Microsoft washes its hands over plurk.com plagiarism

Dec 16, 2009

Microsoft washes its hands over plurk.com plagiarism

Microsoft washes its hands over plurk.com plagiarism microsoft design theft plurk technology

Microsoft quickly stepped out of any wrongdoing in the recent Juku plagiarism of plurk.com, where not only the design elements were copied in order to rush out the new Microsoft’s Twitter-like MSN Juku in China.

Microsoft points to a vendor for the rip off, but it says a lot about Microsoft’s evaluation of third party applications, if they can’t verify how a project is designed/done before reaching the market, them there is not strong policies about anything in their contracts with outsiders, this is a poor PR mess and Microsoft is not the victim here as they wants us to believe, this is unbelievable that plurk.com was ripped off in front of Microsoft’s eyes and nothing was done to avoid it.

Poor Microsoft and its shareholders.

Microsoft statement about Plurk.com:

Microsoft Statement Regarding MSN China Joint Venture’s Juku Feature

Additional information regarding the Juku beta application.

REDMOND, Wash. – Dec. 15, 2009 – On Monday, December 14, questions arose over a beta application called Juku developed by a Chinese vendor for our MSN China joint venture. We immediately worked with our MSN China joint venture to investigate the situation.

The vendor has now 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.

When we hire an outside company to do development work, our practice is to include strong language in our contract that clearly states the company must provide work that does not infringe the intellectual property rights of others. We are a company that respects intellectual property and it was never our intent to have a site that was not respectful of the work that others in the industry have done.

We will be suspending access to the Juku beta indefinitely.

We are obviously very disappointed, but we assume responsibility for this situation. We apologize to Plurk and we will be reaching out to them directly to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation.

In the wake of this incident, Microsoft and our MSN China joint venture will be taking a look at our practices around applications code provided by third-party vendors.