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-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from ZDNet Australia. --------------------------------------------------------------
US court issues injunction against Huawei

By Patrick Gray, 0
June 10, 2003
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/US-court-issues-injunction-against-Huawei/0,139023166,120275224,00.htm


A Texas district court has issued an injunction against Huawei Technologies on Friday evening in a lawsuit filed against them by Cisco over alleged copyright infringement.

Cisco is claiming that Huawei copied both software code and copyrighted material from user manuals. For its part, Huawei is defending the more serious charge of code-copying by claiming an employee was given a disk containing Cisco code during the development of one of its products by an unknown party without its knowledge.

The injunction granted orders Huawei to cease using, selling, distributing or reproducing any of its operating systems that either contain or are derived from Cisco's source code.

Furthermore it will prevent Huawei from "distributing in the United States any version of Huawei's user manuals or on-line help files that copy... or that are substantially similar to any user manual or on-line help files copyrighted by Cisco".

It also demands Huawei cease using any engineer that had accessed Cisco source code or worked with code that was derived from Cisco source code.

Despite the ruling, Huawei remains upbeat about the legal drama.

"Today's ruling will have no material effect on Huawei's business moving forward, including its joint venture with 3Com," it said in a statement.

"Before Cisco initiated its legal action against Huawei, the company had already taken good faith, voluntary action to proactively remove from the U.S. market the obsolete products outlined in the injunction," it added.

Cisco has welcomed the ruling.

"With this ruling, the Court found that the extraordinary circumstances surrounding Huawei's blatant copying of Cisco's intellectual property warrant an equally extraordinary remedy," reports have quoted it as saying.

Huawei and 3Com have partnered in the development of router products.

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