Jury selection is underway in the next big Silicon Valley battle over intellectual property. Networking titan Cisco Systems Inc. is squaring off with rival Arista Networks Inc., a company founded and run by former Cisco employees, in the San Jose courtroom of Judge Beth Labson Freeman.
The patent and copyright trial bears similarities to the Oracle v. Google litigation that’s been playing out in San Francisco. Cisco accuses Arista of appropriating more than 1,000 phrases from its copyrighted user interface. Arista argues that they’re just two-to-five-word strings that engineers have used for decades to configure network equipment.
