In 2003 Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler traveled to Shenzhen to confront Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei with evidence of Huawei's theft of Cisco IP. The evidence included typos from Cisco's technical manuals that also appeared in Huawei's, after being presented with the evidence Ren replied "coincidence".
[2]
In February 2003,
Cisco Systems sued Huawei Technologies for allegedly infringing on its patents and illegally copying source code used in its routers and switches.
[3] According to a statement by Cisco, by July 2004 Huawei removed the contested code, manuals and command-line interfaces and the case was subsequently settled out of court.
[4] As part of the settlement Huawei admitted that it had copied some of Cisco's router software.
[2] Both sides claimed success – with Cisco asserting that "completion of lawsuit marks a victory for the protection of intellectual property rights", and Huawei's partner 3Com (which was not a part of lawsuit) noting that court order prevented Cisco from bringing another case against Huawei asserting the same or substantially similar claims.
[5] Although Cisco employees allegedly witnessed counterfeited technology as late as September 2005,
[6] in a retrospective Cisco's Corporate Counsel noted, "Cisco was portrayed by the Chinese media as a bullying multi-national corporation" and "the damage to Cisco's reputation in China outweighed any benefit achieved through the lawsuit".
[7]
Huawei's chief representative in the U.S. subsequently claimed that Huawei had been vindicated in the case, breaking a confidentiality clause of Huawei's settlement with Cisco. In response, Cisco revealed parts of the independent expert's report produced for the case which proved that Huawei had stolen Cisco code and directly copied it into their products.
[8] In a company blog post Cisco's Mark Chandler stated that the settled case had included allegations of "direct, verbatim copying of our source code, to say nothing of our command line interface, our help screens, our copyrighted manuals and other elements of our products" by Huawei and provided additional information to support those allegations.
[9] Prior to Cisco providing conclusive proof in 2012 the story of Huawei's blatant plagiarism had obtained the status of
folklore within the routing and switching