Chinese programmer arrested for improving someone else's program

A talented programmer, Chen Shoufu, was put in jail, where he has been in his fourth month. The arrest of a 28-year-old university teacher took place at the request of a large software corporation Tencent Holdings , which is the developer of the most popular QQ IM-pager in China. Shouf's province was that he took the liberty of slightly modifying the program, improving its functionality and eliminating some glitches. The improved distribution was distributed under the name Coral QQ. The programmer did not receive any particular commercial benefit from this, although Coral QQ showed “illegal” advertising and spam, but these were crumbs. Nevertheless, Tencent Holdings Corporation was extremely dissatisfied with the fact that advertising was cut off in the improved distribution, and some paid features became available to everyone (for example, displaying the IP addresses of the sender’s computer in the original program costs $ 1.35 per month). The company decided to punish the upstart.

First, Shoufu paid a fine of 100,000 yuan (about $ 13,600), after which he became a real hero in China, according to WSJ . Ordinary Chinese users hate Tencent corporation, which monopolized the market (40.6 million people use the QQ program). However, you can’t do anything against copyright law, even in China. Therefore, a repeat trial of the recidivist led to the arrest of Chen Shoufu.

This is another example of how intellectual property laws impede innovation and the development of society.
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via Against Monopoly