Yahoo headquarters in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: David Ramos/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Yahoo will auction off nearly 3,000 patents and pending patent applications, according to The Wall Street Journal.

News of the patent sale came late yesterday, not long after it was reported that Verizon is submitting a $3 billion bid for Yahoo’s core Internet business. The sale of the core Web business will include about 500 US patents and more than 600 pending applications, separate from the larger group going in the standalone patent sale.

Yahoo moved 2,659 patents into a patent-holding company called Excalibur IP LLC, which was seen as a first step toward a patent sale.