Well, obviously. Patents are Intellectual Property which makes them property which makes them assignable and therefore saleable. What particularly irked me about the original comment was the notion of "below value". How is this different than the sale of any other asset, frankly? The value of something is what some buyer is willing to pay for it, more or less. And honestly, I'm not sure I buy the fact that Nortel's patents were sold "below value": in some respects patents' potential valuations are always inflated because the owner would hardly ever want to sell them unless they had a compelling need, and that compelling need would have a depressing effect to arrive at a real valuation or actual sale value. But there's no middle ground -- you either keep them, and never realize their value (except in using them as a collateral asset, I suppose), or you sell them at a price below that value -- there's very little room for actually trading them as a commodity.
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