While looking to find out what the record number of re-exams is for a patent I ran across a very interesting .pdf article on "Use and Abuse of Patent Reexamination". I never did find out what the record is for reexams of a patent.

A very interesting read…

…imagine that a company, wishing to damage a rival’s business or simply to use a patented technology without paying royalties, were to fabricate or grossly misrepresent evidence purporting to show that its rival’s patented invention is neither novel, nor nonobvious. The company petitions the PTO to reconsider its patentability, and the PTO, deceived by the company’s misrepresentations, agrees to review the propriety of the patent grant. In consequence, the owner’s property interests in the patent are suddenly thrown into question by the mere fact of the PTO’s reconsideration of its validity, though initiated on the basis of a “sham petition.”17

Unfortunately, as I will show, this scenario is far from speculative. The law permits competitors, indeed anyone, to request that the PTO commence a form of administrative review, known as a patent reexamination proceeding,18 in order to reexamine the validity of an issued patent. These proceedings, like the patent application process, carry with them the potential for inequitable conduct,19 though here the misconduct is perpetrated not against the public with the aim of obtaining a wrongful monopoly, but against the inventor with the aim of depriving him of his patent.20 As with patent application procedures, which require applicants to submit evidence in support of patentability, the reexamination process requires parties to submit evidence in support of any request that the PTO reexamine a patent. Yet when the evidence is spurious and the petition for reexamination a sham, the inventor must bear the burden of having to prove it false if he is to be successful in defending his patent—to say nothing of the possibility that the fraudulent or misleading character of such evidence might never be discovered.21 Meanwhile he must endure grave doubts in the marketplace regarding his very entitlement to the patent.22

Thus, just as unscrupulous applicants can harm the public by obtaining a patent through fraud on the PTO, so an inventor’s competitors can deprive him of the economic benefits his patent rights would otherwise have afforded him by subjecting his patent to baseless reexamination proceedings before the PTO, casting doubt as to its validity where there should have been none.As this article will show, patent reexamination proceedings are as vulnerable as many other administrative procedures to the well-known practice of sham petitioning, with particularly damaging repercussions for patent holders.23

After all, if the PTO can be deceived into granting a patent, it is no leap of faith to admit that the Office can be deceived into reexamining and even rejecting a valid one. Though some have argued that “if the PTO decides to grant the request, the request was ipso facto not objectively baseless,”24 the law of malicious prosecution recognizes the fallacy of equating court and agency decisions as conclusive evidence of probable cause: courts and agencies can be deceived. If a requester were to induce the PTO to initiate a reexamination proceeding by submitting “materially false facts,”25 the law of malicious prosecution would find “the presumption of probable cause [to be] effectually rebutted.”26 Skepticism regarding this possibility rests largely on confidence in the current safeguard against requests brought for the purpose of harassment (the “substantial new question of patentability” standard) to function as it was intended. Yet, distressingly, this threshold standard was recently referred to by the former Chief Judge of the Federal Circuit as “almost no standard at all.”27 As will be argued in this article, the standard has neither been rigorously interpreted, nor carefully applied, and failure to do so has left reexamination susceptible to abuse.28 Consequently, the process is being used in a manner at the outer limits of legality and Congressional intent, and in some cases instigated under false pretenses.

And it gets more interesting.

Read the whole pdf file for all the footnotes here: http://lockwoodreexam.com/The_Use_and_Abuse_of_Patent_Reexamination_-_Raymond_A__Mercado.pdf

Cheers, DW