Return To Sender: High Court To Hear Undeliverable Mail Case (washingtonpost.com) 141
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.
The Carpenters (Score:2, Troll)
You've watched the concerts, heard the records, now try the diet!
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You took us to a dark place there, Hog. I'm not complaining, mind you.
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I got modded down!
Too soon?
Re:Ownership (Score:5, Informative)
If it's returned, it's no longer in their care. They're not sneaking into a mail facility in the dead of night.
Re:Ownership (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
I read this a few days ago (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: I read this a few days ago (Score:1)
I was part of a patent review research group about 7 years ago. They were trying to judge how novel patents were for someone skilled in the art. We got into groups of 5 and we were given a problem, that was a patent, and 10-15 minutes to come up with a solution. 90% of the time we pretty much matched the patent. These were fringe patents not things we would have seen. The other 10% we couldnâ(TM)t even figure out what the heck was really going on. Like the idea became so abscracted you really could t e
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Patents are supposed to be for inventions, not for ideas. This isn't a machine; it's an idea. Just like software and other abstract mathematics, it's not patentable matter according to the plain reading of the law.
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Where do you draw the line between software and a machine?
A clock uses gears with the right type and size to make it a good time keeping device. If I were to take a gear and swap it with an other, I could make the clock work backwards, or have it run faster or slower. In many ways the gear settings is the clocks software.
Lets say I have a mousetrap, it works better then an other one, because there is software that uses all the newest buzzwords, to attract the mouse, and know when it is in prime location to
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The actual trapping mechanism itself is rather basic, however all the work went into the software.
If it's a "basic" trapping mechanism, chances are it's out of patent.
And the software is under copyright, from the moment it was put into a fixed form.
If I copy your code, I'm infringing your copyright.
But you're not suppoed to get a patent on a mathematical algorithm, on top of that. I can write different code to attract the mouse, and I'm infringing nothing.
That's the way the system is supposed to work.
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Software is differentiated by being transient, i.e. it's (relatively) easy to change and not a permanent, fixed feature of the machine. Sure, you can replace gears in a watch, but then you are altering the machine itself. Software is loaded on to the machine and makes it perform certain functions, and is then discarded or replaced as a matter of course.
Re:I read this a few days ago (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Except we don't know what is patented (Score:2)
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.
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I haven't read the patent, so I have no idea what the patent covers.
Here is the application of the patent -- U.S. 2003/0191651 [uspto.gov]. And here is the patent itself -- U.S. 6,826,548 [uspto.gov].
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The novelty is in the stringing. Every new invention is at least partly going to build on existing ideas. Patents can be awarded on processes, not necessarily an "invention."
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Over simplified example: Someone patents a light bulb, then someone patents a light bulb socket. In my opinion there should not be an ability to patent inserting the light bulb into the light bulb socket, since it is an obvious possible interaction of previous patents, there is no invention there.
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To be fair your lightbulb example would be considered too obvious for patent protection AIUI.
In this case they did a little more work, in that they selected a barcode system and created an automated scanning and notification process. So while it's obvious that it could be done by computer in an automated fashion, the exact details of how to do that may be worthy of a patent.
The thing is such patents are usually very easy to work around, because they tend to be quite specific to that process. Trivial changes
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The novelty is in the stringing. Every new invention is at least partly going to build on existing ideas. Patents can be awarded on processes, not necessarily an "invention."
Yes, usually, but not in this particular case... Here's claim 1:
1. A method for processing a plurality of undeliverable mail items comprising the steps of:
encoding data including intended recipient identification information on each of a plurality of mail items prior to mailing;
receiving those items of the plurality of mail items that are returned as being undeliverable;
scanning and decoding the encoded data on the items of undeliverable mail to identify intended recipients having incorrect addresses; and
electronically transferring to the sender information for the identified intended recipients for the sender to update the sender's mailing address files.
1. Al, Charlie's assistant, writes Bob's destination address on outside of envelope. That's "encoding data including intended recipient identification information."
2. Get mail returned ("receiving those items that are returned as undeliverable").
3. Read address ("scanning and decoding data").
4. Al sends email to Charlie asking for Bob's correct address ("electronically transferring to the sender information for the identified intended recipi
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Except no one thought of it for hundreds of years until this guy did.
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The technology to make it work didn't exist for hundreds of years. Once the technology became available, it was thought of and implemented very quickly. That suggests that it was an obvious application of the technology.
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For example, most Amazon packages I get have inflated plastic packing material instead of packing peanuts or wads of paper. I look at that and wonder why the hell it wasn't done that way previously
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I don't know anything about this case, so I will talk in generics.
I think that we (in the US) have a problem in that independent simultaneous invention isn't an affirmative defense for obviousness. Often times 2 people invent independently pretty much the exact same thing, and one gets a patent and the other doesn't (famously the telephone, though there's evidence that espionage was involved there). I would argue if two people building on past tech invent something pretty much simultaneously, it falls into
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I think that's an extraordinarily interesting position to take, that simultaneous invention is indicative that the solution is obvious. I've never heard that before. I wonder, though, if it's as cut-and-dry as you're presenting. How simultaneous? Two patent applications or journal publications (etc.) within a month of each other? What if one inventor took longer to prepare than the other? What if they can't pin down the exact day of "invention"*? What if that flash of insight takes thirty years to br
Re: I read this a few days ago (Score:2)
If two labs are doing the same thing to make the same chemical for the same purpose and both get to the same place within a short period of time (yes, what that means is left as an exercise for the courts, and is ambiguous) I would say yes, that is obvious to someone "skilled in the art".
That's the point, people skilled in the art, not laypeople, are who it needs to be obvious to, and if the people skilled in the art are all doing the same thing to solve a problem independently it seems to me the solution w
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CASS doesn't validate that the person lives at the specified address, only that it is a deliverable address.
NCOA only works when the addressee goes out of their way to tell USPS that they are moving.
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So this is for when people move, but don't update their address AND the new resident sends the mail back?
How much of that really happens? I guess a lot if this guy created an industry out of it?
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I guess a lot if this guy created an industry out of it?
I guess.
Also enough that the post office is spending a butt load of money in legal fees because they want to do it too, over a patent that expires in a little over 3 years.
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You mean computers and barcode scanners were invented? Barcode scanners and computers have been working together since the mid 70's
And very quickly, 25 years later, this guy patents using them for this purpose.
"The very first scanning of the now-ubiquitous Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode was on a pack of Wrigley Company chewing gum in June 1974"
It took until this guy thought in 1999 - "why don't we put one of those on letters and if they are returned to sender, all we need to do is scan the barcode to
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Except no one thought of it for hundreds of years until this guy did.
Except that companies are paying this guy to do this for them. What do you think the companies did before he started offering this service? Yes, that's right, they did exactly the same thing (perhaps not with "a computer", but the same thing) all on their own. In hundreds if not thousands if not hundreds of thousands of places.
Can I get a patent on a business process that has been used all over the world by every company that ever sent a piece of mail?
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Yes, you can get a patent for successfully inventing an automated version of a completely manual process.
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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.
Which was partially upheld, then the broadest claims restricted to a shopping cart and upheld too. Long story short whether /. think something is novel is not a good indicator of how patent law actually works but in this case yes the patent itself has been completely shot down both by ACA review and the appeals court. From what I can read of the legal papers, the government can't be sued under ordinary patent law just a special provision that is more eminent domain-like. The USPS asked for a patent review t
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I think it would fail any test of novelty or newness.
It did. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board held the claims unpatentable after the USPS challenged them, and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed. That's why the case is now at the Supreme Court.
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and the patent looks like another example of stringing existing tech together for it's exact intended purpose... I think it would fail any test of novelty or newness.
FTA: "Even early on, the Postal Service expressed interest in Return Mail’s invention, Hungerpiller said. By 2006, the government and Return Mail were talking about licensing options and a formal pilot program."
The Post Office was negotiating with Hungerpiller before they went and violated his patent, so presumably they thought there was "novelty or newness". I'm reminded of another patentability test - the "obvious to a person skilled in the art" criterion. The problem with both criteria is that thin
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Something can be a good and useful service, but still not patentable.
Story told me by patent atty when I was applying.. (Score:5, Interesting)
... 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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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 ste
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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.
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other companies showing interest in your service can be evidence of non-obviousness of the underlying patent, but it's only evidence. often it doesn't add up to much, and the evidence has to line up specifically with the claims of the patent at issue. lot of times the license being sought is for a service that the patent doesn't actually specifically cover.
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Patents are granted for---
1. Frivolous prior art we've been doing for hundreds of years already. (like rounding corners or traveling on 2 wheels)
2. (established processes) on a computer. (like handwriting, mail delivery return*, and composing)
3. Every 100th application in the monthly stack of frivolous (but paid) applications. (like the monthly IBM collection)
4. Every application that lands on So-and-so's desk, that chick approves everything.
5. Anything to do with A/I, deep learning, machine learning, or pe
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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.
So obvious and yet no one but the guy in the story that connected the dots. Seems like a legit patent to me (since no one else, not even the postal service put the elbow grease to get the existing pieces to work.)
The rest of the original article (Score:3, Interesting)
actually tells why the guy is being heard by the Supreme Court.
TLDR? The US postal service are assholes.
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The issue the court will rule on is whether or not the Postal service counts as a "person".
This has pretty interesting implications if they postal service is not a person, but companies are people. That means that in this case, companies have much more rights/power under the law than the government.
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You can't patent something and then expect the government to pay your patent licensing fees.
I wonder how many lawyers working in the military defense industry read your comment. How many do you think spit out their beverage laughing at your comment?
I guess you missed the story about Bitmanagement suing the US Navy. [slashdot.org]
While the US government can revoke and take the IP of a patent under national security measures, that doesn't mean they can simply take any and all patents they want to. Or not pay a licensing fee for anything. If you patent a new stamp adhesive, I don't think the government is going
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I wonder how many lawyers working in the military defense industry read your comment. How many do you think spit out their beverage laughing at your comment?
Lawyers read stupid, incorrect nonsense involving their field of work multiple times a day.
I doubt they even find it funny.
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But the USPS is supposedly an independent corporation. That is why they have to fund their pensions for the next 75 years but other government agencies don't
Re:The rest of the original article (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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It's part of the executive branch --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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But the USPS is supposedly an independent corporation. That is why they have to fund their pensions for the next 75 years but other government agencies don't
The USPS has to fund their pensions for the next 75 years because the pension funds go into treasury bills right where Congress can spend them.
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I thought the US Government reserves the right to make use of patents for themselves? I don't know how this guy has any legal leg to stand on. You can't patent something and then expect the government to pay your patent licensing fees.
Yes you can. The defense sector is diligent in paying for patents it utilizes.
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Still probably an unintended consequence of the intent of the law. The law should be amended or rewritten. For better or worse, companies are already considered people in a lot of cases (Super PACS are a notable exception).
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They're not, and courts don't, measuring if the Postal Service counts as a "person."
They're measuring if the wording in a specific law is including the Postal Service when it uses the word "person" in a particular provision.
There are no implications outside of this exact narrow issue of patent law involving restrictions on when the Government can request a patent review.
Companies are not considered "people" by the court. That's just a colloquial simplification that isn't literally accurate. They're consider
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And it was different. You lost your doctor, your insurance rates more than doubled, and you got shit to replace it. See, different.
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Boo fucking hoo. we lost the election boo hooo. well we won the popular vote. No we didn't win that ether. whine whine whine ⦠Well he is a trader. Oh no. the evidence says he isn't, time to cry some more.
Poor little liberal idiot. Can stand reality so you make up your own bullshit.
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+1 informative link
+1 funny from Rudy Giuliani:
@RudyGiuliani
Twitter allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message. The same thing-period no space-occurred later and it didn’t happen. Don’t tell me they are not committed cardcarrying anti-Trumpers. Time Magazine also may fit that description. FAIRNESS PLEASE
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"And it was different. You lost your doctor", er, no..."your insurance rates more than doubled", um, no, went down..."and you got shit to replace it", ah, no need. Think Different.
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But US government-run healthcare will be different.
Totally off topic, but I was just discussing this elsewhere earlier today.......
https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
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Different than what exists, being gouged and cancelled and not allowed to have insurance if you have a condition already?
Since 2010 it is illegal to refuse coverage based on pre-existing conditions.
of course government run healthcare IS better than corporate run.
Tell that to the patients who have to endure actual government-run healthcare in the US: Vets (the VA) and Native Americans (the BIA). Neither of these institutions have treated their patients with the care that they should have.
Wake up moron.
You're a fucking moron
Ad hominem doesn't have the effect you desire; maybe the opposite.
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Tell that to the patients who have to endure actual government-run healthcare in the US: Vets (the VA) and Native Americans (the BIA). Neither of these institutions have treated their patients with the care that they should have.
Yeah, but those are voting blocks with no power, so they don't really get much priority.
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Since 2010 it is illegal to refuse coverage based on pre-existing conditions.
Not for much longer. Trump's repeal of the individual mandate (the only part of the Republican "repeal and replace" that actually happened, lol) removes the only means by which the pre-existing condition requirement was viable.
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actually tells why the guy is being heard by the Supreme Court.
TLDR? The US postal service are assholes.
Hmm, looks like you are right:
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Yeah, it sounds like the Postal Service wanted to hire him to provide a service, and he wanted to get license fees instead, and he wasn't wise enough to see that his patent was obvious (as in, the details were already obvious to him when he thought it up, it wasn't something that required R&D).
Of course they implemented it themselves in that scenario.
Not every new business makes sense as an IP provider, most businesses only have operational value.
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By 2006, the government and Return Mail were talking about licensing options and a formal pilot program.
That is the part I'm not certain about because it is vague. What process was he using in negotiation? What was the deal/option he wanted? Was it appropriate? Also, a similar system does NOT mean it is a copy of a patent. If the system has only partially similar to his patent claims, then his patent is not covering the system. Business method has specific steps to execute especially in his patent. So the system may or may not be infringing his patent [uspto.gov].
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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.
Sounds like... (Score:3)
”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.
Do it on a computer (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
I feel kind of bad for him that he implemented a great idea, then the post office decided to do it themselves. But if you can't provide a better/cheaper service, being first isn't going to sustain a business.
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The market is full of these holes - little needs that no one is taking care of. If no one else has found a novel process for doing it "on a computer" then he has a valuable, patentable method - even if it uses existing technology. Instead of criticizing his patent, just get out there and go get your own if it's that easy.
Re:Do it on a computer (Score:4, Informative)
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Perhaps, they discovered that they had already worked out to do what he was doing and th
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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.
It's amazing how many slashdotters go for the "all he did" argument. It's as if automation is not a thing, or just a trivial simple thing even a caveman can do.
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Post Office probably is a person (Score:2)
...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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If the Post Office is not a person, why can you sue it for violating a patent?
Personally, I think it would be all kinds of exciting for plaintiff to win here, so we can shave down the "rights" of the legal fictions called corporations. But I suspect the Supremes will see the trap.
Summary doesn't mention what's contested!? (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me guess, the actual issue is some overly broad software patent.
He scans barcodes on mail [google.com] and looks up a database.
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I think the problem here is analogous to using a MAC address vs a DNS address.
Most mail is intended to go to a person, but you have to send it to a place. Hence mail forwarding. The address is the last known location of a person. If the person changed location (changed MAC/IP), you want to find out where the new place of that person is (fresh DNS address).
A unique barcode could identify a person (think SSN or the like), and the database has the most current address for that person, if the first try fails.
So
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Nope, you lost me there.
Try again, but with cars.
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Prior art? (Score:3)
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.
There's the old returned mail trick (Score:2)
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
Prior Art (Score:2)
There's even some of the original documentation around for parts of it (though
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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.