Rockstar Consortium Inc., originally named Rockstar Bidco, is a consortium formed to negotiate licensing for patents acquired from the bankrupt multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer Nortel. Members of the consortium are Apple Inc., BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony. Rockstar is a patent holding non-practicing entity (NPE) and submitted the winning US$4.5 billion bid for the Nortel patents at a week-long auction held in New York in June 2011. In November 2014, it was reported that Rockstar and Google had come to a settlement.