Continued: Microsoft statement and Plurk response

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

On December 15, the following statement was published on the Microsoft website :
( please write any possible comments on the translation through habrpost )

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 started working with our joint venture MSN China to investigate the situation.

The supplier acknowledged that part of the code he provided was indeed copied. This was a clear violation of his contract with the MSN China joint venture and was equally incompatible with Microsoft's policy on respect for intellectual property.

When we hire an external company for development, we clearly indicate 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 our intention was to have a website that would disrespect the work of others.

We will suspend access to Juku beta indefinitely.

We, of course, really regret 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 took to resolve the situation.

Following this incident, Microsoft and our joint venture, MSN China, will review our relationship with the third-party application code.

On December 17, the Plurk blog published a response to this statement from Microsoft:
( my translation is also mine, comments through habrahpost )

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

Plurk is a very young startup with approximately two years of founding history. We are a very, very small and technically 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 improving and distributing 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 honestly, hoping that, like many young entrepreneurs, we can someday be able to help solve other problems and help our small company grow.

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 completely repeating the functionality of our product. This product was later launched and heavily promoted by Microsoft with its large marketing budget.