Canada Post and Swiss Post settle digital mail patent lawsuits

US digital mail technology firm RPost says it has now settled its outstanding patent battle with Canada Post and Swiss Post. The Los Angeles-based company said yesterday that it reached amicable settlements with the two national postal operators in the separate lawsuits regarding patents related to its proof of email delivery applications.

RPost said the financial terms of settlement with both Canada Post and Swiss Post were confidential.

Zafar Khan, the RPost CEO, said: “We have reached favorable agreements with some of the companies that we had been forced to sue for patent and other intellectual property infringement.”

RPost did not comment on the conditions of the agreement with Swiss Post, but Khan revealed that Canada Post has agreed not to use the patented RPost applications in the important US market.

“We are pleased that Canada Post, for example, has included protections to block messaging traffic to the United States IP address range,” he said.

Patenting inventions and licensing them out to other companies is an important source of revenue for technology firms in the digital age, and RPost has been battling a number of companies – including software giant Adobe – over claims they have used its applications in breach of its patents.

Founded in the year 2000, the company has patents covering applications including email tracking, proof-of-delivery, encryption and digital signatures, and has a number of other patents pending.

Khan said yesterday that his company had just had another patent granted – RPost’s 46th patent – this time covering technology that can tell whether the recipient of an offer sent by email accepts or rejects the proposal.

“The newest patent adds to the electronic transactions and signature patents in RPost’s portfolio,” he said of patent number 8,275,845.