The following is a press release from Postal Notice concerning a patent issue with the U.S. Postal Service:

# # #

The U.S. Postal Service stands to gain significant revenues, and postal patrons will receive a new secure way to tell when mail is delivered with the application of an online subscription service called Postal Notice, a service that notifies mail recipients the instant a letter arrives in their mailbox.

Postal Notice will work hand in hand with a USPS program called Informed Delivery that sends emails to recipients in the morning when a letter is out for delivery. Postal Notice completes the cycle by informing recipients that their important letters, checks, personal notes, and other routine mail the exact moment it is delivered. Like Informed Delivery, Postal Notice uses emails plus texts to let mail recipients know that mail has been delivered. The service increases the safety of mail delivery and helps patrons understand when it is time to make that treck to the mailbox.

The USPS, however, is reluctant to share an electronic database with Postal Notice inventor Anthem Pleasant. The database, which would remain secure, would enable the Postal Notice app to become available for a small subscription fee to postal patrons everywhere. The access Pleasant seeks is the same Informed Visibility database made available to potentially less secure bulk mailers.

Instead of communicating to Pleasant, the Postal Service retained the Knobbe Martins Olson & Bear LLP top five law firm to reexamine the issue at USPTO and have Pleasant’s patent invalidated. With billions of dollars on the line, the United States Postal Service wants to try and take the patent away instead of communicating. View updates on https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair and search Serial No. 90/014,141

“I would like the USPS just to play fair,” Pleasant said. “I’m the little guy inventor with a patented product that would provide significant benefits to postal customers and additional revenues to the Postal Service. I have no way of responding to a powerhouse law firm with unlimited resources and the Postal Service’s very deep pockets.

“No doubt the USPS feels its expenditure of megabucks to a giant law firm to crush me with a 500-plus page filing to the Patent Office is money well spent. I’m beginning to understand why the service loses so much money every year,” he said.

# # #