Cisco accuses rival Arista of copying its technology in patent and copyright lawsuits

Arista knowingly included Cisco patents into its products, claims Cisco, and copied its IOS software

Networking giant Cisco Systems has filed suit against Arista Networks, accusing its smaller rival - founded by Cisco defectors - of infringing 14 of its patents, as well as related copyrights.

Cisco argues in its filing, filed in the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, that Arista's founders and staff directly copied Cisco technology, including documentation, when they left the hardware giant to found the new company.

"Arista was founded by former Cisco employees, many of whom are named inventors on Cisco's networking patents... All were employed by Cisco prior to joining Arista. Moreover, four out of the seven members of Arista's board of directors were previously employed by Cisco," claimed Cisco in the filing.

Arista's founders include chief development officer Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief technology officer Kenneth Duda, and CEO Jayshree Ullal, who spent 15 years at Cisco building up its enterprise business. Arista is a decade old and floated on the New York Stock Exchange.

The Cisco complaint argues that Arista's key staff were all "intimately and directly familiar with Cisco's patented networking technologies" and argues that Arista has absorbed "numerous patented technologies developed by Cisco" into its products. It continues: "Arista took an unfair shortcut to compete with Cisco using Cisco's own technologies," and goes on to claim that Cisco is not the only company whose intellectual property has been wilfully infringed by Arista.

Cisco legal counsel Mark Chandler claimed in a blog post that the company only started legal action against Arista following "thoughtful and serious consideration". He wrote: "In the 13 years I've been general counsel of Cisco, I can count on one hand the number of times we've initiated suit against a competitor, supplier or customer."

He continued: "We have taken this action only after assuring ourselves of four key facts - all of which form the basis for legitimate intellectual property actions between competitors:

• Arista incorporates features knowing that Cisco holds intellectual property rights related to those features, all of which are Cisco proprietary and none of which are industry standards;
• Arista intentionally markets those features to its customers as a basis for buying the products;
• Arista promotes its copying to convince investors to finance the company;
• Arista's actions, if unstopped, will embolden others to seek to do the same.

"The heart of our action regards Arista's deliberate inclusion in its products of 12 discrete and important Cisco features covered by 14 different US patents. All of these features are being used by Cisco currently and in products we ship to our customers. None of the implementations are incorporated in industry standards.

"They were patented by individuals who worked for Cisco and are now at Arista, or who at Cisco worked with executives who are now at Arista. These Cisco-created features and implementations are incorporated by Arista in their entirety into Arista's products," claimed Chandler.

Cisco's copyright infringement claim, meanwhile, argues that Arista "copied Cisco's operating system software... Arista also flagrantly copied Cisco's operating system documentation into Arista's documentation". Indeed, Cisco accuses Arista of "verbatim copying of the Cisco IOS software".

Arista, not unexpectedly, rejected the claims. "While we have respect for Cisco as a fierce competitor and the dominant player in the market, we are disappointed that they have to resort to litigation rather than simply compete with us in products," Arista responded in a statement emailed to Reuters.