Patent owner asks USPTO Director to terminate Google-triggered reexam, points to pattern of 21 do-overs after failed IPRs

Context: Ex parte reexamination (EPR) has become a popular fallback for patent challengers who strike out at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Unlike an inter partes review (IPR), anyone, not just the original challenger, can request an EPR, and it comes with a much lower bar to get the USPTO to take another look at a patent. U.S. Patent No. 8,234,705 “Contagion Isolation and Inoculation”, covering methods for detecting infected or vulnerable computers and quarantining them from a secure network, has already survived six prior challenges at the PTAB, including from Cisco, Forescout, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Netskope, Citrix, and Google itself. The patent traces its priority date back to September 27, 2004, and was granted in 2012.

What’s new: The patent owner has petitioned USPTO Director John A. Squires to vacate an EPR order issued against the ’705 patent, arguing that Google filed the reexam on April 8, 2026, using the exact same prior art references from its own IPR petition that the PTAB had denied just months earlier. The petition argues that 35 U.S.C. § 325(d), a provision meant to stop parties from re-litigating issues the Office has already decided, should bar Google from getting a second shot at the same patent through a different procedural door.

Direct impact: If the USPTO Director agrees, the reexam of the ’705 patent would be terminated before it goes any further, closing off Google’s latest attempt to invalidate a patent it has already tried and failed to knock out through an IPR. If the Director declines, the reexam proceeds and Google’s cited prior art gets a full second look, but from that point on Google has no further role in the proceeding. In an EPR, once the request is filed, the requester drops out entirely and it becomes a back and forth between the examiner and the patent owner alone, unlike an IPR where the challenger stays involved throughout.

Wider ramifications: The petition includes a chart showing this is not a one-off move by Google. Since January 20, 2025, Google has filed at least 21 EPRs against patents where a prior IPR had already failed, and in 19 of those, Google itself was the one whose IPR got rejected. More broadly, the petition points to USPTO data showing that between January 2025 and August 2026, just under a third of all reexam requests filed, 425 out of 1,318, involved patents that had already been through an IPR or other post-grant review, covering 714 such proceedings combined. That suggests that the tactic of trying an EPR after an IPR flops is being widely implemented , although Google appears to be the system’s heaviest user.