Microsoft and TiVo have announced their mutual agreement to drop patent infringement charges against each other, officially ending a dispute that has begun in 2010. The Wall Street Journal provided some of the background behind the story:

“Microsoft first sued TiVo in a San Francisco federal court in 2010 as part of a broader attempt to provide legal cover for partner AT&T Inc. (T), a customer of its Internet video platform. It claimed TiVo illegally used technology related to purchasing and delivering video and the ability to display programming information.

TiVo had launched its own strike against AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), alleging that their video services illegally used its TV “time-warping” technology in their digital video recorders. AT&T’s U-Verse TV service runs on Microsoft’s Internet video technology.”

This battle continued for quite some time. After TiVo’s retaliation Microsoft filed another suit, this time in Washington, over the alleged infringement of four different patents, and the media recording company fired back with its own barrage of legal accusations.

Eventually a judge ended up ruling AT&T has to pay TiVo upwards of $215 million in royalties until 2018, while the the settlement with Microsoft completely dismisses the liability of both companies.

TiVo’s legal team has contributed a great deal to its record-breaking fourth quarter, when the compensation from two separate cases against Dish Network and EchoStart came through.

As for Microsoft, the software maker has also been cashing in on its titanic portfolio of roughly 20,000 patents. Specifically it decided to go after Android OEMs using a similar legal tactic to that IBM refined many years ago, and successfully forced several of them into agreements that will translate into a lot of mobile revenue on the long run.