director, for example, ordered reexaminations of the NTP, Inc. patents which covered BlackBerry mobile e-mail technology. Once a reexamination is ordered, a new examiner is assigned to the case, and the patent goes through another examination similar to the examination it received the first time around. If any claims are rejected in light of the new questions raised, then the patent owner can narrow or cancel those claims. The patent owner can also submit new claims, provided they are not broader than the claims in the original patent. If the examiner makes a rejection "final", the patent owner can appeal the decision to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) at the USPTO. The patent owner can file an appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and even to the US Supreme Court, if permitted. Once the reexamination has been concluded, a "certificate of reexamination" is issued. The certificate makes any corrections to a patent as are required under the reexamination. If all the claims in the patent are rejected, the patent gets nullified. 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, .... Public notice The proceedings of all reexaminations are made available to the public on the USPTO's public PAIR (Patent Application Information Retrieval) web site. Reexaminations are assigned serial numbers and cross referenced as child applications of originally issued patents. The process of reexamination has the potential to increase the quality of patents issued and to encourage public input in the process. Ex parte and inter partes reexaminations Ex parte reexaminations are initiated by members of the public, but once said members submit their request, they no longer actively participate in the proceedings. The correspondence is strictly between the examiner and the patent owner. The fee for filing a request for an ex parte reexamination is $6,000 as of January 16, 2018. Inter partes reexaminations were initiated by members of the public, and said members of the public then participated in the proceedings. On September 16, 2012, Leahy-Smith America Invents Act eliminated these proceedings and replaced them with two new post grant proceedings (Post-Grant Review and Inter Partes Review). Duplicate requests for Inter partes reexaminations by the same requesting party are prohibited under 35 U.S.C. § 317. Statistics 747 requests for ex