Cisco Slaps Arista Networks With Suit For "Brazen" Patent Infringement

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday December 7, 2014 @08:40AM from the do-your-own-work dept.

alphadogg writes Cisco has filed two lawsuits against data center switch competitor Arista Networks for allegedly violating its intellectual property. One suit is for patent infringement, which charges Arista with violating 14 Cisco patents for 12 features in the Arista EOS operating system. The second suit is for extensive copying of Cisco's user manuals and command line structures, right down to the grammatical errors within them. "This is not an accident but a strategy," says a source familiar with the matter. "It was a deliberate, brazen and blatant intellectual property violation in order to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Arista's shortcutting to get to market and win share."

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General Counsel's Blog by HockeyPuck · 2014-12-07 10:14 · Score: 3, Informative

Cisco's General Counsel has a blog on the subject.
From another article:

Arista was founded by former Cisco employees, many of whom are named inventors on Cisco's networking patents. Among others, Arista's: 1) founders, 2) President and CEO, 3) Chief Development Officer, 4) Chief Technology Officer, 5) Senior Vice President for Customer Engineering, 6) Vice President of Business Alliances, 7) former Vice President for Global Operations and Marketing, 8) Vice President of Systems Engineering and Technology Marketing, 9) Vice President of Hardware Engineering, 10) Vice President of Software Engineering, and 11) Vice President of Manufacturing and Platform Engineering 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.