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Return To Sender: High Court To Hear Undeliverable Mail Case (washingtonpost.com)
New submitter bluekloud shares a report: Mitch Hungerpiller thought he had a first-class solution for mail that gets returned as undeliverable, a common problem for businesses that send lots of letters. But the process he helped develop and built his small Alabama technology company around has resulted in a more than decade-long fight with the U.S. Postal Service, which says his solution shouldn't have been patentable. The David vs. Goliath dispute has now arrived at the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, the justices will hear Hungerpiller's case, which involves parsing the meaning of a 2011 patent law.
"All I want is a fair shake," said Hungerpiller, who lives in Birmingham and is a father of three. Hungerpiller, 56, started thinking seriously about returned mail in 1999 when he was doing computer consulting work. While visiting clients he kept seeing huge trays of returned mail. He read that every year, billions pieces of mail are returned as undeliverable, costing companies and the Postal Service time and money. So he decided to try to solve the problem. He developed a system that uses barcodes, scanning equipment and computer databases to process returned mail almost entirely automatically. His clients, from financial services companies to marketing companies, generally direct their returned mail to Hungerpiller's company, Return Mail Inc., for processing. Clients can get information about whether the mail was actually correctly addressed and whether there's a more current address.
"All I want is a fair shake," said Hungerpiller, who lives in Birmingham and is a father of three. Hungerpiller, 56, started thinking seriously about returned mail in 1999 when he was doing computer consulting work. While visiting clients he kept seeing huge trays of returned mail. He read that every year, billions pieces of mail are returned as undeliverable, costing companies and the Postal Service time and money. So he decided to try to solve the problem. He developed a system that uses barcodes, scanning equipment and computer databases to process returned mail almost entirely automatically. His clients, from financial services companies to marketing companies, generally direct their returned mail to Hungerpiller's company, Return Mail Inc., for processing. Clients can get information about whether the mail was actually correctly addressed and whether there's a more current address.
and the patent looks like another example of stringing existing tech together for it's exact intended purpose. Similar to "one click shopping". It's just computers doing computer stuf. e.g. I think it would fail any test of novelty or newness.
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If it's returned, it's no longer in their care. They're not sneaking into a mail facility in the dead of night.
I'm not saying that his idea isn't valuable. He obviously had a great idea and was able to build a business around it. But, the idea itself doesn't sound patentable to me. His specific implementation may be patentable, or aspects of what he has built could be. But, should the concept of scanning a barcode and marking an entry in a contacts database as invalid be itself patentable? I would argue not because the action itself is a standard business process that has been done before albeit manually. Plus the post office already had mail sorting hardware/software that would use OCR to decode the address on envelopes, apply barcodes to the envelopes, and then route said envelopes through massive sorting systems. So all they are doing on top of that is building a list of invalid addresses in a database when the envelopes route back through the sorting machine. So they already had most of the pieces he put together into his patent. Only the output was different.