Duplicative petitions hurt small businesses---big firms counter-attack uncooperative small firms to sustain monopolies.

In one extreme instance, the same patent for "Hybrid Vehicles" (U.S. Patent No. 7,237,634) was challenged twenty-seven times since 2014 (thirteen times by Ford Motor, eight times by Volkswagen, five times by Hyundai, and one time by BMW). 92 Granted, the patent owner of the '634 patent is no longer a practicing entity and has sued multiple automakers. The patent's underlying technology could still be legitimate because it has been licensed by various automakers like Toyota and Kia.93 Without procedural changes, IPR barrages like this not only burden the administrative agency, but also deprive patent owners of their peace of mind after obtaining patents. That said, there exist some procedural reasons for such repetitive challenges, such as: (1) extreme cases driven by a large number of claims; and (2) some of these petitions being requests of joinders to other petition-thus they are merely copies of the other petitions. 94 In an ideal scenario, the procedurally triggered repetitions should be addressed by more stringent joinder rules.

In addition to the practice of multiple petitioners challenging a single patent, well-funded large corporations, especially tech companies, also discovered the ability of leveraging IPRs to overwhelm and destroy the portfolios of smaller competitors who are in no way malicious patent assertion entities. In the name of defending their own patents, it appears that large companies have been sinisterly neutralizing competitors' intellectual property. For example, in one case study, Apple once filed twelve IPR petitions against a North Carolina-based startup, Valencell, after a failed attempt to collaborate with the startup on an Apple Watch technology. 95 Although Valencell is only one case in point, Apple's treatment of its competitors reflects an industry wide mindset: tech companies with well resourced legal departments are willing to counterattack innovators so aggressively as to threaten the smaller innovative entities' livelihood, forcing them to settle or give up their enforcement rights altogether in district courts.