The Federal Circuit's Alice in Wonderland Logic

“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

The more you examine the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's recent decision in Secured Mail Solutions v. Universal Wilde, which upheld the district court's ruling that Secured Mail's seven asserted patents were ineligible for patenting under 35 U.S.C. Section 101, the more you find its logic curiouser and curiouser, as Lewis Carrol's Alice might have put it. These Secured Mail patents all address tracking mail through an encoded marking, e.g., a barcode, QR code or URL, on the outside of a mailer which is intended to provide information to the recipient about the contents and the sender.

To nonjudicial eyes—including the expert eyes of highly-trained patent examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)—Secured Mail's patents appear to describe something practical and useful, an innovation the likes of which the patent system was designed to protect. But to the esteemed judges of the Federal Circuit hearing the Secured Mail case, there was not a single thing even eligible for patent protection in these patents, let alone patentable.