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.

Comments

I read this a few days ago

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:I read this a few days ago

[ShanghaiBill]

Nobody would ever get a patent on anything if the test was some beer-bottle patent attorney saying "oh yeah, I could have thought of that."

If you give the beer drinker the solution, and they say "I could have thought of that", then that doesn't mean much, because most innovations are "obvious" in hindsight.

But if the beer drinker knows a bit about computers, and you ask them "How would you solve this problem?", most would come up with a solution involving a database and either a barcode or some sort of OCR. This is the true test of "obviousness", and this patent appears to fail it.

Do it on a computer

[MNNorske]

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.

Re:Do it on a computer

[MNNorske]

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.

Re:Ownership

[omnichad]

If it's returned, it's no longer in their care. They're not sneaking into a mail facility in the dead of night.

Summary doesn't mention what's contested!?

[HeckRuler]

Let me guess, the actual issue is some overly broad software patent.

He scans barcodes on mail and looks up a database.

Re:Ownership

[viperidaenz]

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.

Re:Post Office probably is a person

[DarkFlite]

If the Post Office isn't a person for this purpose, than no corporation could challenge a patent. The Supremes aren't going to toss out corporate personhood over this.

Re:The rest of the original article

[Aighearach]

They exist in a muddled middle ground where they're partially the government, but also partially independent.

That's why Congress is even allowed to give them special pension rules!

So every rule of this type is a special case that the courts have to measure and balance to see how it affects the USPS. And also that means, any precedents created won't apply to anybody else, except maybe Amtrak.

Story told me by patent atty when I was applying..

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... 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."