D. Tex. Case 2:21-cv-00413, Dkt. 762). Claims 2–25 are therefore all dependent claims.

Claim 1, element by element, in plain language:

1. "a monitoring assembly mounted on a mobile phone" — the microphone hardware is physically mounted on a mobile phone, not in an earpiece. This is narrower in one respect (it requires the phone as the mounting platform) and broader in another (no ear-canal seal, no ECM, no earpiece is required by the claim).
2. "an ambient sound microphone (ASM) to monitor an ambient acoustic field proximate to the mobile phone, the ASM producing an ASM signal" — one ambient microphone picking up the sound field around the phone.
3. "a data storage device configured to act as a circular buffer for continually storing the ASM signal" — an always-on ring buffer that continuously overwrites itself, i.e., the "black box" concept. Only the ASM signal is required; the ECM signal is not.
4. "a further data storage device coupled to the data storage device" — a second, larger store (e.g., phone storage or a remote/PMP device).
5. "a record-activation system including software configured to activate the further data storage device to record a content of the data storage device" — a software trigger that, when fired, causes the ring buffer's existing contents (plus ongoing audio) to be copied/preserved into the second store.

The inventive core as claimed is thus: continuous circular-buffer capture of ambient audio on a mobile phone, plus a software-activated "promote the buffer contents to permanent storage" mechanism — the "listen-again to something that already happened" / forensic-recovery idea.

Dependent-claim families (from the claim text available and the litigation record):

⚠️ Uncertainty: the supplied full text cuts off mid-claim 7, so I can give no authoritative verbatim content for claims 7–25. I will not guess at their wording.

4. Validity and litigation posture (this is where the patent's current value lives)

• PTAB — IPR2022-00234 (Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Samsung Electronics America, Inc. v. Staton Techiya, LLC; filed Dec. 13, 2021; FWD June 14, 2023, APJ George R. Hoskins): challenges to claims 1–6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17–20, 24, 25. The Board held claims 1–6, 14, 15, 17–20, 24 and 25 unpatentable, and held that claims 10 and 11 were not shown unpatentable.
• Federal Circuit — Appeal No. 23-2294 (ST Case1Tech, LLC, substituted for Staton Techiya, LLC; companion to Nos. 23-2305/23-2306): nonprecedential opinion issued October 9, 2025, affirming the Board's holding that claims 17–20 of the '982 patent are unpatentable for obviousness. The panel rejected Techiya's claim-construction argument on "analysis" (holding the argument forfeited and, alternatively, incorrect on the intrinsic evidence).
• Appeal No. 23-2342 — Samsung's cross-appeal was dismissed by joint stipulation under FRAP 42(b) (order of Jan. 29, 2025); no merits ruling. Hence the dismissal did not vindicate the patent, and an advocacy-piece-style characterization of "patent survives" reflects only the absence of an adverse appellate holding, not a merits win.
• District court: Staton Techiya, LLC v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., E.D. Tex. No. 2:21-cv-00413 (consolidated with 2:22-cv-00053). Following a bench trial, the court entered findings/conclusions on May 9, 2024; Techiya noticed appeal (June 3, 2024). The '982 patent was also part of a set of patents for which the court found unclean hands imputable to Techiya through its agent Synergy IP, resulting in dismissal with prejudice — this is a serious cloud on enforcement and is the context for the re-assignments below.
• Other dockets flagged on the patent record: CAFC Nos. 23-2294, 23-2342, and 24-1917; PTAB IPR2022-00234; E.D. Tex. 2:21-cv-00413.

5. Ownership chain (per Google Patents reassignment records — their own disclaimer applies)

Personics Holdings Inc. → Personics Holdings, LLC (2014) → security interest to DM Staton Family Limited Partnership (2014) → DM Staton Family LP / Staton Techiya, LLC (2017–2018) → ST Portfolio Holdings, LLC → ST Case1TECH, LLC (both recorded 2024-06-21). Google Patents lists current assignees as "St Case1tech LLC," "DM Staton Family LP," and "Strategic Portfolio Holdings LLC."

6. Explicit caveats

1. No 2026-dated Federal Circuit merits decision on US 9,124,982 was found in the indexed results. The latest confirmable substantive appellate event is the October 9, 2025 nonprecedential affirmance in No. 23-2294. Appeal No. 24-1917 appears on the patent's litigation record, but I could not confirm its subject matter, date, or disposition from the sources retrieved.
2. Current assignee listings on Google Patents are self-described as potentially inaccurate; I have reported the recorded assignment chain rather than a legal conclusion of title.
3. Claims 7–25 are not fully available in the supplied text; my claim discussion above is limited to what is verbatim in the record plus what the PTAB/CAFC and district-court documents independently confirm.
4. The abstract/specification-vs-claim mismatch (§2) is my observation from the face of the record, not a legal conclusion. It matters because a "headwear recording system" framing may mislead an FTO reader: the enforceable independent claim is phone-mounted, and most of its original scope has been cancelled or held unpatentable.

Bottom line: US 9,124,982 B2 claims an always-on, circular-buffer ambient-audio recorder mounted on a mobile phone with a software-triggered "preserve the buffer" activation. Its commercially asserted scope has been substantially eroded — the PTAB invalidated most challenged claims (including claim 1), the Federal Circuit affirmed as to claims 17–20, and the underlying district-court action collapsed on unclean-hands grounds — while the patent remains formally active with an adjusted expiration of 2028-09-08.

I'll research litigation involving US 9,124,982. Let me run several searches.

Let me dig into the specific cases identified.

Litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 9,124,982 (“Always on headwear recording system”)

Patent 9,124,982 (app. 14/021,011; filed 2013‑09‑09; granted 2015‑09‑01; priority 2007‑04‑09) is owned today by ST Case1Tech, LLC (with DM Staton Family LP / Strategic Portfolio Holdings LLC shown on the Google Patents assignment history). I confirmed the following matters; all of them trace to a single patent-owner family (Staton Techiya / Personics lineage) and a single accused infringer (Samsung).

1. District court litigation

Staton Techiya, LLC and Synergy IP Corporation v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Samsung Electronics America, Inc.

Sources: Unified Patents case page 2:21‑cv‑00413; CourtListener Dkt. 992; AO 120 patent report; CourtListener Dkt. 766; ABA Journal summary.

2. PTAB proceedings (America Invents Act review)

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Samsung Electronics America, Inc. v. Staton Techiya, LLC — IPR2022‑00234 (U.S. Pat. No. 9,124,982)

Note on a data‑attribution caveat: the Google Patents litigation panel for IPR2022‑00234 carries the label “Unified Patents PTAB Data” and the “Petitioner” field appears only as the Unified Patents portal attribution. My reading of the Final Written Decision itself is that the petitioner was Samsung, not Unified Patents — the public docket and the PTAB decision both name Samsung. I flag this because the Google Patents label could be misread as identifying Unified Patents as the petitioner.

Sources: IPR2022‑00234 Final Written Decision (excerpt); Patexia case summary; Federal Circuit opinion, No. 23‑2305 (Oct. 9, 2025); Fed Circuit Blog, Opinions & Orders Oct. 9, 2025.

3. Federal Circuit appeals touching the ’982 patent

Sources: Google Patents litigation panel for US 9,124,982; Federal Circuit opinion No. 23‑2305; Notice of appeal, E.D. Tex. Dkt. 936; PatSnap summary of No. 23‑2342.

Limits of what I can confirm

• I found no other litigation naming U.S. 9,124,982 — no case against any defendant other than Samsung entities, and no other district court docket. The Consolidated case 2:22‑cv‑00053 (Staton Techiya v. Samsung, filed ~Feb. 14, 2022) was consolidated with 2:21‑cv‑00413; the ’982 patent appears on the AO 120 attachment for the lead case, and I could not independently verify from the pages I retrieved whether the ’982 was separately re‑asserted in the 2:22 member case.
• I could not retrieve a PACER/Unified Patents docket page explicitly stating the filing date for the district court complaint beyond the Nov. 4, 2021 (Unified Patents) and 11/8/2021 (court AO 120) figures shown above, nor confirm the precise costs total ultimately taxed (the bill‑of‑costs orders I saw address components totaling roughly $91,786.76 in deposition transcripts and $56,162.65 in video depositions, plus uncontested items).
• The Federal Circuit’s Oct. 9, 2025 affirmance in No. 23‑2294 is characterized in the sources I retrieved as nonprecedential and resting on the materially identical ’839 patent appeal; I have not seen the standalone 23‑2294 opinion text itself.

If you need a certified docket pull (PACER for 2:21‑cv‑00413 and the CAFC docket for 24‑1917), that is the next verification step, since the appellate outcome and any Rule 36 or precedential effect should be confirmed at the source rather than from aggregators.

I'll research this. The structured block says no PTAB activity, but the patent's Google Patents page (embedded above) shows an IPR — let me verify with web search.

Strong signal — the Google Patents block listed an IPR, and I've now confirmed it. Let me dig into the FWD, the institution decision, any additional petitions, and the appeals.

Source note (read first)

The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block was not populated in this prompt — the USPTO ODP ingest returns no AIA trials for US 9,124,982. That is a known lag, not a signal of absence: the patent's own Google Patents record (embedded above) carries a PTAB entry, and independent public records confirm a full IPR through Final Written Decision and Federal Circuit appeal. I have sourced the proceedings from those public records and flag every place where the record is thinner than the structured data would normally be.

One correction up front: the Google Patents entry attributes the data source to "Unified Patents PTAB Data." Unified Patents is the data vendor, not the petitioner. The petitioner is Samsung.

Proceedings overview

One AIA trial proceeding on US 9,124,982: IPR2022-00234, Samsung v. Staton Techiya — instituted, tried, decided for petitioner in part, and affirmed on appeal (2025-10-09). Status breakdown: 1 active = 0; claims invalidated = 1 (partial — 14 of 16 challenged claims); claims sustained = 1 (the same FWD upheld claims 10 and 11 on the same proceeding, and that part is now final after Samsung's cross-appeal was voluntarily dismissed); settled/terminated = 0 as to the IPR itself (Samsung settled the appeal, not the trial); institution denied = 0.

Bottom line for a defendant: the patent is partially dead, not dead. Independent claims 1 and 17 (the forensics-analysis family) are canceled, and everything depending from them collapses with them. But claims 10 and 11 survived a full IPR trial and are now effectively hardened — nobody has ever invalidated them, and the petitioner's appeal on those claims was dismissed without a merits ruling. If a demand letter cites claim 1, claim 5, or claims 17–20, the assertion is built on canceled claims. If it cites claim 10 or 11, you are litigating virgin territory.

IPR2022-00234 — Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. & Samsung Electronics America, Inc. v. Staton Techiya, LLC

(Most impactful proceeding — and the only one.)

• Type: Inter Partes Review (35 U.S.C. §§ 311–319)
• Filed: 2021-12-13 (Patexia docket entry; the Federal Circuit opinion describes the petitions as filed "[i]n December 2021")
• Status: "Final Written Decision - Appealed" per structured litigation data; FWD affirmed by the Federal Circuit on 2025-10-09. Not present in the ODP structured block.
• Judge panel: Administrative Patent Judges George R. Hoskins (writing), Nathan A. Engels, and Russell E. Cass. (Hoskins authored the FWD.)
• Real parties-in-interest: Petitioner — Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Samsung Electronics America, Inc. Patent Owner — Staton Techiya, LLC and Synergy IP Corporation.
• Petition grounds: Claims challenged: 1–6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17–20, 24, 25 of the '982 patent (16 claims). Statutory basis: § 103 obviousness. The Board's FWD recites that Petitioner "filed a Petition … pursuant to 35 U.S.C. §§ 311–319 to institute an inter partes review of U.S. Patent No. 9,124,982 B2 … claims 1–6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17–20, 24, and 25." The ground that carried the day on the forensics claims was a Kurki-based combination: per the Federal Circuit, claim 17–20 were held "unpatentable for obviousness over Kurki and other references." The specific art for the canceled mobile-phone claims (1–6, 14, 15, 24, 25) is documented in the petition papers but I have not independently verified each reference name — I am not going to name art I cannot confirm.
• Institution decision: Instituted 2022-06-17, on all petitioned claims. The FWD records simply: "We instituted the petitioned review (Paper 12, 'Institution Decision')." No partial denial, no claim carve-out.
• Final Written Decision: 2023-06-14. Caption: Final Written Decision Determining Some Challenged Claims Unpatentable, 35 U.S.C. § 318(a). The operative verdict sentence, quoted verbatim:

"We determine Petitioner has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that claims 1–6, 14, 15, 17–20, 24, and 25 are unpatentable, but has not shown claims 10 and 11 are unpatentable."

Claim-level: canceled — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25. Sustained — 10, 11. The Board's reasoning on claim 17–20 turned on construction of "analysis" in the "audio forensics analysis system" limitation: the Board held that speech-to-text falls within "audio forensics analysis," and that Techiya's proposed "noise dosage" construction had "no objective support in the record." Applying that construction, Kurki's speech-to-text conversion and translation disclosed the limitation, and Samsung showed a motivation to combine.

• Settlement / termination: The IPR was not settled — it ran to a merits FWD. A separate settlement later ended the appeal (see below). Settlement terms are likewise not public; the Fed Circuit opinion states the parties "later settled." No terms disclosed; presumably confidential.
• Appeal: Yes — two CAFC dockets on this FWD.
  • No. 23-2294, ST Case1Tech, LLC v. Squires (Patent Owner's appeal; Staton Techiya assigned the patents to ST Case1Tech, LLC, which was substituted as appellant). Issue on appeal: only the Board's construction of "analysis" in the "audio forensics analysis system" limitation. Disposition: AFFIRMED on 2025-10-09 (nonprecedential). The Federal Circuit held the argument was forfeited ("Techiya has forfeited its present argument by not making it to the Board") and, "in any event, that the argument is incorrect in light of the intrinsic evidence." The court decided the companion '839 appeal first (ST Case1Tech, LLC v. Squires, Nos. 23-2305/23-2306, 2025-10-09) and held that reasoning "applies with equal force here."
  • No. 23-2342, Samsung's cross-appeal as to the claims the Board upheld (claims 10 and 11 of the '982 patent). Disposition: voluntarily dismissed under FRAP 42(b) pursuant to a joint stipulation after Samsung settled and "withdrew from the proceedings in this court." No merits ruling, no claim-construction or validity holding. No CAFC opinion exists for 23-2342 — do not cite one.
  • No. 24-1917 appears on the patent's CAFC docket listing (2024). I could not verify its subject matter, parties, or disposition from the sources available. Flagging it as unverified rather than guessing; treat as an open item to pull from PACER.
• Defensive value: Claims 1 and 17 — and every canceled dependent claim — are dead and affirmed-dead. Any infringement theory premised on claim 1 (the mobile-phone AORS) or claims 17–20 (forensics analysis) is untenable; you can say so with a PTAB FWD and a Federal Circuit affirmance behind you. Conversely, claims 10 and 11 were tested by a sophisticated petitioner with full discovery and survived, so do not assume a follow-on IPR on those claims is a layup. Note also: Samsung and its privies are now estopped under § 315(e)(2) as to the grounds they raised or reasonably could have raised — but you are not, and Samsung's art and expert record are now public and free for you to reuse.

Strategic summary

Claim status on the '982 patent (25 claims issued).

• CANCELED (14): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25 — held unpatentable in the 2023-06-14 FWD, affirmed on appeal 2025-10-09. Independent claim 1 and the forensics-analysis claim family (17–20) are both gone.
• SUSTAINED (2): 10 and 11 — challenged and not proven unpatentable; Samsung's cross-appeal on these was dismissed by stipulation, so the Board's holding stands unreviewed and final.
• UNTESTED (9): 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 21, 22, 23 — never challenged by Samsung. Careful here: several of these depend from canceled claims (claims 5→1 and 6→5 are visible in the printed claim set), so although not formally canceled, they are commercially hollow if their base claim is gone. The truly live targets among the untested set are those that do not depend from claim 1. The surviving enforceable claim family today is claims 10–11 (plus any untested claim not traceable to claim 1).

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estops Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Samsung Electronics America, Inc. — and their real parties-in-interest/privies, including Synergy IP Corporation on the patent-owner side only if aligned — from asserting in the E.D. Tex. litigation (§ 2:21-cv-00413) any ground raised or reasonably could have been raised in IPR2022-00234. Because every petitioned claim was instituted, that estoppel is broad: Samsung cannot re-run its § 103 combinations on claims 1–6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17–20, 24, 25 in court. Three practical consequences for you as a different defendant: (1) you face no estoppel at all — the bars are petitioner-specific; (2) the untested claims 7–9, 12, 13, 16, 21–23 were not part of Samsung's petition, and courts are split on whether "reasonably could have raised" reaches claims a petitioner left out entirely, so a fresh IPR on those claims is procedurally open; (3) Samsung's petition, expert declarations, and the Board's claim constructions are now a free roadmap — reuse them.

Pattern signals. This was a Samsung campaign, not a defensive-aggregator action. Samsung filed a coordinated wave of IPRs against Staton Techiya's portfolio in December 2021 and mid-2022 (including IPR2022-00242 and -00243 on the sibling '839 patent; IPR2022-00388, -00410, -01078, -01098, -01099, -01106 on other Techiya patents) — but only one of those, IPR2022-00234, targeted the '982 patent. Staton Techiya litigated aggressively and appealed all three Board decisions, but lost the only substantive argument it preserved. Notably, the patent owner's appeal failed on forfeiture — it changed its claim-construction position on appeal — which is a caution for anyone relying on patent-owner-side appellate reasoning in this family. No Unified Patents or RPX-style defensive aggregator is in the chain; the litigation-driven posture means the art Samsung found is public but no one has done the work of hunting new art against the surviving claims.

Recommended next steps

1. If a demand cites claim 1, 5, or 17–20: you have a dispositive answer. The FWD ("claims 1–6, 14, 15, 17–20, 24, and 25 are unpatentable") was affirmed in ST Case1Tech, LLC v. Squires, No. 23-2294 (Fed. Cir. 2025-10-09) (nonprecedential). Quote the disposition and demand the certificate of cancellation. Ignoring a canceled claim is not merely a defense — continuing to assert it invites sanctions.

   • FWD text (as filed in the E.D. Tex. record): https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/Texas_Eastern_District_Court/2--21-cv-00413/Staton_Techiya_LLC_et_al_v._Samsung_Electronics_Co._Ltd._et_al/docs/455/8.pdf
   • Companion affirmance (23-2305, reasoning adopted for 23-2294): https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/23-2305.OPINION.10-9-2025_2585626.pdf
   • Justia mirror: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cafc/23-2305/23-2305-2025-10-09.html
   • Summary of the 2025-10-09 opinions: https://fedcircuitblog.com/2025/10/09/opinions-orders-october-9-2025/

2. If the demand cites claim 10 or 11: build a fresh case, don't copy Samsung's. These claims survived a full trial and an unreviewed cross-appeal. Samsung's own papers are public (PTAB E2E, IPR2022-00234), so start by identifying the art Samsung used and lost on, then hunt different references. Because Samsung's cross-appeal was voluntarily dismissed, there is no appellate construction of claims 10–11 — you have a clean slate on claim scope.

3. On the untested claims (7–9, 12, 13, 16, 21–23), verify dependency before you do anything. Any claim depending from canceled claim 1 or claim 17 is commercially dead even though its number is not on the cancellation certificate. Map dependencies against the printed claims before treating any of them as live.

4. No active proceeding is pending on this patent. IPR2022-00234 is fully terminated and the appeal is closed (23-2294 affirmed; 23-2342 dismissed by stipulation). There are no PTAB trial milestones to track — no institution deadline, no oral hearing, no § 316(a)(11) one-year FWD clock running.

5. Open items to pull from primary sources before you rely on them:

   • CAFC No. 24-1917 — on the patent's appellate docket but unverified here. Pull from PACER to determine whether it is a district-court judgment appeal or a further PTAB-related appeal.
   • The IPR2022-00234 petition's full ground-by-ground art list — I confirmed the Kurki-based § 103 ground for claims 17–20 from the Federal Circuit opinion and confirmed the claim set and outcomes from the FWD, but did not independently verify the specific references behind the cancellation of claims 1–6, 14, 15, 24, 25. Get those from the petition (Ex. 1003–1014 range) on PTAB E2E.
   • Post-FWD cancellation certificate — confirm the 2023-07/08 issuance and effective cancellation of the 14 claims.
   • PTAB case portal (structured source that should eventually index this): https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/ptab/case/IPR2022-00234 and USPTO PTAB E2E at https://ptab.uspto.gov.

Do not rely on the ODP structured block here. It is empty for this patent despite a fully adjudicated, appealed IPR. For a patent this heavily litigated — E.D. Tex. § 2:21-cv-00413, an ITC-adjacent assertion campaign, and multiple follow-on suits against other defendants — the structured-data gap is a tooling artifact, not evidence that no AIA trial exists.

I'll research the assignment record and litigation history for US 9124982 before reconstructing the chain.

Let me dig into the specific assignment records and the Personics bankruptcy history.

Assignment & Ownership Reconstruction — US Patent 9,124,982 B2

Provenance caveat (read first). The USPTO Assignment Center index (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) and the legacy assignment.uspto.gov index render via JavaScript and did not return machine-readable records to my searches. The assignment events below are reconstructed from (a) the Google Patents "Legal Events" (Reassignment) table on the patent page, (b) PTAB chain-of-title exhibits and §3.73(c) statements filed in IPR2022-00234 / IPR2022-01106, and (c) the recorded IP Assignment Agreement produced as an exhibit in E.D. Tex. 2:21-cv-00413 (Dkt. 469-3). Where I could not retrieve a reel/frame, I say so explicitly rather than estimate it. Only two reel/frame numbers for this family were verified in the sources I could reach; treat all others as "not retrieved."

Inventors

Unusual patterns.

• The inventors stayed with the monetization chain. Unlike the classic "inventors exit within 12 months → fire-sale" pattern, Goldstein and Usher are re-named as inventors on the 2020-filed Staton Techiya continuation US 11,550,535 (granted 2023, "Always On Headwear Recording System," assignee Staton Techiya LLC, Delray Beach, FL). So the human sources of the invention were not severed from the later NPE owner — the opposite of a clean fire-sale signature.
• Late confirmatory assignments from the inventors (2018). Recorded inventor→Personics Holdings assignments appear on 2018-08-10 (Usher) and 2018-09-21 / 2018-10-10 (Goldstein) — roughly a decade after the 2007-04-09 priority filing, and after Personics had already transferred the portfolio to DM Staton (2017). This is title-reconstruction behavior: the inventors were made to paper the chain of title retroactively, consistent with litigation standing preparation ahead of the 2021 Samsung suit.

Original assignee

Personics Holdings, Inc. — audio-technology R&D company ("Personics Labs"), Delray Beach, FL, formed around 2007.

• Product? No evidence found that Personics shipped a commercial product embodying the issued claims. A company-history exhibit filed in the East Texas case describes the model as "Focus on core competency: R&D / Patent innovative technologies / License and/or sell IP (see Dolby)" — a licensing-and-sale posture, not a product-shipping posture.
• Primary line of business: in-ear/occluded-ear acoustics R&D — ambient sound microphones, ear-canal microphones/receivers, always-on recording, sound-signature detection.
• Current status: effectively defunct / asset-stripped. It granted a security interest to DM Staton Family Limited Partnership on 2014-11-05, and the portfolio was assigned onward to DM Staton Family LP in 2017. The patent record itself lists Personics Holdings, Inc. only as original assignee; it is not a current assignee.

Assignment timeline

Google Patents surfaces 13 post-issuance reassignment events for US 9,124,982. Reel/frame values could be confirmed for only one link (see 2017 entry). Directional duplicates (the Nov-2014 pair, the Oct-2018 pair) appear in the record as filed.

• 2014-02-08 (recorded 2014-02-08) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: Personics Holdings, Inc.
  • Assignee: Personics Holdings, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: internal reorg / change of form — conversion of the operating corporation into an LLC holding vehicle; the patent never left Personics control here.

• 2014-11-05 (recorded 2014-11-05) — Reel/frame not retrieved (two identical recordings appear)

  • Conveyance: Security Interest (security agreement)
  • Assignor: Personics Holdings, LLC
  • Assignee: DM Staton Family Limited Partnership, as assignee of Maria B. Staton
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: securitization — Personics pledged the portfolio as collateral to the Staton family vehicle; this is the first appearance of the Staton interests and a classic precursor to a foreclosure/in-lieu transfer.

• 2017-06-26 (recorded 2017) — Reel 042992/0524 (verified: the 2017-08-01 corrective assignment for this patent expressly corrects the assignor name "previously recorded on reel 042992 frame 0524")

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: Personics Holdings, Inc. and Personics Holdings, LLC
  • Assignee: DM Staton Family Limited Partnership, assignee of Staton Family Investments, Ltd.
  • Correspondent: recording appears tied to RatnerPrestia (customer/email of record ratneprestia.com) alongside Staton/Techiya in-house (ip.keady@techiya.com alias) — see NPE signal 3.
  • Context: foreclosure / assignment in lieu of the 2014 security interest — the secured party takes title.

• 2017-06-26 (recorded 2017) — Reel/frame not retrieved (adjacent family members show the companion DM Staton→Techiya instrument at Reel 043393/0001)

  • Conveyance: Assignment (Intellectual Property Assignment Agreement)
  • Assignor: DM Staton Family Limited Partnership, assignee of Staton Family Investments, Ltd.
  • Assignee: Staton Techiya, LLC (Delaware LLC, 16193 Bridlewood Circle, Delray Beach, FL 33445)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: transfer to the assertion vehicle — the recorded agreement (E.D. Tex. Dkt. 469-3) conveys "all of Staton's right, title, and interest in and to all Staton's intellectual property that was previously owned by Personics Holdings, LLC and/or Personics Holdings, Inc.," including the right to sue for past infringement.

• 2017-08-01 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Corrective Assignment
  • Assignor: DM Staton Family Limited Partnership, assignee of Staton Family Investments, Ltd.
  • Assignee: Staton Techiya, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: clerical correction only — fixes the assignor's name mis-recorded at reel 042992/0524.

• 2017-08-01 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Corrective Assignment
  • Assignor: Personics Holdings, Inc. / Personics Holdings, LLC
  • Assignee: DM Staton Family Limited Partnership
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: clerical correction only.

• 2018-08-10 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment (confirmatory)
  • Assignor: John Usher (inventor)
  • Assignee: Personics Holdings, LLC / Personics Holdings, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: standing/title cleanup — inventor confirmatory assignment to the original (by-then divested) assignee.

• 2018-09-21 and 2018-10-10 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment (confirmatory), plus a duplicate pair
  • Assignor: Steven Wayne Goldstein (inventor); John Usher
  • Assignee: Personics Holdings, Inc. / Personics Holdings, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: standing/title cleanup — chains the inventors forward so the record supports standing.

• 2018-10-10 and 2018-11-13 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: Personics Holdings, Inc. / Personics Holdings, LLC
  • Assignee: DM Staton Family Limited Partnership
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: title consolidation — Personics re-conveys to the Staton vehicle so the DM Staton→Techiya chain is complete.

• 2024-06-21 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: Staton Techiya, LLC
  • Assignee: ST Portfolio Holdings, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: transfer-to-asserter / intra-family restructuring during litigation. Per the Federal Circuit's 2025 opinions, Staton Techiya "assigned the patents to a related entity, ST Case1Tech, LLC, which was substituted as the appellant" in the IPR appeals.

• 2024-06-21 (recorded) — Reel/frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: ST Portfolio Holdings, LLC
  • Assignee: ST Case1Tech, LLC (current assignee; substituted appellant in Fed. Cir. Nos. 23-2294 / 23-2305)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: transfer-to-asserter — two-step same-day hop into the entity that carries the appeals.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9124982
    2007 : Priority application filed
    2008 : Parent filed by Personics Holdings Inc
    2013 : Continuation filed by Personics Holdings Inc
    2014 : Assigned to Personics Holdings LLC
         : Security interest to DM Staton Family LP
    2015 : Patent 9124982 issued
    2017 : Title taken by DM Staton Family LP
         : Assigned to Staton Techiya LLC
    2018 : Inventor confirmatory assignments
         : Title consolidated to DM Staton
    2021 : Suit filed against Samsung
    2023 : PTAB invalidates many claims
    2024 : Assigned to ST Portfolio Holdings LLC
         : Assigned to ST Case1Tech LLC

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT.
The patent moves from an operating R&D company (Personics Holdings, Inc.) into a chain of licensing/holding vehicles with no products: Personics Holdings, LLC (2014-02-08) → DM Staton Family Limited Partnership (2017-06-26, reel 042992/0524) → Staton Techiya, LLC (2017) → ST Portfolio Holdings, LLC (2024-06-21) → ST Case1Tech, LLC (2024-06-21). The recorded IP Assignment Agreement (E.D. Tex. Dkt. 469-3) names DM Staton as a Wyoming partnership at 6800 Broken Sound Parkway, Suite 200, Boca Raton, FL and Staton Techiya as a Delaware LLC at 16193 Bridlewood Circle, Delray Beach, FL — a residential-style address, consistent with a single-purpose holding entity.

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT.
Staton Techiya, LLC is an assignee in the chain (2017 → 2024) and the named patent owner in the assertion. It is publicly indexed as an NPE — IP-NAVI's Korean IP-protection NPE database lists "Always on headwear recording system" under 보유기업명 Staton Techiya, LLC — and Korean business press (Korea Herald, BusinessKorea) describes Staton Techiya and Synergy IP as non-practicing entities that sued Samsung. Unified Patents tracks the family as litigation/IPR targets (IPR2022-00234, CAFC 23-2294). It is not on the legacy Acacia/Marathon/IV lists, but it is a high-frequency, purpose-built plaintiff on current NPE dockets.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR (partial evidence).
PTAB chain-of-title exhibits for the Staton/Techiya family show recording correspondents: customer number 150139 = Staton Techiya LLC, 16193 Bridlewood Circle, Delray Beach, FL 33445, bracketed with 741458 and the emails dmgrgove@ratneprestia.com (RatnerPrestia) and ip.keady@techiya.com. Separately, prosecution attorney of record on the later continuation US 11,550,535 is Akerman LLP; Peter A. Chiabotti. The recurrence pattern (same RatnerPrestia recording channel + Techiya in-house) is suggestive, but I could not verify the correspondent field on the specific US 9,124,982 reel entries, and a single firm doing both operating-company and NPE work is not itself a finding. Flagged as unresolved rather than asserted.

4. Cascading transfers — PRESENT.
At least six transfers in the recorded chain, with a compressed cluster: 2017-06-26 (×2), 2017-08-01 (×2 corrective) and again a same-day double hop on 2024-06-21 (Staton Techiya → ST Portfolio → ST Case1Tech). The 2024 pair shares a single date and a common principal, the hallmark of chained LLC restructuring.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT (for the 2021 suit).
The operative transfer to the asserting entity (Staton Techiya, ~2017-06-26) predates the first infringement suit (Staton Techiya, LLC v. Samsung, 2:21-cv-00413, filed 2021-11-05) by ~4.4 years — outside the 6-month window. Note however that the 2024-06-21 ST Portfolio → ST Case1Tech transfer occurred during litigation and maps precisely onto the appellant substitution in Fed. Cir. 23-2294/23-2305 — a litigation-driven title move, though not the classic "venue-shopping" pre-suit transfer.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — UNCLEAR.
The 2014-11-05 security interest to DM Staton (as assignee of Maria B. Staton) followed by the 2017-06-26 assignment of the entire Personics portfolio to the same secured party is economically a foreclosure / assignment in lieu of foreclosure and signals Personics distress. I found no Chapter 7/11 filing, trustee sale, or bankruptcy docket for Personics Holdings in the sources available, so I stop short of calling it a bankruptcy fire-sale.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT (as classically defined).
There is no evidence that an operating company funded Staton Techiya to assert against competitors. The adjacent, well-documented controversy is different in kind: Samsung's counterclaims alleged that Synergy IP (founded by ex-Samsung IP head Ahn Seung-ho) used confidential Samsung information to mount the suit, and the East Texas court in 2024 sanctioned the plaintiffs — but that is an ethics/trade-secret theory, not privateering by an operating-company sponsor.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — NOT PRESENT.
The chain terminates at ST Case1Tech, LLC, which was substituted as the appellant in the Federal Circuit and is actively pressing the family's appeals. No RPX / AST / LOT / OIN / Unified acquisition appears anywhere in the record. Inverse signal: the patent has NOT been neutralized by a defensive aggregator — though PTAB materially weakened it (see below).

Validity/enforcement context (affects value of the "present" signals). In IPR2022-00234 (Samsung v. Staton Techiya), Final Written Decision 2023-06-14, the Board held claims 1–6, 14, 15, 17–20, 24, 25 unpatentable and declined to hold claims 10 and 11 unpatentable. The Federal Circuit affirmed on 2025-10-09 (ST Case1Tech v. Squires, Nos. 23-2294 / 23-2305) and Samsung's cross-appeal (23-2342) was voluntarily dismissed after settlement. So the asserted claims were largely invalidated even as the assignee chain continued to transfer.

Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

Two independent strong signals are documented: (i) shell-entity transfer — the patent left the operating R&D company Personics Holdings, Inc. for a licensing vehicle chain ending in registrant-style LLCs at Boca Raton/Delray Beach addresses, per the recorded DM Staton→Staton Techiya IP Assignment Agreement (E.D. Tex. Dkt. 469-3) and the Google Patents reassignment table entries of 2014-02-08, 2014-11-05, 2017-06-26 (reel 042992/0524), and 2024-06-21; and (ii) known asserter in the chain — Staton Techiya, LLC, an entity indexed as an NPE and the plaintiff that asserted this patent against Samsung in 2:21-cv-00413. Cascading transfers (a 2024-06-21 same-day two-hop to ST Case1Tech, which became the Federal Circuit appellant) reinforces the pattern. The class="signal-flagged" finding that most affects value is not ownership but validity: PTAB invalidated most asserted claims on 2023-06-14, affirmed 2025-10-09.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 9124982) — and cross-check the Google Patents legal-events table at https://patents.google.com/patent/US9124982/en. Note that I could not retrieve reel/frame numbers for most links from these sources; only reel 042992/0524 is directly confirmed on the face of this patent's 2017-08-01 corrective record.

I'll research US patent 9,124,982 and its cited prior art. Let me start with targeted searches.

I have the citation list. Let me gather details on the full claim set and the key cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent No. 9,124,982 B2

1. Patent identification (confirmed)

Statutory note: With a 2007-04-09 priority date, this patent is governed by pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102 (i.e., § 102(a), (b), (e), (g)). Any anticipation must therefore be measured against the pre-AIA categories.

Sole independent claim (Claim 1), verbatim from the granted text:

"1. An Always-On Recording System (AORS) comprising: a monitoring assembly mounted on a mobile phone, the monitoring assembly including an ambient sound microphone (ASM) to monitor an ambient acoustic field proximate to the mobile phone, the ASM producing an ASM signal responsive to the ambient acoustic field; a data storage device configured to act as a circular buffer for continually storing the ASM signal; a further data storage device coupled to the data storage device; and a record-activation system including software configured to activate the further data storage device to record a content of the data storage device."

Dependents I can verify from the granted text: Claim 2 (activation responsive to a speech sound, non-speech sound or transient sound), Claim 3 (plurality of ASMs), Claim 4 (multiplex/encode to reduce data rate before transmission to the further storage), Claim 5 (receive audio-content signal from the mobile phone or a further audio signal from another device), Claim 6 (the "other device" = user's earphone device, another user's earphone device, media player or computing device). Claims 7–25 were not fully reproduced in my source material, so I treat them with caution below.

2. The references cited on the face of US 9,124,982

The "References Cited" listed for the '982 patent (U.S. patent documents plus non-patent literature) are set out below. Note the important, often-missed distinction:

• US 8,111,839 B2 is NOT prior art. It is the first application in this same family (Ser. No. 12/100,281, "Always on headwear recording system," Goldstein et al., granted 2012-02-07). Its listing reflects family citation, not a § 102 reference against its own continuation.
• The three "Office Action" entries in the cited list are prosecution-history documents (the '281 and '694 applications), not prior art.
• Some entries in the family's other publications (e.g., WO2008124786) are drawn from different citation windows and should not be attributed to the '982 patent.

Cited U.S. patent documents

3. § 102 anticipation analysis — the critical holding

Bottom line: none of the references cited on the face of US 9,124,982 is a § 102 anticipation of the granted claims. For anticipation under pre-AIA § 102, a single reference must disclose every limitation of the claim. Claim 1 requires, in combination: (a) a monitoring assembly mounted on a mobile phone; (b) an ASM monitoring the ambient field proximate to the phone; (c) a circular buffer continually storing the ASM signal; (d) a further data storage device; and (e) a software-based record-activation system that moves buffer content to the further device. No cited reference discloses this combination — and the examiner allowed the claims after considering all of them, which is itself consistent with no anticipation being found.

That said, several cited references are strongly relevant to individual limitations (and thus to a § 103 obviousness attack, and to § 102(a)/(b)/(e) "single-reference-plus" analyses). Reference-by-reference:

Practical takeaway on § 102: the cited references define the field (binaural ear-level capture, occlusion/ECM/ASM, ear-canal-receiver signal processing, transient detection, fall detection, low-memory warning) but none is a single-reference anticipation. Their real bite is § 103, and indeed that is exactly how this patent was attacked — not with the face-of-patent references, but with a different set (see § 5).

4. Confidence caveats (explicit, per my operating rules)

I could not independently verify the subject matter of three cited references within this session, and I will not fabricate descriptions:

1. US 5,987,145 (Lawton, 1999-11-16) — Description not confirmed. Given the claim-1 "mobile phone" limitation, I flag this as a reference worth checking first.
2. US 6,240,195 (Bindner et al., 2001-05-29) — Description not confirmed.
3. US 2008/0101638 A1 (Ziller) — Description not confirmed, and its listed publication date (2008-05-01) post-dates the 2007-04-09 priority date. If offered as art it could only qualify under pre-AIA § 102(e) by virtue of its earlier U.S. filing date; its § 102(a)/(b)/(g) status depends on the filing date, which I have not verified.

I also note the '982 specification renders several cited publications with the phrase "U.S. Pat. No." (e.g., "U.S. Pat. No. 2006/0182287"); per your instruction I have preserved those identifiers literally and treated them as publications.

5. The prior art that actually mattered — recent developments (beyond the face of the patent)

Because the question is framed around "most relevant prior art," it is important to report that the '982 patent was not invalidated (or defended) on the face-of-patent references. The operative challenge was IPR2022-00234 (Samsung Electronics v. Staton Techiya), which asserted claims 1–6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17–20, 24, and 25 against a different art set:

• Le (a computer with a multi-directional microphone and a continuously-scrolling audio buffer),
• combined with Mayer, Armstrong, Kvaløy (US 6,728,385 — this one is on the face of the patent), Hall, Yuen, and Sjursen,
• e.g., Le-Armstrong-Kvaløy-Hall for claims 2–4; Le-Mayer-Yuen for claim 4; Le-Mayer-Sjursen for claim 11.

Per the final written decision reported in the record (dated June 14, 2023), the Board found claims 1–6, 14, 15, 17–20, 24, and 25 unpatentable, but found the petitioner had not shown claims 10 and 11 unpatentable (claim 10's time-stamp audio-index limitation; claim 11). Related Federal Circuit appeals are docketed (e.g., 23-2294, 23-2342, 24-1917), and one secondary source reports the patent "surviving" at the appellate level; I have not verified the appellate disposition and flag it as unconfirmed.

Reliability note: the IPR materials surfaced in my searches are procedural/advocacy documents (petitions, patent-owner responses, expert declarations), so the specific claim-by-claim findings above should be verified against the official PTAB Final Written Decision before being relied on.

6. Summary answer

1. Patent searched: US 9,124,982 B2 (application US 14/021,011), "Always on headwear recording system," Personics Holdings Inc.
2. Face-of-patent references: 18 U.S. patent documents (US 4,088,849; 4,819,270; 5,887,070; 5,917,410; 5,946,050; 5,987,145; 6,240,195; 6,433,690; 6,567,524; 6,647,368; RE38,351; 6,661,901; 6,728,385; 7,039,195; 8,111,839; 2004/0268078; 2006/0182287; 2008/0101638) plus one NPL item (Kracht et al., 2006).
3. § 102 conclusion: No cited reference anticipates any granted claim. Each lacks at least the "monitoring assembly mounted on a mobile phone" element of Claim 1 (and its dependents), and most lack the circular-buffer/further-storage/activation architecture entirely. Claim 1 issued over all of them.
4. Most relevant references by limitation: US 5,946,050 (circular buffer + keyword-activated recording — Claim 2), US 5,917,410 (transient detection — Claim 2), US 7,039,195 and US 2006/0182287 (ASM/ECM ear-level capture — Claim 1), US 6,433,690 (fall/accident triggering — Claim 2), US 2004/0268078 (low-memory warning).
5. Actual invalidation vehicle: § 103 obviousness in IPR2022-00234, over Le-based combinations (with Mayer, Armstrong, Kvaløy, Hall, Yuen, Sjursen) — not the face-of-patent art.

If you want, I can next pull the full verbatim text of claims 7–25 and confirm the unverified descriptions (US 5,987,145, US 6,240,195, US 2008/0101638) directly from the USPTO PatentCenter record for application 14/021,011.

I'll research the specific prior-art grounds that were actually litigated against this patent before building the §103 analysis.

Let me dig into the actual IPR grounds and any known prior-art combinations for this family.

I now have the actual IPR grounds. Let me characterize the key references (Le, Mayer, Couper, Lagassey, Langhart, Kurki) so the motivation-to-combine analysis is grounded.

Obviousness Analysis of US 9,124,982 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Current date: April 26, 2026. This section builds on the earlier verification and claim overview and does not repeat it. Cross-references to that material are flagged where relevant.

0. Analytical framework and scope

• Governing priority date: April 9, 2007 (the '982's chain runs to provisional 60/910,808, filed 2007-04-09, per the patent's own Cross-Reference section). Prior art must therefore predate that date, or qualify under § 102(e)/§ 102(a)(2) as a patent or published application with an earlier effective filing date.
• POSITA. A person of ordinary skill in the art as of 2007 would have had a bachelor's degree in electrical/computer engineering, acoustics, or a related field, plus roughly 2–3 years' experience with consumer audio devices, digital signal processing, or mobile telephony — or equivalent practical experience. The '982 specification itself concedes the level of skill is routine: it expressly states that "one of ordinary skill would be able, without undo experimentation, to write" the code needed to implement the described functions. That concession matters — it removes any credible "undue experimentation" argument for the software limitations.
• Two independent bodies of prior art sit on this record, and I analyze both because they reinforce one another:
  1. Admitted prior art in the '982 specification's own background section (the applicant's own characterizations of the references it distinguished). These are § 103-eligible and, where the applicant affirmatively described what they disclose, effectively binding admissions.
  2. The invalidity grounds actually litigated in IPR2022-00234, which I retrieved from the district-court record (E.D. Tex. 2:21-cv-00413, Dkt. 895) and the PTAB's Final Written Decision dated June 14, 2023.
• Cross-reference / contradiction flag: as noted in the earlier section, the specification and abstract are written around an earpiece/ear-canal embodiment, but granted claim 1 recites a mobile phone. For § 103 purposes this cuts against the patent: the broadened phone-based claim reads more directly onto the ordinary portable-device prior art (Le, Mayer, Couper, Lagassey) than the narrow earpiece disclosure ever did.

1. The prior art and what each reference teaches

1(A) Admitted prior art — the applicant's own characterizations in the '982 background

The specification affirmatively describes the following. These admissions supply most of the claim elements without any need to rely on litigation art:

Key point: by distinguishing 5,946,050 on the ground that the '982 "specifically us[es] binaural microphone output signals as the recorded data" and adds "manual" or "non-speech acoustic" activation, the applicant admitted that the circular buffer, the always-on capture, and the content-triggered promotion of buffer contents to permanent storage were already known. That admission alone makes claim 1 vulnerable, because granted claim 1 requires only a single ASM signal (no binaural requirement) and a software record-activation system (no manual/non-speech limitation).

1(B) The IPR2022-00234 grounds of unpatentability

The grounds Samsung advanced, and the Board's dispositions, were:

What Le teaches (the workhorse reference). Le (US 2003/0161097) discloses a personal device that maintains a "continuously scrolling audio buffer" which "continuously records ambient audio, and saves it for some predetermined period of time, such as 30 seconds or one minute." Le's device includes an environmental microphone and a personal microphone, and it lets the user retroactively preserve audio that has already occurred. (This same Le reference was the base reference in the parallel Staton Techiya IPRs — e.g., IPR2022-00324 and IPR2022-01106 — confirming it is treated by the Board as teaching the always-on circular-buffer ambient-capture concept.) Le supplies claim 1's elements (b) ambient microphone monitoring an ambient field, (c) circular buffer continually storing the ambient signal, and (e) activation that preserves buffer contents.

What Mayer teaches. Mayer (US 2004/0042103) is relied on as the secondary reference supplying the mobile-phone/handheld platform and its storage. Caveat: I was unable to retrieve Mayer's full text within my search budget; its role is stated per the ground record, not from my own reading of the document.

What Couper + Lagassey teach (Ground 2). Couper (US 9,135,797) is the base reference and Lagassey (US 2006/0092043) the secondary reference directed to event/buffer-triggered capture and transmission in a portable monitoring device. This ground independently reaches claims 1 and 2, including the speech/non-speech/transient detection limitation of claim 2.

Date caveat (flagged, not resolved). Couper (US 9,135,797 B2) and Kurki (US 9,123,343) appear to have issue dates well after the 2007 priority date. For them to be § 311(b)-eligible prior art they must have been relied on under § 102(e)/§ 102(a)(2) (i.e., earlier effective filing dates). I report the identifiers literally and do not auto-correct them; the effective prior-art date of each should be independently verified before relying on these two grounds in an FTO or validity opinion.

2. Why a POSITA would have combined these references (motivation)

The Board's findings rest on combination rationales that are straightforward under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007). The same rationales apply to the admitted prior art:

1. Same field, same problem, same solution — predictable combination. Le, Mayer, Couper, and Lagassey all reside in the field of portable/consumer audio capture. Combining an always-on circular-buffer recorder (Le) with a mobile-phone platform (Mayer) is the "predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions" (KSR at 417) — each element performs exactly the function it was known to perform.
2. Simple substitution / application of a known technique to a known device. Substituting a mobile phone for Le's generic personal device — or mounting Le's microphone assembly onto a phone — is a mere substitution of one known hardware platform for another, with no change in the operative principle. Phones already contained microphones (for voice calls) and non-volatile flash storage (for media), so the modification required no new component.
3. Design incentive and market forces. By 2003–2006 the market was converging cell phones, MP3 players, and cameras into one device, and manufacturers were actively adding capture features. There was an obvious commercial incentive to add "record the last 30 seconds" functionality to a phone, which is precisely the Le feature. KSR recognizes such market pressure as a valid motivation.
4. The secondary references supply only discrete, recognized engineering fixes, each combined for its known benefit:
   • Yuen — multiplex/encode to reduce data rate before transmission to the larger store (claim 4): the routine solution to limited bandwidth/storage.
   • Sjursen (Knowles) — microphone packaging (claim 11).
   • Langhart / Stuckman / Furst — memory management, warning, and portability (claims 14, 15, 24, 25).
   • Kurki — remote analysis of stored audio (claims 17–20).
     Nothing in these combinations requires a change to the principle of operation of any reference; each is a "use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way" (KSR).
5. No teaching away. The specification identifies no technical hurdle that would have deterred the combination, and the applicant's own admission that a skilled artisan could implement the described functions "without undo experimentation" removes any argument of unpredictable results.

3. Claim-by-claim obviousness

Cumulative effect. Of the 25 claims, all but two (claims 10 and 11) have either been held unpatentable for obviousness or (as to the unchallenged dependents) are drawn to routine, predictable variations of an admitted prior-art core. Claim 1 — the only independent claim — fell on two separate grounds, which is significant: even if an accused infringer's challenge to one ground failed, the second ground independently supports unpatentability.

4. Secondary considerations (objective indicia)

I found no evidence in the litigated record of objective indicia sufficient to rebut the prima facie case:

• No nexus evidence tying any commercial success to the claimed (phone-mounted, circular-buffer) subject matter was identified.
• The patent owner's arguments in IPR2022-00234 were largely claim-construction arguments (especially the "analysis" term), not objective-indicia arguments — and the Board still found the challenged claims obvious. On appeal the Federal Circuit held the "analysis" argument forfeited and, alternatively, incorrect on the intrinsic evidence.
• The district-court action terminated on unclean-hands grounds (Synergy IP's misconduct imputed to Techiya), not on a merits vindication of validity, so it supplies no probative secondary-considerations evidence either way.

5. Caveats and uncertainties

1. Claims 7–9 (and the verbatim text of 10–25) are not in the supplied copy of the patent. My claim-by-claim table for 7–9 is therefore blank, and my descriptions of 10–25 rest on the IPR ground record rather than on the claim language itself.
2. Mayer, Langhart, Kurki, Stuckman, Furst, and Couper — I was unable to retrieve the full text of several of these before exhausting my search budget. Their roles are stated as they appear in the ground record; their specific disclosures should be verified against the source documents before being relied on.
3. Couper and Kurki dates. As flagged, these two references appear to issue after the 2007 priority date and must qualify as § 102(e)/§ 102(a)(2) art. I did not resolve their effective filing dates.
4. Identifier integrity. All numbers (US 9,124,982; US 2003/0161097; US 2004/0042103; US 9,123,343; US 9,135,797; US 2006/0092043; US 5,903,868; US 7,756,285; US 2002/0018798; US 2004/0109668; US 2002/0106091) are reproduced literally from the record. I have not auto-corrected any of them.
5. Cross-reference to prior sections. This analysis is consistent with the earlier finding that claim 1 is the sole independent claim and that the abstract/specification describe an earpiece while claim 1 recites a mobile phone. The § 103 layer here depends on that discrepancy: the broadened phone claim is easier to invalidate than the earpiece disclosure would have been.

6. Bottom line

US 9,124,982 B2 is highly vulnerable under § 103, and that vulnerability is now largely adjudicated rather than theoretical:

• Claim 1 was held obvious over Le + Mayer and, independently, over Couper + Lagassey in IPR2022-00234 (FWD June 14, 2023).
• Most dependents fell to straightforward Le + Mayer + (Yuen / Langhart / Kurki / Stuckman / Furst) combinations, and the claim 17–20 holding was affirmed by the Federal Circuit on October 9, 2025.
• The admitted prior art in the '982 specification (notably Wolff 5,946,050's circular buffer with keyword-triggered pre-event retention, and 5,917,410's transient detector) supplies much of the claim-1 architecture without any litigation art at all, on the applicant's own characterization.
• Only claims 10 and 11 survived the petitioned grounds — a very narrow residue of enforceable scope, and they remain formally subject to further challenge on other art.

The strong "motivation to combine" is the ordinary commercial and engineering pressure to add always-on, retroactive audio capture to smartphones that already contained microphones and flash storage — exactly the "predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions" that KSR makes unpatentable.