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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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actually tells why the guy is being heard by the Supreme Court.
TLDR? The US postal service are assholes.
”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 thereâ(TM)s a more current address.”
So basically he patented outsourcing? Rather than the client companies doing the verification work, his company did it. All the barcodes seem likely to have done is to make his company’s job easier to automate... and probably accomplished some lock-in.
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Basically it sounds like he just took an existing process/job and did it on a computer. Prior to this a person would've gone into the contact spreadsheet or database and marked the entries as invalid. All he did was take that existing job and put a computer readable barcode on stuff and had the computer do it faster. Very useful for the companies as it saves payroll, but it does not sound like something that should've been patentable to me.
If it's returned, it's no longer in their care. They're not sneaking into a mail facility in the dead of night.
...for the purposes of the act.
I suspect that the Post Office has in the past had patents assigned to it. and if it can be 'someone' which can own a patent, it is also 'someone' who can invalidate a patent. Also companies are 'people' for some legal processes, so I see little reason why government bodies can't also be 'people' for legal actions.
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Let me guess, the actual issue is some overly broad software patent.
He scans barcodes on mail and looks up a database.
Yes, this is the snailmail equipment equivalent of the tracking pixel for email. But the patent is on the whole process, including the automation of delivering the status of each address to the original sender and attempting to provide an updated address. It's novel and non-obvious, but it's not hard. It doesn't have to be hard for no one else to ever think of it before - patents protect that inspiration.
IANAL, but the post office is delivering the mail - to the return address specified on the mail.
The post office received the letter and delivered it according to the instructions on it.
"return to sender" mail doesn't stay the property of the post office indefinitely.
Because if USPS Inc. is not a person, then neither are any of the other "Companies are People too" companies
Sorry, that's not on the table here (and for reasons having nothing to do with politics, as you later infer).
The petitioner's primary argument is that the government itself acknowledges it is not a "person" because the following definition of "person" in 1 U.S.C. Section 1 does not include governmental agencies:
“In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise . . . the words ‘person’ and ‘whoever’ include corporations,companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies , as well as individuals.”
The Supreme Court isn't being asked to read any of the long list of non-human entities out of this statute, and there's no basis for them to do so in any event.
My employers have been doing this since roughly the same time period. Because it's obvious. As soon as bar code scanners with ps/2 keyboard in/out jacks came on the market, we had people handling our return mail this way. DB and everything.
Postal service is right and this Hungerpiller rube is a rent-seeker, not an innovator.
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To mail letters fo free. Put the address of the recipient in the return address section
Drop it in a post box and it'll get returned to sender to the address you out as the recipient.
But tricks that bypass a stamp is illegal and stamps are cheap anyway.
Hehe
... things become obvious in hindsight, and we tend to forget they really weren't so obvious before the fact. If the idea / process / procedure hadn't been implemented yet, in spite of the tech required having been available for quite some time, then was it really obvious?
Story told me by a patent attorney when I was applying for one. (I say this because I didn't look it up myself.):
He said the classic case of inventions only being obvious in hidnsight was a challenge to the patent on the
Ray-o-Vac "leakproof" "sealed-in-steel" battery (a classic carbon-zinc dry cell).
Such cells consists of some variant of this: a zinc cup (the negative electrode), containing a corrosive paste (which either IS the positive electrode or contains it (i.e. manganese dioxide) at its center) and a carbon electrode to contact the electrode to provide the positive terminal. Early "dry cells" were capped with things such as asphalt and wrapped with a printed carbon label.
The corrosive pastet eating the zinc cup was what powered the cell. So before it was actually dead the corrosive would have eaten a hole in it, wetted the cardboard, and started eating the flashlight or whatever. (Assuming swelling of the internal components didn't rupture the zinc cup first, with the same result.)
Needless to say this didn't make users happy. So the various battery companies did a bunch of research to try to design a variant that didn't do this. For years.
Story goes that one of the researchers came home really depressed one day and his wife asked what was the problem. So he explained it. Says she (while opening a can of soup, as the story goes): "Why don't you seal it in a steel can?"
Thus (with the addition of composition changes to avoid swelling enough to burst the can) was born the sealed in steel leakproof dry cell.
Of course Union Carbide (Everready) challenged the patent as obvious. "Oh?" says the judge. Turning to the Ray-o-Vac folk he asks: "How long did you work on this problem before you though of the can? How many engineers worked on it? How much did you spend?" Turning back to the Union Carbide guys he asks them the same thing. Answers: Years of work, lots of guys, lots of bux. "It's only obvious in hindsight. Rule for the defendant."
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by that reasoning, if i sent a letter to someone and it got sent back 'return to sender' and i tore it up and threw it out, i'd be destroying post office property. that doesn't make any sense at all.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
But it was completely novel to the battery makers. The people who's business it was to make batteries and in theory best situated to make improvements in the battery field. If putting it in a can was dead obvious, then why did these companies spend years trying to figure it out? It clearly was no obvious to them.
I agree with the judge's ruling because it was a novel idea for that specific industry.
With the mail case, if it was so obvious then why didn't the postal service come up with it first? They are stealing his idea because they don't want to pay for something they should of figured out for themselves, but clearly did not.
I haven't read the patent, so I have no idea what the patent covers. I don't know what the invention is that is patented. Have you read it? I might read it after I put kiddo to bed.
The summary mentions that the invention uses gears and levers - er I mean bar codes and scanners, but doesn't tell us anything useful regarding what is patented. The guy didn't pay gears, levers, barcodes, or scanners. He built something using these parts plus more, and patented what he built.
There's even some of the original documentation around for parts of it (though not expressly for unclaimed mail) from 98 / 99.
a-guide-to-printing-the-4state-barcode-v31-mar2012.pdf - although the document is dated 2012 - that's just the most recent revision - the original dates back to the June 1998 (as listed on Page 2).
This 1999 document australia-post-addressing-standards-1999.pdf references "Specification Number 203-4-State Barcodes" - which likely would also contains the same information.
Patents and innovations involving "cross-pollination" of previously unrelated industries, is actually quite common, So much so that some companies have reserchers looking for correlations between different fields, just to find such stuff.