3Com filed a motion with the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Marshall, Texas to intervene in the litigation between Cisco Systems and Huawei Technologies. 3Com is seeking a declaratory ruling regarding the validity and originality of the intellectual property behind new products that it intends to ship through its soon-to-be launched joint venture with Huawei. 3Com said it was taking legal action to make clear to the court, as well as customers, that it intends to follow through with the launch of the 3Com-Huawei joint venture. 3Com asserts that the new products it will ship in partnership with Huawei will be substantially different from those in the dispute between Cisco and Huawei. Also today, Huawei has filed an amended counterclaim for declaratory relief that the new products do not infringe Cisco’s intellectual property.
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- Late last week, a U.S. District Court judge issued a preliminary injunction against Huawei Technologies.
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In March 2003, 3Com and Huawei Technologies said that they would form a joint venture based in Hong Kong with principal operations in Hangzhou, China. Huawei’s contribution to the JV will include enterprise networking business assets, including LAN switches, routers, engineering, sales/marketing resources and personnel, and licenses to its related intellectual property. 3Com’s contribution to the JV will include $160 million in cash, assets related to its operations in China and Japan, and licenses to its related intellectual property. The name of the joint venture will be 3Com-Huawei in English and Huawei-3Com in Chinese. 3Com said the JV would provide it with modular layer 2 and 3, 10/100/1000 MB switches. The JV and Huawei will also provide 3Com with a full line of enterprise routers.
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In January 2003, Cisco Systems filed a lawsuit against Huawei Technologies and its subsidiaries Huawei America and FutureWei Technologies alleging unlawful copying of Cisco’s intellectual property. In particular, the suit alleges that Huawei unlawfully copied and misappropriated Cisco’s IOS software, including source code, copied Cisco documentation and other copyrighted materials, and infringed numerous Cisco patents. Cisco claims that Huawei’s operating system contains a number of text strings, file names, and even bugs that are identical to those found in Cisco’s IOS source code.