Apple and other tech companies sold 4,000 smartphone patents for $900 million to a clearinghouse, the patents' new owner announced Tuesday, in an effort to put a their legal battles them. RPX Clearinghouse LLC executed an agreement to purchase the patent assets controlled by Rockstar Consortium LLC. Rockstar is the entity formed in 2011 by Apple, Blackberry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony to purchase approximately 6,000 patent assets from the Nortel bankruptcy estate. Approximately 2,000 of these patent assets were previously distributed to various Rockstar owners and are not part of this transaction. RPX Clearinghouse will receive license payments from a syndicate of over 30 companies, including Cisco and Google. Upon closing, which is subject to regulatory approval and other customary conditions, syndicate participants will receive non-exclusive licenses to the Rockstar patents, and RPX Clearinghouse will make the patents available for license to all other interested companies under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

"We are pleased to act as a clearinghouse and underwrite an agreement between the owners of Rockstar and our syndicate of licensees," said John A. Amster, Chief Executive and Co-founder of RPX. "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."

The deal is expected to end a series of lawsuits -- which effectively pitted Rockstar against smartphone makers who developed Android phones -- around patents for some basic smartphone technology, including navigating through documents, data networking and Internet access.