14 DAY TRIAL // One day after it started investigating allegations of code theft, Microsoft has shut down the Microsoft China microblogging service offered to customers under various monikers including MSN Juku/Hompy/Mclub. At the same time, the Redmond company confirmed officially that in the making of Juku code and design elements were lifted from a rival product dubbed Plurk. However, the software giant threw the blame on a third-party developer which it did not mention, for plagiarizing Plurk.
“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,” Microsoft said in a statement.
Juku had debuted into Beta at the end of November 2009, and was made available exclusively to Chinese users through MSN China. When it first said that it was looking into the matter of code theft, the Redmond company also took down Juku, noting that a decision will be made on the suspension after the accusations would have been verified. As it acknowledged that both code and components of the visual style had been lifted from Plurk by the third-party which developed Juku, Microsoft shut down the MSN China microblogging service indefinitely.
“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,” Microsoft stated.
Ironically, Microsoft is one of the biggest driving forces fueling the fight against piracy and copyright infringement around the world, and especially in China. The Redmond company itself has had products and services copied and bootlegged and its intellectual property infringed upon, but it looks like it now gets to see what the other side of the fence is like.
“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,” the software giant added. “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.”