AOL Sells 800 Patents to Microsoft for $1.1 Billion

TechCrunch: In a memo to employees, AOL revealed that it has “agreed to sell 800 of our patents and their related applications to Microsoft for $1.056 billion in cash.” That leaves the once-dominant Internet company with just 300 patents in its portfolio, most of them related to “core and strategic technologies, including advertising, search, content generation/management, social networking, mapping, multimedia/streaming and security among others.”

As part of the terms of the deal, AOL received a perpetual license for the technologies it sold.

Microsoft hasn’t commented on what it plans to do with the patents.

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