We have been hearing about mobile manufacturers filing patent lawsuits against each other from quite some time now. But this lawsuit looks lot more serious and in fact, crazy. The US mobile maker Motorola Inc has sued China’s Huawei Technologies Co. for an alleged theft of trade secrets. The Chinese company has been found conspiring against Motorola and trying to steal its technology and trade secrets since past 9 years ( That’s some serious issue now.)

Motorola has sued Huawei and a dozen of Motorola employees to have shared with each other confidential information about the cellular equipments. The crazy part is that the lawsuit was initially filed in 2008 against four former Motorola engineers and a company called Lemko. However after all these long years of investigation, it has turned out to be more dirty with nine additional employees found guilty of  supposedly stealing plans for a 3G base station called the SC300. Motorola thus filed a new complaint on July 16^th in a federal court in Chicago.

Motorola claimed a string of emails tagged “Motorola Confidential Proprietary” showed that “Huawei and its officers knew they were receiving stolen Motorola proprietary trade secrets and confidential information without Motorola’s authorization and consent,” according to the suit.

Huawei on the other hand denies the claims stating them to be completely groundless.

“Huawei has no relationship with Lemko, other than a reseller agreement. Huawei will vigorously defend itself against baseless allegations,” the company said in an emailed statement.

Once a thief Always a Thief

Turning back a few pages of history, Huawei had been accused of stealing trade secrets of US high tech giant Cisco Systems in 2003. The company had “unlawfully copied and misappropriated” Cisco’s software for directing Internet traffic. However the case was dropped after Huawei agreed to alter its router and switch products.

Motorola now claims that Huawei and Lemko are now selling equipment based on the stolen technology.

Huawei is now world’s second-largest seller of wireless telecoms equipment. But is that success based on false ground of stealing and cheating?  It will be really interesting to see the secrets and evidences unfold with time. And we are definitely not missing this one. You are invited too!

Via Yahoo! & NYTimes; Image Courtesy: Thetelecomblog