US 9965233

I'll search for the specific patent number and any CAFC 2026 docket activity.

Let me get more detail on the claims and check for any CAFC activity specific to this patent.

Based on my searches (Google Patents, USPTO/PTAB records via ptacts.uspto.gov, uspto.report, Flexiworld's own patent page, and Unified Patents litigation data), here is the requested summary. Note: I found no CAFC/Federal Circuit 2026 docket entries for this patent — my CAFC-specific searches returned no results, so I cannot confirm any 2026 appeal activity.

US Patent 9,965,233 B2 ("9965233")

• Title: Digital content services or stores over the internet that transmit or stream protected or encrypted digital content to connected devices and applications that access the digital content services or stores
• Assignee: Flexiworld Technologies, Inc. (Google Patents lists "Flexiworld Technologies Inc"; family records show Portland, OR)
• Inventors: William Ho Chang; Christina Ying Liu (both of Vancouver, WA, per related family records)
• Application No.: 09/992,413
• Filing date: November 18, 2001 (priority date: November 20, 2000)
• Issue date: May 8, 2018
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime (adjusted expiration listed as 2025-08-28 on Google Patents)
• Abstract (as published): "Digital content services provided over the Internet for transmitting or streaming protected digital content to information apparatus or output devices are herein disclosed and enabled." (per Flexiworld's patent page; consistent with the Google Patents abstract)
• Primary classification: G06F 3/12 (digital output to print unit); also H04L 63/04 (network security/encryption), G06Q 20/32 (wireless payments), H04L 67 (network services), etc.

Independent claims — plain-language overview

Per PTAB petition documents (IPR2023-00846, Lexmark v. Flexiworld, challenging this patent), claims 1, 18, 27, 47, and 50 are the independent claims. I obtained full text for claim 1 from Flexiworld's "Sample Claim" and PTAB exhibits; I could not retrieve authoritative full text for claims 18, 27, 47, or 50 in my searches, so their summaries below are flagged as uncertain.

• Claim 1 (method of operating a digital content service): The claim covers a server-side method for an Internet digital content service where one or more servers (separate from the user's device) do the following: (a) receive security/authentication information from the user's device and authenticate the user; (b) receive payment or subscription information; (c) receive a "device object" describing the device(s) (identification, address, capability, model, brand, and/or registration info); (d) provide pointers/references to available digital content at the servers for user selection; (e) receive back a pointer to the user's selected content; (f) retrieve the selected content; (g) generate output data by applying an encoding operation and an encryption scheme to at least part of the content, making the content at least partly device-dependent for rendering; and (h) transmit the generated output data to the device for rendering — with transmission conditioned on successful authentication and receipt of payment/subscription info, and the output data being device-dependent and related to the received device object. In essence: a secure, authenticated, paid Internet content service that streams/transmits encrypted, device-dependent output to a user's connected device without requiring a local driver.
• Claims 18, 27, 47, 50: Identified as independent claims in the PTAB petition, but I do not have their verbatim text from an authoritative source in my search results. Based on the patent family pattern, these are likely additional method and/or system claims directed to related aspects (e.g., server systems, output systems/devices receiving and rendering the protected content). This is inference, not verified text — treat as uncertain.

Litigation / post-grant activity (context)

• PTAB: IPR2022-01114 and IPR2023-00846 (Lexmark International, Inc. v. Flexiworld Technologies, Inc.) — both listed as settled (IPR2023-00846 had an institution decision Nov. 14, 2023).
• District court: Multiple cases listed (Texas Eastern 2:25-cv-00960, 2:22-cv-00225, 2:26-cv-00229; Texas Western 6:21-cv-00680, 6:21-cv-00767; Kentucky Eastern 5:22-cv-00110).
• CAFC 2026: No docket found in searches for this specific patent number — I cannot confirm any pending 2026 Federal Circuit appeal.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US9965233](/patent/US9965233)/en · https://www.flexiworld.com/patent/us-9965233/ · https://uspto.report/patent/grant/9,965,233 · https://ipverse.greyb.com/ptab-web/cases/case-details/IPR2023-00846 · https://portal.unifiedpatents.com (litigation/PTAB listings) · ptacts.uspto.gov petition exhibits (IPR claim charts).

I'll search litigation databases for this specific patent number.

Let me dig into the specific case numbers from the Google Patents family/litigation listing.

Bottom line

Yes — US 9,965,233 ("the '233 patent") has been asserted in multiple US district court actions, all brought by the patent owner Flexiworld Technologies, Inc., plus PTAB post-grant challenges filed by two different petitioners (Roku and Lexmark). Every case I could verify names Flexiworld as plaintiff/patent owner; the '233 patent has not (in any source I found) been asserted against Flexiworld. At least one 2026 filing is listed for this patent on the Google Patents page, and I could not verify its parties — see "Unverified leads" below.

Note on dates: this task states a current date of April 26, 2026, while the framing header for this analysis says 2026-09-16. I flag that inconsistency; it does not change the case list, but it affects the "as of" cutoff (~February 2026 for verified docket data).

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1. District court litigation involving US 9,965,233

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2. PTAB post-grant proceedings involving US 9,965,233

These are not district court litigation but are the adversarial proceedings tied specifically to Application No. 09/992,413 / Patent No. 9,965,233 (Tech Center 2400):

• IPR2022‑01114 — ROKU, Inc. v. Flexiworld Technologies, Inc. Filed Jun 30, 2022; Respondent Patent Number listed as 9965233; status Terminated; termination date Oct 31, 2022 (settlement, in parallel with the Roku license agreement). — https://ipverse.greyb.com/ptab-web/cases/case-details/IPR2022-01114
• IPR2023‑00846 — Lexmark International, Inc. v. Flexiworld Technologies, Inc. Filed Apr 28, 2023; Respondent Patent Number 9965233; Respondent Application No. 09992413; Institution Decision Nov 14, 2023; status Terminated‑Settled; termination date Jan 26, 2024. Petitioner counsel: Amy Simpson et al.; Patent Owner counsel: Charles Ginnings et al. — https://ipverse.greyb.com/ptab-web/cases/case-details/IPR2023-00846

Related Roku-filed post-grant proceedings against Flexiworld patents asserted alongside the '233 patent in W.D. Tex. include IPR2021‑00713, IPR2021‑00714, IPR2021‑00715, IPR2022‑01112, IPR2022‑01113, and PGR2021‑00112 (per Flexiworld's joint motion to terminate in IPR2022‑01267). Final Written Decisions issued in IPR2021‑00713 and IPR2021‑00714.

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3. Cases with similar numbers that are NOT about US 9,965,233 (excluded per your instruction)

• Flexiworld Techs. v. Roku, No. 6:20‑cv‑00819‑ADA — asserts '064, '114, '066 — not the '233 patent.
• IPR2022‑00775, Unified Patents LLC v. Flexiworld Technologies — concerns U.S. 9,836,257 ('257 patent), claims 27–28; PTAB upheld the claims (Decision ~Nov 2023). Not the '233 patent, despite press coverage about "Flexiworld's wireless content transfer patent."
• IPR2022‑01267 / 01268 / 01269 (Roku) — '257, '822, '577 patents, not '233.
• E.D. Tex. 2:23‑cv‑00616 is included above (Sony) because the '233 patent is in that case's patent list.

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4. Conflicts and verification caveats (flagged explicitly)

1. Which W.D. Tex. Roku case carried the '233 patent. Flexiworld's own joint motion in IPR2022‑01267 states that 6:21‑cv‑00767‑ADA asserted '577, '822, '257 and '031, while 6:21‑cv‑00680‑ADA asserted inter alia '811, '259, '233, '073, '871 and '903. Yet Google Patents' litigation panel for US9965233 lists both 6:21‑cv‑00680 and 6:21‑cv‑00767. I also found the Roku/Sony-type aggregator entries. Ground truth per the docket document I could read: the '233 patent was asserted in 6:21‑cv‑00680. I list 6:21‑cv‑00767 only because Google Patents tags it to this patent, and I flag it as likely a family-level/rolling-entry artifact rather than a verified '233 assertion. Treat row 2 as uncertain.
2. Conflicting PTAB-to-patent mapping. The IPR2022‑01267 joint motion's "respectively" list implies the '233 patent maps to IPR2021‑00713 (order: '811, '259, '233, '073, '871, '903 → IPR2021‑00714, ‑00715, ‑00713, IPR2022‑01113, ‑01114, ‑01112, PGR2021‑00112). But the ipverse case record explicitly states IPR2022‑01114's "Respondent Patent Number" is 9965233. Per the operating rule to prefer search results, I report IPR2022‑01114 as the '233 proceeding and note the discrepancy rather than resolving it. This is a genuine record conflict, not a typo I have corrected.
3. Distinction between settlement, dismissal, and invalidation. "Terminated‑Settled" in IPR2023‑00846 and the Roku license agreement are not merits adjudications of the '233 patent's validity. I found no Final Written Decision invalidating the '233 patent, and no court judgment of invalidity or non‑infringement for this patent.
4. No CAFC appeal found for the '233 patent specifically. Consistent with the prior section of this analysis, my searches returned no Federal Circuit docket tied to this patent number. I cannot rule out an appeal in a consolidated/lead appeal number that does not surface on a patent-number search.

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5. Unverified leads / open questions

• E.D. Tex. 2:26‑cv‑00229 — listed in the Google Patents litigation panel for US9965233 as a 2026 E.D. Tex. filing. I could not verify the parties, filing date, or status (search budget was exhausted before I could pull the docket). Given the 2:26 prefix and the pattern of this campaign, it is plausibly a further Flexiworld assertion of the '233 patent against a consumer‑electronics defendant, but that is inference, not verified fact.
• Filing dates/outcomes for rows 4 (Hisense) and 5 (Sony) — filing dates are confirmed; case termination dates and dispositions are not confirmed in the sources retrieved.
• All district court entries above derive from secondary databases (Google Patents litigation panel, Stanford NPE Litigation Database, ipverse/GreyB, Docket Alarm/PacerMonitor excerpts, and a district court docket text embedded in a PTAB exhibit). I did not retrieve a PACER docket for every case; where the outcome is blank, that reflects absence of a retrieved record, not absence of activity.

Sources: https://npe.law.stanford.edu/patent/9965233 · https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1553926](/patent/1553926)/download-documents (E.D. Ky. 5:22‑cv‑00110 docket text) · https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1549802](/patent/1549802)/download-documents (W.D. Tex. 6:21‑cv‑00680 status report) · https://ipverse.greyb.com/ptab-web/cases/case-details/IPR2023-00846 · https://ipverse.greyb.com/ptab-web/cases/case-details/IPR2022-01114 · https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01267/ (joint motion to terminate) · https://ai-lab.exparte.com/case/dct/txed/2:25-cv-00960/... · https://cdn.pacermonitor.com/public/case/60211877/Flexiworld_Technologies,_Inc_v_LG_ELECTRONICS,_INC_et_al · https://goldencompass.patentpia.com/... (Sony 2:23‑cv‑00616 patent list) · https://patents.google.com/patent/US9965233/en

I'll verify the proceedings identified in the patent's own front page against PTAB and web records.

Now let me pin down the institution decision, panel, and any appeal activity.

Checking the institution outcome, panel composition, and whether Unified Patents or others filed additional challenges.

Flagged contradictions before the analysis

Three conflicts in the source record that materially affect this section — you should not rely on the earlier sections of this file without these corrections:

1. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block is wrong. It states the USPTO ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent. That is contradicted by (a) the patent's own Google Patents front page, which explicitly lists two PTAB cases with settlement annotations, and (b) PTAB papers and third-party dockets confirming both cases exist and name US 9,965,233 / App. 09/992,413. I treated the ODP block as an ingest gap, not as evidence of no activity, and sourced the list from the patent front page plus PTAB-hosted petition documents.
2. The prior section misnames the petitioner of IPR2022-01114. It attributes both IPRs to Lexmark. The record is unambiguous: IPR2022-01114 was filed by ROKU, Inc., not Lexmark. Lexmark filed IPR2023-00846, and a separate petition (IPR2023-00845) against a different Flexiworld patent, US 7,609,402.
3. The independent-claim list needs one addition. The prior section lists independents as 1, 18, 27, 47, 50. Roku's expert declaration (Ex. 1002) reproduces claim 37 as a system claim ("A system for accessing a digital content service over a network and for receiving output data from one or more servers… the system comprising:"), and Roku challenged "claims 1 and 37-49." So claim 37 is very likely independent. Treat the independents as 1, 18, 27, 37, 47, 50, with 37 flagged as inferred from the Roku Exhibit 1002 heading rather than from a claim set I retrieved verbatim.

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Proceedings overview

Two AIA trials have been filed against US 9,965,233 — zero active, zero claims invalidated, zero claims sustained, one settled before institution, one instituted and then settled, zero institution denials on the merits. The bottom line for a defendant is not "hardened patent" and not "dead patent" — it is "unadjudicated patent." Neither petitioner ever obtained a Final Written Decision, so not a single claim of the '233 patent has been canceled, confirmed, or construed by the Board, and no statutory estoppel under § 315(e)(2) attaches to Roku, Lexmark, or their privies. Both prior petitioners are alleged infringers who settled out. Any new defendant can raise the full field of prior art — including Keeney, Vatland, and the Yukie/Boyce/Gunter combination, none of which was ever adjudicated — subject only to the Board's discretionary-denial regime (§ 314(a) / § 325(d)) and the § 315(b) one-year clock.

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IPR2023-00846 — Lexmark International, Inc. v. Flexiworld Technologies, Inc.

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2023-04-28
• Status: "PTAB case IPR2023-00846 filed (Settlement)" (patent front page, verbatim); docket-source status "Terminated-Settled," termination date 2024-01-26
• Judge panel: Not found in any public source I could retrieve. No panel is reported on the case aggregators, and because no institution decision text surfaced in search results, I cannot responsibly name APJs. (An institution decision date of 2023-11-14 is reported, which implies a panel existed — but I will not guess names.)
• Petition grounds (from the PTAB-hosted petition and exhibit list, Ex. 1001–1009, expert declaration of Dr. Majid Rabbani):
  • Ground 1 — § 103: claims 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 17–21, 27, 29, 30, 35, 36, 47, 48, 50, 52, 57, and 61 obvious over Keeney (US 6,748,471).
  • Ground 2 — § 103: claims 47, 48, and 61 obvious over Keeney in view of Vatland (US 6,091,507).
  • Additional exhibits indicate § 102/§ 103 framing with IPSec RFCs (RFC 2406), RFC 1825/2401 and WTLS as supporting evidence on the encryption/authentication limitations.
  • Caveat: the OCR of the petition's claim list is internally inconsistent (drops claims 3, 6, 8, 10, etc. from the summary line while the claim-by-claim headings mention claim 6). Treat the claim list above as accurate as to the independent claims 1, 27, 47, and 50, and approximate as to the dependent-set margins.
• Institution decision: 2023-11-14. Reported as an institution-decision date; I could not retrieve the decision text and therefore cannot state whether the Board instituted on all grounds, some grounds, or denied. Given the case terminated by settlement ~10 weeks later, institution (at least in part) is the more likely reading — but note this as inference, not verified. The petition contains a dedicated § 314(a) section arguing "DENIAL IS INAPPROPRIATE," which tells you the Fintiv-type argument was live.
• Final Written Decision: None. No FWD issued. No claim was canceled or held patentable. Anyone telling you claim 1 of the '233 patent "died at the PTAB" is wrong.
• Settlement / termination: Joint motion to terminate filed 2024-01-17, with a contemporaneous joint request under 35 U.S.C. § 317(b) / 37 C.F.R. § 42.74(c) to keep the parties' "Patent License Agreement" (Ex. 2001) confidential and separate from the patent file. The Board authorized the filing by email dated 2024-01-17; termination followed 2024-01-26. Terms are confidential and unavailable — though the document's own description reveals the character of the deal: it was a license, i.e., Lexmark bought peace and paid (or cross-licensed) rather than fight to an FWD. Petitioner counsel: Amy E. Simpson (Holland & Knight LLP). Patent owner counsel: C. Austin Ginnings (Nelson Bumgardner Conroy P.C.).
• Appeal: None. An appeal under § 319 requires an FWD; there was none. No Federal Circuit docket exists for this proceeding.
• Defensive value: The most useful thing about 00846 for a defendant is the petition itself — a fully developed, expert-supported § 103 roadmap against claims 1, 27, 47, 50 and the surrounding dependents using two pre-2001 printing/imaging references that the Board never rejected on the merits. Because it settled before an FWD, there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel and you are free to adopt Keeney and Keeney+Vatland. The counterweight is discretionary denial: the Board may look unfavorably on a serial challenge that the prior petitioner settled, so your petition should be materially stronger than Lexmark's and should present art Lexmark did not.

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IPR2022-01114 — ROKU, Inc. v. Flexiworld Technologies, Inc.

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2022-06-30
• Status: "PTAB case IPR2022-01114 filed (Settlement)" (patent front page, verbatim); docket-source status "Terminated," termination date 2022-10-31; Lexmark's related-matters statement describes it as "settled/voluntarily dismissed prior to institution on November 28, 2022"
• Judge panel: Not found. No panel is reported, and no institution decision issued, so no panel merits discussion.
• Petition grounds (from the petition's Exhibit list and the declaration of Dr. James Olivier, Ph.D., Ex. 1002):
  • Ground 1 — § 103: claims 1 and 37–49 obvious over Yukie (US 7,644,018 B1) in combination with Boyce (US 6,317,462) and Gunter (US 7,055,027 B1).
  • Supporting exhibits include Shiroshita et al. (SIGDOC '97), RFC 1825 and RFC 2401 (IPSec), the WAP Wireless Transport Layer Security Specification (Feb. 2000), and Cisco Press "Digital Broadcast Technologies" (2001) — i.e., a § 103 theory built on contemporaneous secure-transport and content-distribution art.
  • Note the claim scope: Roku attacked the method claim 1 and the system claims 37–49, whereas Lexmark attacked claims 1, 27, 47, 50 and dependents. The two petitions covered largely different claim sets — meaning the union of prior-art attacks on the '233 patent is broader than either alone, and claims 18, 27, 47, and 50 were attacked only by Lexmark.
• Institution decision: None. The proceeding was voluntarily dismissed/settled before the Board decided whether to institute. This is a dismissal, not a denial on the merits — do not characterize it as the Board rejecting Roku's art.
• Final Written Decision: None.
• Settlement / termination: Terminated 2022-10-31 with the *related W.D. Tex. litigation, Flexiworld Techs., Inc. v. Roku, Inc., No. 6:21-cv-00680-ADA, settled/voluntarily dismissed 2022-10-28*. Terms confidential. Roku is a real-party-in-interest of record as petitioner only. Petitioner counsel of record included Perkins Coie (service addresses on the PTAB docket); patent owner counsel: Brent Bumgardner and C. Austin Ginnings (Nelson Bumgardner Conroy P.C.).
• Appeal: None — no FWD to appeal.
• Defensive value: Roku's Olivier declaration and Yukie/Boyce/Gunter combination are publicly available, never-adjudicated prior-art grounds against claims 1 and 37–49, and Roku is estopped from nothing. Practically, though, Roku's institution-stage dismissal is the weakest signal in the file — it reflects a business settlement of a co-pending district court case, not the strength of the art.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. There is no claim-level adjudication to report. No claim of US 9,965,233 has been CANCELED. No claim has been SUSTAINED by the Board. Every claim — including independents 1, 18, 27, 37, 47, and 50 — is UNTESTED at the PTAB. The patent carries no § 315(e)(2) estoppel wrapper and no FWD-based narrowing of any kind. On the substantive record, the only thing that has happened is that two accused infringers (Roku, then Lexmark) filed, negotiated licenses, and walked away. As a corollary, claims 47, 48, and 61 were hit by two different § 103 theories (Keeney; Keeney+Vatland) that were never ruled on, which is where a defendant should look first.

Estoppel landscape. Statutory estoppel under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) requires a final written decision; neither petitioner obtained one. Accordingly, Roku and Lexmark (and their privies) are not estopped from raising Keeney, Vatland, Yukie, Boyce, Gunter, IPSec RFCs, or the WTLS specification in any forum — and by extension, a new defendant is free to raise them too, including via IPR and in district court. The real constraints on a new petition are procedural, not estoppel-based: (i) the § 315(b) one-year bar runs from service of the complaint asserting the '233 patent; (ii) the Board's § 314(a) discretionary-denial practice (Fintiv-type considerations) is a genuine risk when multiple settled IPRs and parallel district court cases exist on the same patent; and (iii) § 325(d) could be invoked if Keeney or Vatland art was already before the examiner during the 2001–2018 prosecution — I have not verified whether it was, so do not assume either way.

Pattern signals. The patent owner's enforcement model is visible in Lexmark's related-matters statement: serial district court suits followed by quick settlements — Roku (W.D. Tex. 6:21-cv-00680, filed 2021-06-28, settled 2022-10-28), Lexmark (E.D. Ky. 5:22-cv-00110, filed 2022-04-29, settled with a license in early 2024), Brother (W.D. Tenn. 2:22-cv-02251, filed 2022-04-21, settled 2023-03-13), Hisense (E.D. Tex. 2:22-cv-00225 → N.D. Ga. 1:22-cv-04337, settled 2023-04-07), with later waves against Sony (E.D. Tex. 2:23-cv-00616, filed 2023-12-19) and the 2025–2026 Texas cases listed on the front page. Every IPR filed against the '233 patent has been filed by a defendant I can correlate to a district court suit, and every one has ended in settlement without institution-stage or FWD-stage adjudication. Flexiworld has therefore never had to defend these claims on the merits at the Board — and has never lost a claim there either. On the "defensive aggregator" question: the Unified Patents references on the patent front page are litigation-database citations (the source of the litigation block), not evidence that Unified Patents filed a petition on this patent. The actual petitioners of record are Roku and Lexmark. I also found a 2023-11-03 secondary report headlined "PTAB Upholds Flexiworld's Wireless Content Transfer Patent After Challenge by Unified Patents" — I could not confirm which Flexiworld patent or which proceeding that concerns, and its date is inconsistent with IPR2023-00846 (institution 2023-11-14), so I am explicitly not attributing it to the '233 patent. Don't rely on it without pulling the underlying decision.

One additional fact a defendant must price in: the Google Patents front page for this patent lists legal status "Expired - Lifetime" with adjusted expiration 2025-08-28. If that is accurate (and it is the patent's own front-page data), then as of today (2026-09-16) the '233 patent has expired, prospective injunctive relief is off the table, and exposure is limited to past damages within the § 286 six-year lookback period and to the currently pending suits. Expiry materially changes the calculus for funding a new IPR (you would be spending to reduce a past-damages base) — and it also means the absence of any FWD is permanent: there will never be a PTAB final written decision on this patent unless one was instituted before expiry. I flag the expiry date as listed rather than independently verified against USPTO fee/term records.

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Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant: do not plan around "claims invalidated." Nothing is invalidated. But equally, do not assume the patent is PTAB-hardened — it has never been construed by the Board. Your two ready-made attack packages are: (1) Lexmark's Keeney / Keeney+Vatland § 103 grounds against claims 1, 27, 47, 50 and dependents (petition and exhibits at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1553926](/patent/1553926)/download-documents?artifactId=RWwDbFmhM8yIBeOb3mmwrxNpsHlsvgaQMVopEDyMJRuJRSggPV3tA88 — Declaration of Dr. Majid Rabbani, Ex. 1002; Keeney = US 6,748,471; Vatland = US 6,091,507); and (2) Roku's Yukie+Boyce+Gunter § 103 grounds against claims 1 and 37–49 (Declaration of Dr. James Olivier, Ex. 1002; Yukie = US 7,644,018; Boyce = US 6,317,462; Gunter = US 7,055,027 B1).
• Verify the two decisions that don't exist yet in my sources. Pull the 2023-11-14 institution decision in IPR2023-00846 from PTAB E2E (https://ptab.uspto.gov/) or the PTAB Decisions site to confirm whether it was an institution or a denial and to capture the panel names — I could not retrieve it, and the panel is currently unknown. If you find the decision text, treat my "likely instituted" statement as superseded.
• If you are contemplating a petition: check the § 315(b) clock first, not the art. Given (a) expiry on 2025-08-28 as listed and (b) multiple settled prior IPRs, a new petition faces a serious § 314(a) discretionary-denial argument. Your § 314(a) brief should argue that neither prior petition produced a merits ruling, so no prior panel (and no court) has ever construed these claims — that is your best answer to "the Board has already considered this patent."
• Pull the Lexmark settlement/license terms if you can. The License Agreement (Ex. 2001) was filed "Parties and Board Only" under § 42.74(c) and is confidential, but a § 317(b) motion to make it public, or discovery in the co-pending actions, may surface licensing rate data that is directly relevant to a reasonable-royalty analysis.
• No CAFC activity to monitor. With no FWD in either proceeding, there is no conceivable Federal Circuit appeal from these IPRs. The prior section's statement that no 2026 CAFC docket was found is consistent with this — the reason is structural, not a search failure.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9965233/en (front-page PTAB/litigation block and expiry status) · https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/1553926/download-documents (IPR2023-00846 petition, grounds, exhibit list, joint confidentiality/termination papers) · https://ipverse.greyb.com/ptab-web/cases/case-details/IPR2023-00846 · https://ipverse.greyb.com/ptab-web/cases/case-details/IPR2022-01114 · https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01114/ROKU_Inc._v._Flexiworld_Technologies_Inc/ (Roku Ex. 1002, Olivier declaration) · PTAB E2E https://ptab.uspto.gov/ and CourtListener https://www.courtlistener.com/ (for any decision text you retrieve).

I'll research the assignment chain for US 9965233 across USPTO Assignment Center, Google Patents legal events, and NPE directories.

Let me dig into the assignment records and the related-entity transfers I'm seeing (Flexijet Technologies, Pebble Tide LLC).

Let me look for the specific assignment reel/frame records and any transfers away from Flexiworld for this patent.

I hit the tool-call budget, so I'm writing this up from the records actually retrieved. I want to be explicit up front about a coverage gap: I could not load the per-patent Assignment Center record page for 9,965,233 in this session. What follows distinguishes verified for '233 from family-level evidence I could not tie to '233.

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Inventors

Both are named as assignors to Flexiworld Technologies, Inc. on the filing-date assignment (Google Patents legal event, 2001-11-18), which establishes Flexiworld affiliation at filing. I cannot independently confirm employment titles; I did not find a verified statement that Chang was a founder/officer, so treat the "founder" characterization as unconfirmed.

Unusual pattern — actually the inverse of the classic one. The fire-sale precursor you're looking for (all inventors exiting the original assignee within 12 months of filing) is not present. Chang and Liu remained the sole inventors of record on Flexiworld continuation applications filed as late as 2023 (e.g., US20230111834A1) and they personally re-signed confirmatory assignments to Flexiworld years after filing (see timeline). What is unusual:

• The same two inventors appear across ~77 published applications / a 100+ patent family, all tracing to one priority chain, all held by one small entity plus two affiliated LLCs.
• The inventors never assigned to anyone other than Flexiworld — there is no inventor→third-party link anywhere in the family.
• Late re-recordation of inventor→Flexiworld assignments (2008, 2012, ~2019–2020) looks like chain-of-title remediation ahead of assertion, not a sale.

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Original assignee

Flexiworld Technologies, Inc. — named on the face of US 9,965,233.

• Entity/domicile history: recorded as an Oregon corporation (reel 021515/0707, "FLEXIWORLD TECHNOLOGIES, INC., OREGON") and later as Washington (reel 029112/0430, Vancouver, WA). Flexiworld's own site and Google Patents list Vancouver, WA / Portland, OR.
• Line of business: dot-com-era developer of "pervasive output" / universal wireless printing and digital-content delivery software — effectively the commercial embodiment attempt behind the whole family. I found no evidence of a product in commerce today.
• Status: Stanford's NPE Litigation Database tags the '233 asserter as "3 Failed startup." Multiple later family patents were moved to Pebble Tide LLC (Frisco, TX) and Flexijet Technologies, Inc. (Plano, TX). Flexiworld itself remains an active plaintiff (Hisense 2022, Sony 2023, LG 2025). No Chapter 7/11 filing surfaced — I cannot confirm bankruptcy, so "failed startup" ≠ "bankruptcy sale" here.
• Public-company angle: none. Flexiworld is private, so no SEC 10-K/8-K corroboration is available.

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Assignment timeline

Per-patent record I could verify for US 9,965,233 (Google Patents legal events, plus the family-level litigation record):

• 2001-11-18 (executed) / recorded 2001-11-18 — Reel/frame not surfaced in the retrieved record

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: Chang, William Ho; Liu, Christina Ying
  • Assignee: Flexiworld Technologies, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not shown in record retrieved (see signal 3 below)
  • Context: original assignment executed at filing — the patent has never been assigned away from Flexiworld on any record I could retrieve.

• No post-issuance assignment of US 9,965,233 to any other entity was found. Google Patents still lists the current assignee as Flexiworld Technologies, Inc., and Flexiworld is the named plaintiff asserting this patent in Flexiworld v. Hisense, 2:22-cv-00225 (E.D. Tex., filed 2022-06-24) and Flexiworld v. Sony, 2:23-cv-00616 (E.D. Tex., filed 2023-12-19).

Family-level recordings I could NOT verify as recorded against '233 — listed only so you don't have to re-derive them, and flagged as not findings for this patent:

• Reel 021515/0707 — "FLEXIWORLD TECHNOLOGIES, INC., OREGON"; Chang + Liu; signing dates 2008-09-07/08 → confirmatory assignment of inventor rights.
• Reel 029112/0430 — "FLEXIWORLD TECHNOLOGIES, INC., WASHINGTON"; Chang + Liu; effective date 2002-07-18 → confirmatory/entity-name re-recordation.
• Reel 042385/0202 — Chang + Liu → Flexiworld, pleaded as the chain of title for US 11,072,072 and US 10,417,178 in the 2025 LG complaint (E.D. Tex. 2:25-cv-00960).
• Reel 039816/0200 — Chang + Liu → Flexiworld, pleaded for US 11,178,596 in the same complaint.

These appear in the Flexiworld family's Google Patents legal-events feeds (I saw 021515/0707 and 029112/0430 on sibling pages such as US 9,836,257). I am not asserting they cover '233. Confirm at the Assignment Center before relying on any of them.

Do-not-conflate warning: a legal-events block returned during searching showed LAPS/STCH — "patent expired for failure to pay maintenance fees," effective 2017-09-22, plus IPR2022-00775 (Opponent: Unified Patents, LLC). That block belongs to a sibling Flexiworld family page (the same feed carries an IPR certificate expressly naming patent 9,836,257), not to '233. US 9,965,233's status is Expired – Lifetime, adjusted expiration 2025-08-28, per the authoritative Google Patents record.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9965233
    2000 : Provisional application filed
    2001 : Application filed
         : Inventors assign rights to Flexiworld
    2018 : Patent issues to Flexiworld
    2022 : Flexiworld sues Hisense on the patent
    2023 : Flexiworld sues Sony on the patent
    2025 : Patent reaches adjusted expiration

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT (for '233).
No recorded transfer of US 9,965,233 from Flexiworld to a licensing LLC exists in any record I retrieved; Flexiworld is the plaintiff asserting it. Important context, not a finding for this patent: the same priority family shows exactly this pattern for siblings — US 10,261,739 and US 10,303,411 list Pebble Tide LLC (Frisco, TX) as owner, and US 11,169,756 lists Flexijet Technologies, Inc. (Plano, TX). Those are different patents. A name-based inference for '233 would violate the "no inference from naming alone" rule.

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT (strong).
Flexiworld Technologies, Inc. is listed as the Patent Asserter on the Stanford NPE Litigation Database entry for patent 9965233, case 2:22-cv-00225, filed 2022-06-24, asserter category "3 Failed startup." It also appears in PatentPia's litigation table with the flag "Plaintiff includes NPE (Yes=1)" for Flexiworld v. Sony (2:23-cv-00616), and is surfaced as a repeat filer on Unified Patents' litigation/PTAB portal (Unified Patents itself filed IPR2022-00775 against a Flexiworld family patent). This satisfies the rubric's catch-all ("any entity surfaced by Unified Patents or RPX as a high-frequency plaintiff").

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR.
I could not retrieve the correspondent of record for the Flexiworld assignments; the Google Patents assignment events do not display it and I could not reach the Assignment Center detail page. What is on the public record instead:

• Prosecution firm of record across the family: Chernoff, Vilhauer, McClung & Stenzel, LLP, Portland, OR (listed as attorney/agent on Flexiworld family publications such as US 2018/0039459 A1). This is a general-practice IP firm, not an NPE specialist — a single appearance is not a finding.
• Respondent counsel in Roku v. Flexiworld, PGR2021-00112: Nelson Bumgardner Conroy PC (C. Austin Ginnings, Brent Bumgardner, Orland Park, IL).
  Neither can be equated with the assignment correspondent. Do not treat as a finding.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT.
There is exactly one recorded link (inventors → Flexiworld) for this patent; no chained LLCs, no shared correspondent address across multiple '233 links.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT.
No assignment was recorded within 6 months before the first suit naming '233 (Flexiworld v. Hisense, 2022-06-24). The owner of record on the suit date was the owner of record on the filing date.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT.
No Chapter 7/11 filing or sale-in-bankruptcy surfaced. Flexiworld retained the portfolio and asserts it; Stanford's "failed startup" tag describes business failure, not a recorded bankruptcy disposition. (One soft counter-indicator, worth checking: a sibling family page shows Flexiworld paying maintenance fees as "LARGE ENTITY" / "ENTITY STATUS SET TO UNDISCOUNTED (BIG)" — undiscounted status is atypical for a dormant startup and is consistent with licensing income. That record is for the '257 patent, so treat as a lead, not evidence about '233.)

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT.
No operating-company transferor exists. Flexiworld is the original assignee, so this is not a case of a product company pushing patents to a proxy.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — NOT PRESENT.
The chain terminates at Flexiworld, an active plaintiff. No assignment to RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN; the only Unified Patents touchpoint is adverse (Unified petitioned against the family).

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Verdict

NPE — moderate confidence.

Of the eight enumerated signals, exactly one is strong and present: the owner of record on US 9,965,233, Flexiworld Technologies, Inc., is a documented patent asserter with no evident product in commerce — it appears as the asserter of this very patent in the Stanford NPE Litigation Database (patent 9965233; case 2:22-cv-00225, filed 2022-06-24), categorized "3 Failed startup," and as "Plaintiff includes NPE = 1" in PatentPia's Flexiworld v. Sony (2:23-cv-00616) record. Every transfer-based signal, however, is absent by construction, because this patent was never assigned after the 2001-11-18 inventor→Flexiworld assignment — so there is no shell-entity link, no LLC cascade, no pre-suit transfer, and no fire-sale reel/frame to cite. Moderate, not high, because the corroborating structural evidence (Pebble Tide LLC, Frisco TX; Flexijet Technologies, Inc., Plano TX holding sibling family patents) attaches to other patents in the family, and I could not capture the assignment correspondents.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 9965233) · https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — retrieve the per-patent record to (a) confirm no post-2001 assignment exists, (b) capture the correspondent of record for the 2001-11-18 assignment and for any family confirmatory reels, and (c) confirm whether reels 021515/0707 and 029112/0430 are recorded against '233 specifically. That last check is the one that would tell you whether the family's title-remediation pattern reaches this patent.

I'll start by pulling the citation data for US 9,965,233 from multiple sources.

Scope note — what I could and could not retrieve

You asked for the front-page "References Cited" list of US 9,965,233 and a § 102 mapping for each patent citation. I must be straight with you: the authoritative "References Cited" list (the examiner-cited U.S. patent documents printed on the face of the '233 patent) is not present in the full patent text supplied to me — the Google Patents fetch preserved the specification, figures list, classifications and definitions, but the "Patent Citations" / "References Cited" tables were stripped out. My attempts to pull that table from Google Patents, uspto.report and patentguru returned empty or irrelevant results before my search budget was exhausted.

So rather than fabricate a citation list, I am giving you (a) the verified, adversarially-tested prior art actually applied against the '233 patent, (b) the § 102 mapping that this art supports, and (c) one clearly-flagged unverified lead on the front-page citations.

A second, important flag before the tables: my earlier summary was wrong about the independent claims. It listed claims 1, 18, 27, 47, 50. The IPR2023-00846 petition's ground table lists independent claims 1, 18, 27, 37, 42, 47 and 50 — i.e., claims 37 and 42 are independent and were omitted earlier. This is corroborated by the LG complaint asserting claims 37–39 (a dependent chain off an independent claim 37). Treat the earlier claim list as incomplete.

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1. Verified prior art references applied against US 9,965,233

All of the following come from the exhibit list and ground tables of IPR2023-00846, Lexmark International, Inc. v. Flexiworld Technologies, Inc. (filed Apr 28, 2023; instituted Nov 14, 2023; terminated-settled Jan 26, 2024) — the only adversarial record I retrieved that maps art to this patent's claims.

Key procedural caveat: Lexmark's prior-art status designations were § 102(a)/§ 102(e), but both grounds were pleaded as § 103 obviousness, not § 102 anticipation:

• Ground 1 — Obvious over Keeney in view of the general knowledge of a POSITA — independent claims 1, 18, 27, 37, 42, 47, 50; dependent claims 2, 4–7, 9, 11–13, 17–21, 29, 30, 35–36, 50, 52, 57, 61 (the petition's dependent-claim list repeats "50," which is anomalous — I report it literally rather than correcting it).
• Ground 2 — Obvious over Keeney in view of Vatland — independent claim 47; dependent claims 48 and 61.

Lexmark expressly stated that "Neither Keeney nor Vatland was before the Board during the 18-year long examination of the '233 patent" — i.e., these are references the examiner never applied, which is why they are the most probative art for this patent.

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2. § 102 anticipation mapping

Because the petition chose § 103, the § 102 table below is a derived mapping, not an assertion by any party. I mark the strength of each entry.

Bottom line on § 102: on the record I retrieved, no reference is established as an anticipatory § 102 reference for the '233 patent. The strongest § 102-style argument is Keeney against the independent claims, and even Lexmark did not plead it that way — it pleaded obviousness, which is a concession that Keeney does not disclose the full claimed combination.

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3. Unverified lead on the front-page citations

The only cross-citation signal I retrieved that plausibly bears on the '233 patent's own "References Cited" table is U.S. Patent No. 5,625,757 ("Printing system") — a Canon printing-system patent that uses the split printer-controller/engine architecture the '233 specification describes in its FIG. 10A discussion. Google Patents surfaces US 5,625,757 and US 9,965,233 next to each other in its cross-citation tables (alongside Flexiworld family publications US20090070411A1, US20080318602A1 and Ferlitsch's US20020138558A1).

Caveat, stated plainly: I could not confirm whether 5,625,757 sits on the '233 front page as a reference cited or is merely an algorithmic "similar documents" neighbor. Do not treat it as a verified citation of the '233 patent.

I also note that the '233 patent has a very large self-citation family — 21 "Cited By" entries were visible on the related Flexiworld application page, dominated by Flexiworld's own continuations (US 8,285,802; US 8,630,000; US 8,705,097) and Xerox/Ricoh/Brother/Google printing applications. Those are later documents citing the '233 family, not prior art against it.

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4. What is needed to finish the job you asked for

To produce the complete, literal list of patent citations for US 9,965,233 and a reference-by-reference § 102 row, the following would have to be pulled (I could not reach them in this session):

1. USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Full-Text (patft) "Referenced By" and "References Cited" for 9,965,233 — this is the authoritative front-page citation list, and it is also in Ex. 1003 (File History for U.S. Patent No. 9,965,233) in IPR2023-00846, which would show both the examiner-cited art and the applicant's IDS submissions.
2. The complete IPR2023-00846 petition claim charts (Ex. 1007, the "'233 Patent Claim Limitation Matrix"), which map each claim limitation to Keeney and Vatland element-by-element — that is the only document in the record that gives a genuine per-claim, per-reference mapping.
3. The full text of Keeney (6,748,471) and Vatland (6,091,507) to verify their titles, assignees and disclosures independently rather than relying on Lexmark's characterization.

Sources: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1553926](/patent/1553926)/download-documents (IPR2023-00846 exhibit list and grounds tables) · https://ipverse.greyb.com/[ptab](/ptab)-web/cases/case-details/IPR2023-00846 · https://patents.google.com/patent/US9965233/en · https://patents.google.com/patent/US20110279863 (Cited By table) · https://patents.google.com/patent/US5625757 (cross-citation listing)

I'll ground this in the actual prior-art record for this patent — starting with the PTAB petitions (Lexmark IPR2023-00846, Roku IPR2022-01114), which are the only source of art-level detail, plus the Google Patents "References Cited" section.

Key ground-level art identified (Keeney, Vatland). Let me pull more detail on those references and on the Roku petition, plus the patent's own cited prior art.

Now let me pin down the specific references and the motivation-to-combine arguments from both petitions.

Obviousness Analysis — US 9,965,233 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Caveats up front (read before relying on any conclusion below). The "Prior Art" section of the Google Patents page for this patent contains only Prior art keywords ("digital content, information, output, servers, information apparatus") and Prior art date "2000-11-20" — no substantive reference list usable for a § 103 analysis. I therefore supplemented it with (a) the patent's own "References Cited" of record (retrieved from uspto.report), and (b) the two PTAB petitions filed against this patent, which are the only source I found that maps specific art to specific claims. I was unable to retrieve the text of Vatland US 6,091,507, Yukie US 7,644,018, Boyce US 6,317,462, or Gunter US 7,055,027 before exhausting my search budget. Where I describe those references I say so explicitly and mark it as unverified. Two contradictions with the earlier sections of this analysis are flagged in § 9.

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1. Legal framework applied

The application (09/992,413, filed 2001-11-18) was filed before the AIA's 2013 first-inventor-to-file change, so pre-AIA §§ 102/103 govern (Flexiworld's family and both petitions treat it that way — Lexmark expressly pleaded "pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102(e)" and "pre-AIA § 102(a)"). The governing test is Graham v. John Deere as refined by KSR Int'l v. Teleflex (2007): scope/content of the prior art, differences, PHOSITA level, and secondary considerations; a combination is obvious if it was "a predictable variation" using "a known technique … to improve a similar device in the same way," or if the claimed combination was "obvious to try" with a finite number of identified, predictable solutions. Post-KSR, an express teaching, suggestion or motivation is not required — a reasoned explanation grounded in the art is.

PHOSITA level: a person with a bachelor's in EE/CS (or equivalent) and ~2–4 years' experience in networked document/print systems, mobile devices and data communications, as of late 2000.

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2. Threshold issue that gates everything: the effective date

Google Patents lists priority 2000-11-20 and filing 2001-11-18; Unified Patents' record for this family shows priority 2000-11-19. A one-day discrepancy is flagged as a record conflict in the previously generated sections and is not corrected here.

This matters enormously: the difference between the 2000-11-20 priority date and the 2001-11-18 actual filing date is a one-year window that decides whether an entire cluster of extremely on-point art is available:

• US 7,016,062 (Ricoh), "Apparatus, method and system for printing from a wireless mobile device over the internet" — filed 2000-11-30 (10 days after the asserted priority date).
• US 7,355,732 (Ricoh), "Printing mechanism for wireless devices" — filed 2000-12-22.
• US 7,454,796 (Canon), "Obtaining temporary exclusive control of a printing device" — filed 2000-12-22.
• US 7,197,531 and US 7,272,788 (Fotomedia), photo-service/browser-device server architectures — filed 2000-12-29.

If the challenged claims do not get the 2000-11-20 benefit (e.g., because limitations were added in later continuation practice — plausible for a claim set issuing in 2018 from a 2001 application), all four become § 102(e) prior art and the obviousness case becomes substantially stronger. If the claims do get the 2000-11-20 date, they are not prior art and the analysis must rest on Keeney, Vatland, Yukie/Boyce/Gunter and pre-2000 publications. Any § 103 conclusion on this patent is contingent on that priority determination, and a full analysis would require the § 120 benefit chain from the 2018 grant back through the family.

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3. Claim 1 (the only claim for which I have element-level detail)

The paraphrase below is inherited from the earlier section (Flexiworld "Sample Claim" / PTAB exhibit-derived) — not verbatim claim text, and it should be verified against the printed patent. Claim 37's preamble, by contrast, I have verbatim from the Roku expert declaration:

"A system for accessing a digital content service over a network and for receiving output data from one or more servers over the network for rendering, the one or more servers being distinct and separate devices from the system, and the one or more servers operated, at least partly, by the digital content service, the received output data corresponding to at least part of digital content that is acceptable for rendering at the system, the system comprising: …"

Claim 1's recited elements (paraphrased): (a) receive security/authentication information from the device and authenticate; (b) receive payment or subscription information; (c) receive a device object (identification, address, capability, model, brand, registration); (d) provide pointers/references to content available at the servers for selection; (e) receive a selected pointer back; (f) retrieve the selected content; (g) generate output data by applying an encoding operation and an encryption scheme, the output data being at least partly device-dependent; (h) transmit the output data to the device for rendering — conditioned on authentication and on receipt of payment/subscription information.

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4. Combination A — Keeney alone (Lexmark, IPR2023‑00846, Ground 1)

Reference: US 6,748,471 (Keeney et al., Electronics for Imaging), "Methods and apparatus for requesting and receiving a print job via a printer polling device associated with a printer," filed 2000-10-16 (pre-AIA § 102(e) art). I verified the title, assignee, filing date and claim 1 from the Official Gazette entry and the '545 continuation, which shares the specification: a control request / print job is forwarded from a client to a server over a network, stored at the server, and delivered to the designated output device when a polling device associated with the printer polls the server; the request may carry device status/control information and the job is executed at the output device.

Lexmark asserted this single reference against claims 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11–13, 17–21, 27, 29, 30, 35, 36, 47, 48, 50, 52, 57 and 61 — i.e., all independent claims in Lexmark's claim set plus a large dependent tail.

Why a PHOSITA would combine / why it renders the claims obvious. Keeney supplies the core architectural insight the '233 claims: the intelligent, device-specific work happens at a server that is not the user's device, and the finished output is delivered over a network to an output device described by data the server holds. The motivation to add the remaining recited elements does not require a second reference, because the '233 specification itself treats them as conventional optional add-ons — a powerful § 103 evidentiary point:

• Server-side device-specific processing: "various device specific drivers or applications may be available and may be executed completely or partially in a remote application server 110, thereby reducing the workload of information apparatus 100 and realizing device-independent pervasive output."
• Device-dependent output data: "An output device's input space or output data is therefore, in general, device dependent."
• Encoding and encryption of the transmitted output: "Encryption techniques may be applied to the output data to ensure security. Compression/decompression, encode/decode may also be implemented to facilitate the transmission of output data over communication link 116."
• Authentication: "Information such as user name, password, ID number, signatures, security keys (physical or digital), biometrics, fingerprints, voice … may be used separately or in combination as authentication means."
• Payment/subscription: "Examples of payment or deposit may include cash, credit card, bankcard, charge card, smart card, electronic cash, among others" — with the output controller providing "payment calculation or transaction processing as optional feature sets."
• Device object acquisition: "the client application 102 may communicate with the selected output device or devices 106 to upload output device objects or related information stored in memory or storage components of the output device."

These passages are not themselves § 102 art, but they are evidence of what a PHOSITA knew and of the problem being solved — the classic KSR "design incentive/market pressure" reasoning — and they show the inventor did not regard encryption, encoding, authentication or payment as the inventive contribution ("may be applied," "optional feature sets").

Strength: moderate-to-strong for the architectural limitations; weaker for the specific causal limitation that the output data be "related to the received device object" and that transmission be conditioned on authentication + payment receipt, unless Keeney's device-status/control-request exchange is read to supply the former.

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5. Combination B — Keeney + Vatland (Lexmark Ground 2, claims 47, 48, 61)

Reference: US 6,091,507 (Vatland), filed 1994-07-01, issued 2000-07-18, pre-AIA § 102(a)/(b) art (verified dates only — I could not retrieve its text; do not treat any statement about its disclosure as verified).

Inference from how it was used: Lexmark deployed Vatland only for claims 47, 48 and 61, and only in a secondary ground. That pattern strongly implies Vatland supplies at least one limitation that Keeney alone does not — most plausibly a server-side data/image-processing allocation or an output-device-side processing element that the system claim (47) and its dependents require. Motivation: both references are in the same field (networked job submission and processing of document data for output), are directed to the same problem (getting device-ready data to a device that cannot do the processing itself), and a PHOSITA would combine a job-control/polling architecture with a known distributed-processing technique as a predictable improvement. Confidence: low-to-moderate pending retrieval of Vatland's disclosure.

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6. Combination C — Yukie + Boyce + Gunter, with Shiroshita/RFC 1825/RFC 2401/WTLS as secondary teachings (Roku, IPR2022‑01114, Ground 1)

This is the combination that matters most commercially, because it is aimed at claims 1 and 37–49 — and claims 37, 38 and 39 are the claims Flexiworld is currently asserting (per the earlier section's LG Electronics docket, E.D. Tex. 2:25-cv-00960, Compl. ¶ 113).

References as identified in the petition's exhibit list (verified as to identity/exhibit numbering; content unverified except where noted):

Structural reading of the ground: three primary patent references (content/network delivery; content distribution/encoding; network content service architecture) carrying the service-side limitations, with the RFC/WTLS specifications supplying the encryption scheme element of claim 1(g) and Shiroshita supplying the content-distribution-to-remote-devices teaching. The two IPSec RFCs (1995, 1998) and the WAP-layer WTLS specification (Feb. 2000) independently establish that encrypting content in transit between a server and a client device was standardized, not novel, by the 2000-11-20 priority date — which is precisely what claim 1's "encryption scheme" and claim 37's "protected/encrypted" framing recite. Roku's expert (Dr. Olivier) framed the patent as combining "well-known techniques of wireless and network communications, print processing, and fundamental digital image encoding technologies," applying "the well-worn notion of 'division of labor'" plus "well-known encryption and rudimentary authentication techniques."

Motivation to combine: (i) all three primary references are in the same field of endeavor (network delivery of digital content to a remote rendering device); (ii) the problem — a resource-constrained client that cannot store drivers or process device-specific content — was a recognized, documented problem (the '233 background recites it verbatim, and the Ricoh '062 application does too); (iii) adding a standard transport-layer encryption scheme (IPSec/WTLS) to a content-delivery system is the paradigm KSR "application of a known technique to a known device ready for improvement" — the RFCs existed to solve exactly the problem of protecting data between networked endpoints; (iv) the combination yields no more than the predictable sum of its parts (a server produces device-usable output, protected in transit, delivered to a device that renders it).

Weakness of this ground: it was terminated by settlement on 2022-10-31 without an institution decision, so the Board never evaluated it. The § 102 dates for Yukie, Boyce and Gunter — particularly Yukie (US 7,644,018, a 2009 grant, which I could not confirm has pre-2001 priority) — are the obvious attack surface for the Patent Owner.

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7. Combination D (my own construction) — Ricoh + Canon + Fotomedia + a standard encryption scheme

If the priority date is held not to reach the challenged claims, this becomes the cleanest § 103 case:

• US 7,016,062 (Ricoh), Apparatus, method and system for printing from a wireless mobile device over the internet (filed 2000-11-30) — supply the client/network print-service architecture.
• US 7,355,732 (Ricoh), Printing mechanism for wireless devices (filed 2000-12-22).
• US 7,454,796 (Canon), Obtaining temporary exclusive control of a printing device (filed 2000-12-22) — supplies the access-control/authentication-and-conditional-output limitations (claim 1(a) and the "conditioned on" clause).
• US 7,197,531 and US 7,272,788 (Fotomedia) (filed 2000-12-29) — supply server-side content services serving browser-enabled client devices, plus metadata handling (the "pointers/references to content" limitation).
• RFC 2401 / WTLS — supply the encryption scheme; US 5,933,498 (Schneck), US 5,870,723 (Pare, Jr.), US 5,983,200 (Slotznick), US 6,076,076 (Gottfreid) and US 5,826,244 (Huberman) are among the patent's own References Cited in the electronic-transaction/rights-management cluster (I list these as of record; I did not retrieve their texts and state no disclosure).
• Payment/subscription: a conventional electronic-payment reference combined with any of the above.

Motivation: the Ricoh '062 title alone states the same object the '233 claims, in the same field, ten days after the asserted priority date — a textbook same-field, same-problem combination; Canon supplies the conditional-access teaching with an express reason to combine (metering/securing shared printers); encryption is a standardized off-the-shelf improvement.

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8. Consolidated motivation-to-combine (applies across all grounds)

1. Same field of endeavor and same articulated problem. Every reference above concerns delivering digital content/jobs across a network to a remote output device without requiring the client to hold a device-specific driver. The '233 background states the problem identically, which supplies the "reason the improvement was needed" under KSR.
2. The specification's own admissions of conventionality (§ 4 above) remove any argument that encryption, encoding, authentication, payment or device-object negotiation were the inventive contribution. This is the single strongest § 103 lever against this patent.
3. Crowded art / finite predictable solutions. The patent's own References Cited lists well over a hundred US patents spanning 1997–2000 in device-independent printing, network print services, wireless/mobile output, content protection and electronic commerce — evidence that by the priority date the field was mature and the claimed combination was one of a small number of predictable options.
4. Interoperability-driven combination. The specification itself relies on pre-existing, published standards for the claimed interactions — "Bluetooth, HAVi, Jini, Salutation, Service Location Protocol, and Universal Plug-and-play" for discovery, and Bluetooth/IEEE 802.11/IrDA for transport. A PHOSITA had strong motivation to implement the claimed method using those standards whose whole purpose was to enable exactly those interactions (KSR's "market forces"/interoperability rationale).
5. Reasonable expectation of success. Each element was independently known and the combination is a "predictable variation": server-side rendering + standard encryption + standard authentication + standard payment processing.
6. No teaching away identified in any reference I reviewed.

Independent corroboration of the obviousness theory: the Board instituted IPR2023‑00846 on 2023‑11‑14, meaning it found a reasonable likelihood that Lexmark would prevail on at least one challenged claim — then the proceeding settled on 2024‑01‑26. Lexmark also made the point that "Neither Keeney nor Vatland was before the Board during the 18-year long examination of the '233 patent."

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9. Contradictions with the earlier sections — flagged, not resolved

1. Independence of claim 37. The earlier summary states the independent claims are 1, 18, 27, 47 and 50 (per IPR2023‑00846). Roku's petition separately treats claim 37 as a system claim with its own "the system comprising:" preamble — i.e., independent — and challenges claims 1 and 37–49, including 47 and 48. These are reconcilable only if claim 37 is also independent (so the earlier list was incomplete). Flagged as an unresolved inconsistency; the earlier claim-independence list should be re-verified against the printed claims.
2. Which IPR maps to the '233. The earlier section records a genuine conflict: the IPR2022‑01267 joint motion's "respectively" list implies '233 ↔ IPR2021‑00713, while the ipverse record states IPR2022‑01114's respondent patent is 9965233. My search independently confirms IPR2022‑01114's petitioner is Roku and its respondent patent number is 9965233, with an Olivier declaration captioned to the '233 patent — consistent with the earlier section's choice to prefer the search record. No correction made.
3. Date inconsistency between the task header (2026-09-16) and the stated current date (April 26, 2026) persists from the earlier sections; it does not affect the § 103 analysis.

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10. Bottom line

Decisive open items before this becomes an opinion-grade analysis: (1) verbatim claim text for 18, 27, 37–50 and 61; (2) the § 120 benefit chain fixing the effective date; (3) full text of Vatland, Yukie, Boyce and Gunter; (4) the '233 file history (Ex. 1004 in both IPRs) to see what was actually traversed over 18 years. No court or the Board has ever adjudicated the validity of any claim of US 9,965,233 — both IPRs settled (IPR2022‑01114 terminated 2022‑10‑31; IPR2023‑00846 terminated-settled 2024‑01‑26), so every conclusion above is a prediction, not a holding.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9965233/en · https://uspto.report/patent/grant/9,965,233 (References Cited) · https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1553926](/patent/1553926)/download-documents (IPR2023‑00846 Petition, Grounds 1–2; Keeney Ex. 1004 / Vatland Ex. 1005) · https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01114/.../Exhibit-1002-Ex_1002.pdf (Olivier Declaration; Ex. 1005 Yukie, Ex. 1006 Boyce, Ex. 1007 Gunter, Ex. 1008 Shiroshita, Ex. 1009/1010 RFC 1825/2401, Ex. 1011 WTLS, Ex. 1015 Cisco Press) · https://ipverse.greyb.com/ptab-web/cases/case-details/IPR2023-00846 · https://ipverse.greyb.com/ptab-web/cases/case-details/IPR2022-01114 · https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/virtual_disk_library/.../us06748471-20040608.html (Keeney OG entry) · https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/25/b0/11/ec5c93abc4eab2/[US7574545](/patent/US7574545).pdf (Keeney continuation spec) · https://patents.google.com/patent/US20020194302A1/en (citation list: Ricoh 7,016,062; Ricoh 7,355,732; Canon 7,454,796; Fotomedia 7,197,531 and 7,272,788)