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In 2011, Nortel sold its patent portfolio to Rockstar, a consortium of companies including Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Ericsson AB and EMC. According to The Star:
The purchase will give Apple and its five bidding partners control over more than 6,000 patents and applications that cover wireless and Internet technologies ranging from mobile standards to Internet search and social networking.
Do we know for certain which patents, and in particular which pending patents Rockstar acquired from Nortel?
From press reports it looks like Nortel sold their entire portfolio. One person seems to be widely quoted talking about important subsets of the portfolio he came up with (The "five" lists). His lists are at Nortel patenttrakker
A quick search on the USPTO site for patents with original assignee having "Nortel" in the name gets 4278 hits. Looking for applications at the USPTO site, "Nortel" as assignee gets 1360 hits. The sum is 5,638. Press accounts seem to all use the number 6,000.
