Accused of plucking Plurk, Microsoft pulls microblog service

Canadian startup Plurk, a Twitter-like social networking site that has gotten quite popular in China, accused Microsoft China of not only stealing the service's design, but 80 percent of the service's code too. In response, Microsoft has pulled its microblogging site, which goes by the name of Juku and was developed by a third-party vendor for the company's MSN China joint venture. Redmond has also started working with the joint venture to thoroughly investigate the charges, and so far has "acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied. This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property."

The whole story begins with a Plurk blog post explaining that the team could not believe Microsoft's blatant theft. "We were first tipped off by high-profile bloggers and Taiwanese users of our community that Microsoft had just launched a new Chinese microblogging service that looked eerily similar to Plurk. Needless to say we were absolutely shocked and outraged when we first saw with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft's new offering had with Plurk. From the filter tabs, emoticons, qualifier/verb placement, Karma scoring system, media support, new user walkthroughs to pretty much everything else that gives Plurk its trademark appeal, Microsoft China's offering ripped off our service."

Plurk did code comparisons to come up with the 80 percent figure.

 This is a really astounding example of the absolute worst case scenario of what intellectual property theft can be. Yet it is just downright surprising that a company as vast and expert in programming as Microsoft would  end up in a situation of having picked such a failure of a contract partner. Forget all of the positive rhetoric and examples as of late by the Chinese government going after intellectual property fraud, this is going to be extremely humiliating to China's tech world and cause every company with coders in China to re-evaluate and investigate their work.

As much as I try to take an even-handed approach on issues regarding China, this is a case where there is truly no excuse for what has gone wrong. It is downright criminal to both believe one could get away with such code theft and then trying to sell it to a prestigious company as your own with almost no modification. It is both a tremendous breach of any semblance of legal society, no doubt violating both IP laws as well as the written contract signed, it also breaks the important bond of trust between groups that all societies know and value.

Microsoft has done the best it can to cover for this disaster, but what is going on here will not be good for Sino-American corporate relations. This scandal will be a case-study that all other major companies will be taking note of when they consider working with China, and presents the greater challenge of achieving respect for copyright, and more generally the rule of law, in the Chinese state. 

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