Cisco is fighting back against comments made by Huawei Senior Vice President Charles Ding last month. Ding claims that an earlier lawsuit that claimed Huawei had stolen Cisco's source code and used it in its own products was unjustified.

Shortly after filing the earlier suit, Cisco got a worldwide injunction against Huawei's sale of products, including code for Cisco's proprietary routing protocol called EIGRP. Huawei publicly admitted that it had used the code in its products and the company pledged to stop, said Cisco's senior vice president, general counsel and secretary Mark Chandler on the company's blog.

After the injunction was issued, Huawei agreed to have an expert review of its code. The litigation was concluded a year later. The results and what was done as a consequence were all covered by a confidentiality agreement.

However, according to Chandler, Ding recently stated that "when Cisco sued Huawei for intellectual property rights infringement, Huawei provided our source code of our products to Cisco for review, and the results were that there was not any infringement found, and in the end Cisco withdrew the case."

Chandler states, "Our legal advisers tell us that given Mr. Ding’s statements, we would be justified in releasing the full report. To facilitate the understanding about what actually happened in the litigation and allow Huawei to itself clear up any confusion, we waive any confidentiality requirement for the report and suggest that Huawei itself have the expert’s complete final report put into the public domain. Fair competition, indeed, requires transparency of business practices and a respect for intellectual property rights."

Cisco is urging Huawei to publish the report to clarify what happened during the litigation in an effort to show its transparent business practices and respect for intellectual property rights.

But Chandler also wanted to make it clear that Cisco's actions against Huawei had nothing to do with the deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and China, stating that the litigation was between private companies not between the U.S. and China. He added that "We respect the efforts the Chinese government is making to increase intellectual property protection." He also says that the litigation was in no way related to recent smartphone patent cases between companies such as Samsung and Apple.

Cisco has good incentive for maintaining a good relationship with China. It is currently trying to expand its market share in the country. Huawei's Chinese heritage and presence in emerging markets could effectively block those plans.

(Source: ucstrategies)