Microsoft Will Sell Some AOL Patents to Facebook

Today, Microsoft

announced that it would sell roughly 650 patents it just recently purchased from AOL

to Facebook

. Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft is taking $550M from Facebook and retaining licensing rights to the patents it was selling to Facebook. Microsoft is also keeping about 300 patents that it bought from AOL. Microsoft and Facebook have close partners in recent years, with some arguing that Microsoft would increase its partnership with Facebook in coming years, possibly bringing a deeper integration of its search tool Bing into the Facebook platform.