Facebook buys 650 Microsoft patents for $550 million

San Francisco, CA, United States (AHN) – Facebook is beefing up its patent arsenal by sealing a $550 million deal to buy 650 patents that Microsoft acquired from AOL for more than $1 billion.

The deal announced by Facebook and Microsoft on Monday will allow the largest social networking site to protect its business interest from rivals in the long term and strengthen it against patent lawsuits, according to Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel.

Facebook is facing 10 charges of patent infringement from Yahoo. The search engine claimed in its March lawsuit that Facebook infringe on its Internet privacy, advertising and information sharing patents.

The patents Facebook acquired from Microsoft include advertising, search and social networking technologies.

For its part, the software giant’s sale of the 650 patents allows it to recover the cost of acquiring them from AOL, according to Brad Smith, executive vice president and general counsel at Microsoft.

Microsoft acquired a total 925 patents from AOL for $1.056 billion in an auction on April 9. The firm will license the remaining 275 patents to Facebook.

Facebook owns 56 patents and have pending patent applications for 503 more. It also reportedly bought 750 software and networking patents from IBM.

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