87 citing patent families: how to read the public record
The public record lists 87 citing patent families associated with organizations including Microsoft, Visa, and Bank of America. Here is what those references do and do not establish.
A forward citation appears when a later patent record references an earlier patent or publication. The reference may be submitted by an applicant, supplied by a third party, or added by an examiner. Its inclusion is public, but it is not an admission that the reference is material and does not identify the submitter without review of the prosecution record.
The displayed count for Rock Innovation is 87 citing patent families: 21 direct citations to individual family members and 66 family-to-family records under the site's current counting method. Family-level counting reduces duplicate publication records but should be rechecked as patent databases update.
The companies behind those citations include IBM, Visa, Microsoft, Bank of America, Samsung, and Toyota. Also Mastercard, Capital One, TD Bank, Alibaba, Siemens, Bosch, T-Mobile, Dell, Seagate, HP Enterprise, KPMG, Micron, NTT, and Swatch. Over twenty organizations across eight industry sectors.
How to read this analysis
Technical similarities are starting points for review, not legal conclusions. A patent citation does not prove product use, materiality, validity, or infringement. Any product-specific conclusion requires current evidence, claim construction, and an element-by-element review by qualified patent counsel.
What the citation record can show
A later patent record that cites a Rock Innovation patent can be inspected for its assignee, claims, specification, cited references, and prosecution history. That makes the citation dataset a useful research index.
The 87 citing families span different assignees and technical subjects. The count does not show that each assignee, its attorneys, or an examiner reached the same conclusion about Rock Innovation's claims.
For licensing research, the records can help prioritize documents for closer review. They are not third-party infringement opinions or endorsements.
Why this changes licensing conversations
The hardest part of any licensing outreach is the first meeting. The target's legal team wants to know: is this patent real, is it relevant to us, and should we spend time on it? Most licensing campaigns spend months getting past that threshold.
A citation can give counsel a concrete prosecution record to inspect before a first conversation. It does not answer the relevance question for a product, but it can reduce the time needed to locate related patent materials.
Citation frequency does not test the cited patent's claims or establish that the patent would survive a validity challenge. Validity requires a separate analysis of the asserted claims, prior art, prosecution history, and applicable law.
What the citations do not prove
Forward citations are not infringement opinions. They do not prove that any citing company practices the patent claims. They do not establish damages. They are prior art references in a prosecution record.
They show that the Rock Innovation family appears in later patent records. They do not prove materiality, technical overlap, commercial importance, patent value, or validity.
The full records can be checked through USPTO Patent Center and Google Patents. Review the file history before attributing a citation or drawing a conclusion from it.
Details on the patent family and forward citation data are at rockinnovationip.com.
Primary patent records
Verify claim text, continuity, status, and prosecution details in the official records before relying on this analysis.