A hi-tech war of words flared again yesterday, when Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies filed a reply to a United States district court defending itself against copyright infringement allegations made by Cisco Systems.
'Cisco opened its reply brief with a bloated list of allegations, tailor-made for coverage by the press, that it claimed Huawei failed to deny,' Huawei's lawyer Robert Haslam wrote in response to Cisco's motion for preliminary injunctions.
'Cisco's motion seeks to prevent Huawei from selling its products in the US market and is no more than an attempt to stifle competition.'
Cisco, the world's No 1 computer networking manufacturer, told a Texas court last week that it had new evidence to show Huawei routers identified themselves to a network as being Cisco products by illegally copying Cisco's data link switching (DLSw) protocol source code.
Huawei argued that DLSw is a widely used industry standard. It used Cisco's identification number because 'during product testing, Huawei discovered that Cisco routers operated differently when they detected a Huawei router, resulting in degraded performance'.
'Huawei merely made the choice to optimise performance for its customers,' the Chinese company said, adding the assertions that it 'still uses Cisco code' were incorrect and misleading.
