US COURTS have approved the sale of Nortel's patents to the Rockstar consortium that includes Apple, Microsoft and Research in Motion.
The firms banded together along with EMC, Ericsson and Sony into a consortium as Rockstar Bidco, and paid £2.8bn for the patents to beat off competition from other companies including Google and Intel.
Now they have some 6,000 patents at their disposal and no doubt they will hope to license them to other organisations.
Google, which claimed to be going after the patents in order to protect itself against people going after it over patents, wanted to pay around a quarter of the final winning price, but it's unlikely that it could not have afforded to go higher.
Although courts approved the purchase this week, the deal was set back at the start of June.
"Following a very robust auction, we are pleased at the outcome of the auction of this extensive patent portfolio," said George Riedel, chief strategy officer and president of business units at Nortel at the time. "The size and dollar value for this transaction is unprecedented, as was the significant interest in the portfolio among major companies around the world."
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