Dive Brief:
- This week, the International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled that Arista Networks violated three of five patents Cisco Systems alleged the company infringed upon.
- An administrative law judge made the ruling in the ongoing patent fight between the two companies. To top things off, last month Arista filed a lawsuit against Cisco alleging antitrust violations.
- The case will now be further reviewed by the commission. A judge will make a ruling on a second ITC investigation in April regarding six more patent infringement allegations Cisco made against Arista.
Dive Insight:
The judge ruled that Arista infringed upon three patents (’537, ’592 and ’145). The patent ’537 is related to Sysdb Initiation that manages a router’s own configuration data. The ’592 and ’145 are related to private local area networks. No infringements were found on the other two patents (’597 and ’164).
All the alleged patent violations come from technology former Cisco employees invented before becoming executives at Arista, or tech from engineers who were Cisco employees but worked for Arista execs, ZDNet reports.
The patents in question go to the core of Arista's business and could seriously impact future business and customer offerings.
If the case is upheld by the ITC in June, the commission could potentially ban Arista from importing certain equipment or devices from outside of the U.S. or put a cease and desist order on certain Arista’s inventories.
In its lawsuit again Cisco, Arista accused the company of monopolistic business practices that unfairly harms both competing vendors and end users.”