Continuing Events: Microsoft Statement and Plurk Response

On December 14, an entry was published in the Plurk blog, the translation of which received a great response on Habré. The bottom line is that the new MSN China product - MSN Juku - is actually a copy of the Plurk service.

December 15 on the Microsoft website published the following statement:
( possible comments on the translation please write through habraposhta )

On Monday, December 14th, questions arose about the Juku beta application, which was developed by a Chinese supplier for our joint venture MSN China. We immediately began working with our joint venture MSN China to investigate the situation.
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The supplier acknowledged that part of the code provided to them was indeed copied. This was a clear violation of his contract with the MSN China joint venture and is equally incompatible with Microsoft's policy regarding respect for intellectual property.

When we hire an outside company to develop, we clearly state in our contract that the company must provide work that does not violate the intellectual property rights of others. We are a company that respects intellectual property and never intend to have a website that disrespect others.

We will suspend access to Juku beta indefinitely.

Of course, we are very sorry for what happened, but we take responsibility for this situation. We apologize to Plurk and we will contact them directly to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation.

Following this incident, Microsoft and our joint venture MSN China will reconsider our attitude towards the code of applications provided by third-party vendors.

On December 17, Plurk's blog posted a response to this Microsoft statement:
( translation is also mine, comments - through habraposhta )

We are currently considering all possibilities regarding how to proceed further in response to a recent Microsoft statement. We are still thinking about legal prosecution in full due to the seriousness of the situation. Essentially, Microsoft takes responsibility, but does not provide reporting.

Plurk is a very young startup with approximately two years of foundation history. We are a very, very small and tech-oriented company. We do not have a marketing department, we do not have a sales department. Even now, I, the co-founder of Plurk, have to write this press release myself. We spend most of our time perfecting and spreading our product. Numerous iterations, human efforts and almost all capital resources are spent on providing a unique and rich social network environment for our users. We write our own code and share it with the community when necessary ( opensource.plurk.com ). We play fair, hoping that, like many young entrepreneurs, we can someday be able to help solve other problems and contribute to the growth of our small company.

This event was not only a simple matter of code theft; Due to the uniqueness of our product and user interface, it took effort to deliberately study and dig into our code with the clear intention of fully replicating the functionality of our product. This product was later launched and strongly spun Microsoft with its large marketing budget.