Two and a half years ago, Cisco Systems Inc. declared IP war on networking rival Arista Networks Inc.

Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler announced on his blog “official action to stop Arista's brazen misappropriation of the fruits of our engineers' labor.” He listed 14 patents that Arista was allegedly infringing and called out copyright infringement that was “a strategy, not an accident.”

Today, Cisco's case against Arista is hanging by a few tenuous threads. The company lost its copyright trial in December. Cisco has dropped or Arista has been found not to infringe nine of the 14 patents. Of the five that the International Trade Commission has found infringing, Arista has successfully designed around three, with an administrative judge signing off on the third Wednesday.