Light examiner search. Crowded prior‑art neighborhood. The bet is on invalidation.
TR‑684 lands in band 7 of the Trarian invalidity scale (1 = safest, 10 = riskiest). Patents historically scoring in this band have been invalidated at a rate of 65% when challenged on the merits — a band an underwriter can size positions against.
The driver story is coherent: the examiner added essentially no prior art of their own during prosecution, the citations that are on the file are themselves heavily cited (a busy technical neighborhood), and the patent sits in a contested forward‑citation pattern. Doctrine load on §103 is moderate but not damning.
| Elt. | Claim text | Disclosure |
|---|---|---|
| 1[a] | "a method of providing quality of service in a voice over IP telephone system" | Golden col. 2, ll. 14–28verbatim |
| 1[b] | "detecting a packet loss event on the network" | Golden col. 4, ll. 31–52verbatim |
| 1[c] | "adjusting a buffer depth at a receiving endpoint in response to the detected loss" | Golden col. 5, ll. 8–22 · cf. Fig. 3Bteaches |
| 1[d] | "signalling the adjustment to a corresponding transmitting endpoint over the same channel" | Golden col. 6, ll. 41–58 · Yu §3.2obvious to combine |
| 1[e] | "wherein the adjustment maintains call latency below a configurable threshold" | Golden col. 7, ll. 12–24verbatim |
| Reference | Date | Disclosure | Theory |
|---|---|---|---|
| US 6,452,924 B1 Top hit | 17 Sep 2002 | Golden — jitter‑buffer adaptation in VoIP endpoints. Discloses 1[a]–[c] and [e] verbatim. | §102 anticipation |
| US 6,389,032 B1 | 14 May 2002 | Cohen — endpoint‑to‑endpoint signalling protocol for QoS feedback. | §103 (w/ Golden) |
| IETF RFC 3550 §6.4.1 | Jul 2003 | RTP control protocol — receiver reports of loss rate, jitter, signalling. | §103 (w/ Golden) |
| EP 1 209 879 A2 | 29 May 2002 | Nortel — adaptive packetization rate to maintain latency. | §103 combination |
| Yu et al., ICC 1999 | Jun 1999 | "Adaptive Playout for Internet Telephony" — §3.2 teaches mutual signalling. | §103 motivation |
| Cisco AVVID 4.0 Manual | Jan 2001 | Commercial deployment manual — POSITA had ready access to the technique. | POSITA context |
The bet would have paid off.
TR‑684 is a real, settled case — included here as a worked example. The PTAB cancelled the challenged claims; the Federal Circuit affirmed. The score was made blind to the outcome.
A single case never validates a model. But it is the kind of outcome the score is built to flag in advance — and the kind of bet an underwriter can size to the band.
Caveats & reading notes
The Trarian score is a ranking tool calibrated to historical outcomes. It is not a guarantee of future results. In any small sample you will see patents in the strongest bucket that turn out invalid and patents in the weakest bucket that turn out valid.
We classify patents into more or less likely to be invalidated — not into "valid" and "invalid." A 1 is not a verdict; a 10 is not a free pass. The point is consistency: a 6 means the same thing every time, every patent, every analyst.
This report is a sample. Names and selections are illustrative. Trarian is a research firm, not a law firm. Nothing in this report constitutes legal advice.