they join together as groups so that it costs each individual company less money and they still get the patents that they want.I find this rumour pretty unlikely to be honest. I don't think Microsoft would be willing to enter into a coalition that would give a significant collection of 4G patents to Apple... That would be... incredibly stupid of them.
guess you didn't read the article...MS will probably have full rights to them. That was probably part of the deal.
Meanwhile, the largest contributor of the consortium was said to be Apple who put up $2 billion "for outright ownership of Nortel's Long Term Evolution (4G) patents as well as another package of patents supposedly intended to hobble Android."