By filing for a reexamination, such parties seek to invalidate the patent while keeping legal fees low.
The director, for example, ordered reexaminations of the NTP, Inc. patents which covered BlackBerry mobile e-mail technology.
As of January 2, 2001, certificates of reexamination have a kind code in the series C1, C2, C3, .... Before then, kind code was in the series B1, B2, B3, ....[4] The proceedings of all reexaminations are made available to the public on the USPTO's public PAIR (Patent Application Information Retrieval) web site.
[5] Reexaminations are assigned serial numbers and cross referenced as child applications of originally issued patents.
[9] Some 640 requests for inter partes reexaminations were filed during FY2012, a figure that has been rising substantially every year and a fourfold increase since FY2008.
For inter partes reexaminations, claims were changed in seven of the eight cases that had been completed by the time the statistics were released.
As of April 2006, all of the NTP claims that have been acted upon have been rejected on the basis of the substantial new questions of patentability.
[needs update] Blackberry agreed, on March 3, 2006, to settle its patent dispute with NTP for more than 600 million US$.
U.S. patent 6,004,596 entitled "Sealed crustless sandwich" was issued in 1999 to applicants Len Kretchman and David Gesked.
The patent claimed an improved crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which could be mass-produced and sold in stores.
The patent was licensed to Smuckers, which then introduced the Uncrustables brand of frozen no-crust sandwiches.
[13] Smuckers invested about $20 million to build a factory in Scottsville, Kentucky to produce the product.