Smith's counterpart at Facebook, Ted Ullyot, said in the statement that this deal is another step in the company's process to build a patent portfolio.

Facebook and Microsoft partner in a variety of areas, as they battle common foe Google in markets including social networking, search, online advertising, mobile and cloud applications.

It has become popular among large IT vendors to spend considerable amounts of money bulking up their patent holdings as proactively defensive measures against possible intellectual property lawsuits.

In Facebook's case, it is currently facing such a lawsuit from Yahoo, which alleges Facebook has infringed 10 of its patents. The lawsuit, filed in March, states that the infringed-upon patents cover areas like online advertising. Weeks later Facebook fired back with a patent-infringement countersuit against Yahoo.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said via email that Facebook's patent acquisition doesn't change Yahoo's allegations.