Cisco Sues Arista Networks Over Copyright, Patent Infringement

Cisco filed two lawsuits against Arista Networks Friday, alleging the defendant committed numerous copyright and patent violations (see complaints here and here). Cisco’s suits -- filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California -- allege that because many of Arista’s executives were former Cisco employees, they used several of Cisco’s patents and copied Cisco’s command line interface. “Arista’s EOS [Extensible Operating System] was developed from the ground up as a nextgeneration network operating system for the cloud based upon the pioneering technologies invented by Arista -- far from the ugly messaging pursued by Cisco on Friday,” said Dan Scheinman, Arista board member, in a blog post Sunday. “Cisco’s lawsuit is just like the lawsuits (actual and threatened) brought against it in the 90’s by Lucent, IBM and Nortel -- an attempt by a legacy vendor that is falling behind in the marketplace to use the legal system to try and slow a competitor who is innovating and winning,” he said. “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,” said Mark Chandler, Cisco general counsel, in a blog post Friday.