In April, AOL announced plans to sell off over 800 of its patents to Microsoft. Today, AOL announced that deal has officially concluded, with Microsoft paying AOL $1.056 billion for the rights to all those patents. AOL also gets a license to those same patents it sold to Microsoft
AOL has already announced that it plans to use Microsoft's money in order to pay back its shareholders in some way. AOL said that it will reveal its plans in more detail by the end of the month. AOL added that it still holds the rights to over 300 other patents involving "advertising, search, content generation/management, social networking, mapping, multimedia/streaming, and security."
While it is not mentioned in today's press release, it is believed that as part of AOL's patent sale to Microsoft, it also sold off the rights to all of the patents involved with the Netscape web browser, which AOL acquired a number of years ago. The trademark rights to the Netscape name are believed to remain with AOL.
Microsoft has already announced it will sell 650 of the patents it has just bought from AOL to Facebook for about $550 million. Microsoft will retain the remaining AOL patents.
Source: AOL press release
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