Patent management company RPX has bought patents owned by Rockstar Consortium, a group formed by Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft and Sony to acquire intellectual property from the bankrupt Nortel.

According to The Wall Street Journal, RPX is paying $900 million for the assets, less than a quarter of the sum Rockstar paid for them in the first place (although the portfolio being sold is not exactly the same). Funds from a group of companies licensing the intellectual property has made up “much” of the price.

In a statement, John Amster, chief executive and co-founder of RPX, said: “Leading technology companies from multiple industries came together to shape this transaction. We commend everyone involved for their leadership and commitment to clearing the risk of the Rockstar portfolio by negotiating a reasonable purchase price in one efficient transaction”.

Rockstar paid $4.5 billion for the Nortel assets in 2011, at a point when the industry was in the midst of a patent frenzy which saw high valuations placed on a number of assets. But despite numerous lawsuits between a number of tier-one vendors, there have been few decisive victories which came down to patents.

It was reported twelve months ago that Rockstar was in talks about a sale.

RPX said that while Rockstar acquired around 6,000 patents from Nortel, around 2,000 of these have been distributed to Rockstar owners and are not part of the current transaction.

According to RPX, its RPX Clearinghouse will receive licence patents from a syndicate of more than 30 companies, including Cisco and Google. They will be made available to other companies under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

Mark Chandler, general counsel of Cisco, said: “With RPX acting as a clearinghouse and deal manager, a global consortium of unprecedented scale came together willingly and reached a fair value for licensing patent rights in a negotiated business transaction instead of a courtroom.”