An Asian blogging website called Plurk has accused Microsoft’s new Chinese social networking website of ripping them off – everything from parts of their code to the actual design itself when making their new site.
“Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but blatant theft of code, design, and UI elements is just not cool, especially when the infringing party is the biggest software company in the world. Yes, we’re talking about Microsoft…” said a blog post from Plurk earlier this week, as their community grew angry about what they felt was a blatant rip off of their site from a company with the knowledge and resources to do better.
The accusations certainly don’t appear to be particularly unfounded either, as Microsoft has actually taken their site down while they investigate the matter. Microsoft said they hadn’t taken immediate action because the blog post was made during the middle of evening so they couldn’t take the site down. They haven’t said much else except that the matter will be investigated, but a spokesperson for the company did say:
“Our MSN China joint venture contracted with an independent vendor to create a feature called MSN Juku that allowed MSN users to find friends via microblogging and online games”
Plurk are of course busy lapping up the publicity they have received, and it seems like Microsoft may well have an apology to make. It seems unlikely that they didn’t know about the site considering they would almost certainly have done market research into social networking sites popular in the country before beginning on any such project.
How would you feel if you found out a big company like Microsoft had taken elements of your own code or unique design? Would you be angry or flattered that a large company had used your work?
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