Cisco blames Huawei of 'misstating facts' in 2003 trial
updated 06:05 pm EDT, Thu October 11, 2012
Trial ended after Huawei removed offending code
Networking equipment manufacturer Cisco is accusing competitor Huawei Technologies of misstating facts doing a 2003 copyright infringement case, and has released segments of what was said from a previously sealed document. Cisco wait it was revealing parts of an expert's report "so the world could learn what really happened."
According to Cisco, ""the exactness of the comments and spacing not only indicate that Huawei has access to the Cisco code but that the Cisco code was electronically copied and inserted" into Huawei's codebase for routing equipment. Huawei maintains that the claims are unjustified as it received the disputed code for a third party, which it believes absolves the Chinese company of the copyright infringement. The case between the two companies was eventually dropped in 2004 after Huawei extracted the questionable code from its routers and switches.
Earlier this year, Cisco Executive Vice President Rob Lloyd said ""We clearly know that our customers view innovation from Cisco and they don't see the same from Huawei. We would clearly say that imitation isn't innovation." He added on an earnings call that "the privacy of information, how data is protected is forefront in our customers' mind in a cloud-centric world. That's not the forte of Huawei."
Despite the US Government's report released this week about Huawei and ZTE being espionage fronts for the Chinese government, and recommendations from the House Intelligence Committee that US companies not do business with the pair, Cisco made a blog post on Thursday saying that it had no dispute with the Chinese government and "We respect the efforts the Chinese government is making to increase intellectual property protection."
