Microsoft rips off Plurk

http://blog.plurk.com/2009/12/14/microsoft-rips-plurk/

by abraham • 17 years ago

581 135 17 years ago

blog.plurk.com

phreanix• 17 years ago

Incredible, I guess in their culture this is ok (or has become so commonplace as to be ok), but shouldn't Microsoft have some sort of measures against it in their own workplaces?

archon8102• 17 years ago

My guess is the Chinese team was facing strict deadlines and in the act of desperation they ripped off the code and layout from Plurk. It's outrageous and MS needs to straight up get sued for this.

Plurk has a very small team of less than 10 guys and in my eyes this is nothing less than MS bullying. This is not right.

mikeryan2• 17 years ago

I don't know if I can lay all the blame on Microsoft for this.

The dev's knew what they were doing but I doubt the rip-off percolated very high up. As a SW manager I'm not sure how I'd know that this was ripped off wholesale if I wasn't very familiar with the ripped off site.

Don't get me wrong, this is bad. But expose it to MS and let them clean house. I don't doubt that they will.

axod2• 17 years ago

By "their culture' do you mean China, or Microsoft?

I really don't think for example Google China would do this.

luchak• 17 years ago

Something like this did happen at Google China a couple of years ago: they released a Chinese IME that contained a dictionary taken from Sohu. Sohu demanded a public apology, which Google issued a couple of days later, along with a version that did not contain the stolen list.

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Google_Apologizes_For_Poaching... http://bit.ly/5zIVYl

Edit: for what it's worth, I personally agree with the theory that this was probably done by a local team that was under a lot of pressure but wasn't getting enough oversight.

ericb2• 17 years ago

China has some odd laws in terms of how Chinese subsidiaries work from what I understand. It is isn't quite like opening a subsidiary in say, England. I think there is a rule about a local chinese partner company being involved where you get your employees through that chinese partner company. In the example I witnessed, it was difficult to dictate culture in the chinese office as they were working through an intermediary. Can anyone else with more experience on this comment?

potatolicious3• 17 years ago

As a Chinese guy, I have to say that the above comment is generally correct - there is fundamentally a different awareness of the concept of IP in Asia.

More frankly, this concept doesn't really exist.

It's not that the culture is more tolerant of ripping others off, but rather that when it comes to creative works, it's not seen as ripping off. Being able to take, adapt, and re-release the work of others, even for-profit, is a matter of course for the majority of the population. Many are not even aware of the moral issues surrounding it, and as far as they are concerned, none exists.

In all likelihood this wasn't so much a team under pressure and stealing out of desperation - in all likelihood someone just did it without very much thought... and it flew under the radar of those who know better.

figital3• 17 years ago

If you're going to worry about that you should have obfuscated your junk.

archon8102• 17 years ago

You've got to be kidding me. And this justifies Microsoft, right?

dschobel2• 17 years ago

He does have a point (one which merits better than his -4 fate).

If your biggest asset is your UI, not only do you have to appreciate you have a tenuous competitive advantage but you should have a battle plan, both technical and legal, for when the theft invariably does happen.

They got lucky that it was a big operation like MS with a public reputation to maintain (laugh all you like) rather than some no-name. It's easy to put public pressure on the Apples, Google and MS' of the world.

axod2• 17 years ago

Read the article. They did.

figital3• 17 years ago

I just re-read the article. If you really squint you might be able to assume that their code was scrambled in some way (if that's what "not compiled" means). Otherwise if you're trying to gain (well deserved) sympathy for something like this then the deobfuscation process is probably the most important part of the story. Did MS then rescramble the code? I'd want to know that as well.

mattlong• 17 years ago

I just pretty-printed the largest JS file loaded in their homepage. The result doesn't look obfuscated by any means.

Removing whitespace != Obfuscating

Don't take their claims at face-value, get your facts straight.

Disclaimer: I'm not claiming that obfuscating (or not) makes any difference with regards to MS infringing on their codebase, just pointing out that it's not actually very obfuscated as claimed by their developer.

eru• 17 years ago

I do not see how obfuscation is necessary for copyright.

stanleydrew2• 17 years ago

they did obfuscate. see post from plurk dev here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994473

amix3• 17 years ago

Being the co-founder and lead dev of Plurk I can tell you this sucks :-( But we are looking at our legal options, thought legal war with Microsoft and especially legal war at Microsoft in China would require a lot of resources.

I think this will become a major concern for all startups that are doing lots of client-side stuff. If people have determination they can copy your code (even if all your code is obfuscated, which Plurk's is). And I don't know what the solution is - other than stronger IP laws in emerging countries.

mustpax• 17 years ago

You are clearly in the right. But a bit of advice: skip the whole look and feel issue* and stick to copyright infringement. Their code is exactly the same or highly derivative of Plurk code. This is pretty well-worn copyright territory, I don't think it would take much for Microsoft to back down.

* Apple sued Microsoft back in the day for stealing the look and feel of Mac OS, and failed. So that argument can be very hard to make.

padmanabhan01• 17 years ago

So, how does this work? Will everything be fine if they maintained the same look and feel and intentionally obfuscated/added more junk to their code to make the code look different?

grellas• 17 years ago

Under U.S. law, copyright protection automatically affixes to any original work of authorship that becomes fixed in any tangible medium of expression. It does not extend to ideas themselves.

Illegal copying can occur by exact copying of source or object code or by paraphrasing (misappropriating a program's structure or architecture, its inter-modular relationships, and/or its algorithms and data structures, at least insofar as these elements do not constitute unprotectable ideas - this can occur by copying the fundamental essence or structure of a copyrighted work even while rephrasing or restating it in immaterial respects).

Impermissible copying can also involve exact duplication of a user interface, or a "paraphrasing" of that interface (e.g., by creating screen displays and menu commands which are very similar but not identical to those of a copyrighted program).

Though interface elements can potentially be copyrighted, the advice you give is sound in most cases because of the courts' reluctance to give any party a monopoly on interface ideas in the guise of copyright (thus, Apple had sought unsuccessfully via copyright to gain exclusive use of a variety of interface elements, such as a visual depiction of a trash can). This is where "look and feel" cases become so difficult - who wants to give anybody exclusive rights via copyright, for example, to the basic ideas behind a spreadsheet? That is why many of those older cases failed.

In spite of this, I don't know that I would simply dismiss the look-and-feel aspect of this case based on the interface involved here. On its face, there appears to be more involved with this interface than mere ideas and, when there are creative forms of expression involved, and the copying is exact or so significantly "paraphrased" as to be almost indistinguishable, an interface infringement may have occurred.

All of the above, however, is based on a U.S. law analysis and may be irrelevant (at least legally) in China. If there is some way to bring U.S. legal principles into play, or anything analogous to them, then this would appear to be a fairly flagrant instance of illegal copying. While the costs of launching and pursuing a formal legal fight would be great, as long as you have a reasonable venue in which to launch it (i.e., one that respects IP rights) and the resources to carry it through to the preliminary injunction stage (usually 6 to 8 weeks into the case), winning a preliminary injunction would likely work its effect in causing Microsoft to fold, assuming it otherwise is willing before that to fight and is able to survive a horrible onslaught of bad publicity.

mikeryan2• 17 years ago

Look I doubt anyone very high up at MS knows of this and when they do you might be able to get some scratch out of this.

They're really going to have 3 ways to deal with this.

1. pull down the existing site while they retool. 2. Pay you a licensing fee while the rewrite from scratch. 3. Do nothing and get a ton of bad press

See if you can get 1 or 2 and maybe make some money off the deal.

ericb2• 17 years ago

You forgot 4. Buy you out.

jf6• 17 years ago

I just started working for Microsoft so that I can be a voice inside the company for startups. I'm forwarding this thread to my legal contact.

UncleOxidant• 17 years ago

4. Microsoft could buy Plurk to save face.

betterlabs• 17 years ago

I agree. Its highly unlikely that this was done on purpose with complete transparency to higher management. But I still wonder how the manager or the manager's manager of the project didn't see this happening. I am pretty sure the team and their 1 or 2 levels up researched plurk and its success in the region enough to recognize that it was copied. The product manager could not have missed this. I am sure a lot of people are under fire for this.

volida• 17 years ago

wow.

By the way, what do you mean by obfuscation? Because this is really weird, they even copied the variables. So was the code obfuscated or just trimmed of white space. You should consider using the google closure compiler with advanced optimizations, although you will have το do some extra work το get your javascript compile in advanced mode.

amix3• 17 years ago

We used Yahoo's compressor for both JS and CSS ( http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/ ). An example of our JavaScript can be seen here: http://statics.plurk.com/5578b0a824368f9af6afa9dd6e8abf64.js. You can see that not all the variables are converted, since Yahoo's compressor is very conservative and won't change functions or global objects names.

This was the best available option at the time we wrote Plurk. We will take a look at Google Clouse Compiler, thanks.

colbyolson2• 17 years ago

What's up with a few of your "to's" at the end of your last sentence? :-)

Elepsis• 17 years ago

Just curious, have you guys tried reaching out to Microsoft at all to get this resolved before going public with it?

julio_the_squid• 17 years ago

Microsoft didn't seem to have a problem with going quite public with it.

socratees2• 17 years ago

This sounds horrible. Microsoft shouldn't be blamed for this entirely though. Why wouldn't the team that created this think through before?

From what I know, people inside Microsoft make sure they don't get in to any legal trouble before they make use of any code or idea that's already available.

Anyways, this episode is a blatant disrespect for IP. Copying the code is something awful. I believe this case deserves the attention of authorities at Microsoft.

jf6• 17 years ago

Legal compliance is VERY important at Microsoft, so much so that we aren't supposed to even read Open Source source code.

eob2• 17 years ago

Amix,

I feel for you, man. This is really awful to wake up and see.

China has totally different laws though -- do you know if this kind of copying is legal there? I have a number of friends who have told me that the whole web startup scene in Beijing is totally different than the US because the rules of the market are completely different over there (rampant copying, theft, DDOS attacks among competitors, etc). One example of this I've heard is that game developers have to give away their games for free and then rely on in-game purchases to make money, because there's no chance of actually selling software upfront.

What are your thoughts?

Best of luck fighting this -- hopefully this will just be a funny war story in a few months time.

amix3• 17 years ago

I can't disclose much on the legal aspects, since I might say something stupid. A few months from now I hope the war story will be similar to David vs. Goliath, because that is our current situation - i.e. we are fighting vs. a billion dollar mega corp that has stolen most of our ideas and code and uses their power to come in a market where we are banned [China].

qeorge• 17 years ago

They can't steal what's really valuable about Plurk:

  1) Your loyal community
  2) The team that created this site in the first place

All they got was a snapshot of what you were doing yesterday.

stanleydrew2• 17 years ago

Indeed. See the related Steve Blank post and surrounding discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=981167. This is a little different since Microsoft is copying a well-known and already successful product, but the idea still applies.

gcb2• 17 years ago

is 1 valid in China already?

access_denied• 17 years ago

By any means: use the visibility you gain from this for your PR/advertising game! Now is the time for a smart play, get the public behind you (in terms of: target audience goes Plurk 'cause it's cool). Granted, this is not 'the solution but an opportunity you can manage to get a win out of this. (Remember, PG wrote the $$ he spent on PR was worth it.)

messel• 17 years ago

They'll pay handsomely for the disservice. It's a gold mine and positive press for Plurk. Don't feel too bad, you just won the Internet.

credo• 17 years ago

Microsoft should be held accountable for this, but assuming the blog is correct, I'm assuming that the deliberate ripoff (described on plurk's blog) wasn't a high-level Redmond decision.It was probably a decision taken at the junior management levelin Microsoft, China.

It will be interesting to see Microsoft's response, but suspending the MSN club service is probably the best immediate response, if plurk's blog is correct.

davepeck• 17 years ago

Precisely. This was a junior dev somewhere far away from Redmond making a terrible mistake. It's about to get thrown up to the highest level, and I can pretty much guarantee you that MSFT takes the site down.

dangrossman2• 17 years ago

It wasn't even that. It was a third party contractor hired by the Chinese company Microsoft partnered with to create "MSN China". So this was beyond just a hierarchical separation within the company, it was several degrees separated from the company itself. Only through contract is this even owned by Microsoft.

ideamonk• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._MikeRoweSoft

Plurk should sue and win. If M$ could have had issues over phonetically rhyming domain name and take the kid to court, why not plurk taking microsoft into court for something serious. You just can't excuse yourself by saying someone in my company's xyz office is responsible.

nsoonhui• 17 years ago

The problem is that the case might have to be heard in China, whose judiciary system is not something that I can trust.

barredo2• 17 years ago

Offtopic: Is really Plurk #1 microblogging service in Asia?

barredo2• 17 years ago

Didn't remember it was greatfirewalled in China: http://blog.plurk.com/2009/04/27/china-bans-plurk/

ratsbane2• 17 years ago

This reminds me of the Kayak/Bing Travel issue from July and similar incidents before that. It's easy enough to blame some contractors at a distant outpost but the frequency with which these things happen around Microsoft certainly leads to the conclusion that they are bad actors and poor citizens.

likpok• 17 years ago

Kayak/Bing Travel wasn't Microsoft, IIRC. They acquired another company who copied the look and feel of Kayak.

sachinag• 17 years ago

They acquired Farecast.

ratsbane2• 17 years ago

Farecast had a very different UI when MS bought them. The transition to the copy of the Kayak UI happened well after Kayak rolled theirs out and also well after MS bought Farecast.

The scenario/timeline you outline above is reasonable enough to assume - as is the idea that, as Farecast came out before Kayak, that Kayak was actually copying Farecast. What actually happened though is different. Farecast had a completely different model - they were banking on their ability to forecast whether or not you were likely to get a cheaper fare for the same route if you waited. Their original UI was based around that idea and it didn't go over incredibly well. After the Microsoft purchase and before the launch of Bing Travel they did a major redesign and got rid of most of the old Farecast. The old Farecast price predictor idea is reduced to one line at the top of the flights list on the page center.

I wrote about this and posted to HN shortly after Bing Travel went live and because of that I've been introduced to more information about the whole situation than I had when I originally brought it up. In a nutshell, the Microsoft team blatantly copied Kayak's UI and has pretty much gotten away with it.

kogir• 17 years ago

I'm speculating, but I'd guess this was the fault of poor management of an external contractor or partner. We don't know for sure who actually developed the code, just who's hosting it. It's not like similar things haven't happened before:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/11/microsoft-pull...

I'd personally never heard of Plurk until now, and wouldn't have known myself that a contractor had ripped it off had I commissioned the work.

It's still an egregious violation, but I doubt this will even need to go to trial. Microsoft stands to gain little from alienating startups in this manner. If it comes to it, I'm sure aggressively shaming them publicly will be far cheaper than suing and eventually as effective.

moeffju• 17 years ago

The JS code was obviously unpacked/prettified. All internal vars have shortnames like B, C, D, etc. Everything that interacts with the outside has long names, as in the minified plurk code.

Astonishing.

jot• 17 years ago

MS seem to be doing this quite a bit. Remember Bing copying Kayak back in June: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=674123

johnrob• 17 years ago

Interesting how javascript is turning source code theft into copyright infringement (a civil matter), when traditionally it would be trade secret theft (a criminal matter).

falsestprophet2• 17 years ago

View > Page Source does not a trade secret make

falsestprophet2• 17 years ago

In general, there are three factors that characterize a trade secret:

    * is not generally known to the public;
    * confers some sort of economic benefit on its holder
    (where this benefit must derive specifically from its not
    being generally known, not just from the value of the 
    information itself);
    * is the subject of reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy.

Javascript code fails all three tests

voyagerfan5761• 17 years ago

I can't say I'm surprised that Microsoft has stolen yet another idea, but I am astonished that they didn't go to more effort to obfuscate that fact. I'm publicizing this through my networks. More people need to know that the 's' in 'Microsoft' is really a '$'.

kyro• 17 years ago

I've always found the use of $ when referring to Microsoft to be really really childish, and weird when I see people here, who are presumably mature adults, doing the same.

jonmc122• 17 years ago

Not condoning MS, but does anyone else find it ironic that a chinese company is accusing MS of piracy?

bigbaray• 17 years ago

I find it very ironic!! I feel bad for these guys but before you get my full sorrow, Mow your grass!!

potatolicious3• 17 years ago

Not condoning the crime, but does anyone else find it ironic that a black guy is accusing someone of robbery?

Yes, because ignorant stereotyping is fun! Remember kids, it's not racism if it's not targeted at a member of the List Of Races We Should Be Sensitive About!

jonmc122• 17 years ago

uhh.. its not stereotyping - comment was directed at a government policy that has fostered piracy at all levels in China. The comment is a characterization of policy, not a characterization of people.

alttab• 17 years ago

Your comment is both funny, and correct! At least, I think so.

But I seem to understand that here, that type of humor seems to be discredited even if its insightful (especially if its not).

ericd• 17 years ago

a) It appears to be inaccurate based on a number of comments here saying that Plurk is Canadian.

b) The comment is not adding anything to the conversation, it's just snarky. HN values insights, not snark.

There are plenty of places on the internet for trading snark, this isn't intended to be one of them.

thelibrarian• 17 years ago

Plurk is Canadian, not Chinese.

joblessjunkie• 17 years ago

Chinese software piracy: if you can't beat it, join it.

extofer• 17 years ago

why doesn't this surprise me

_pius• 17 years ago

Stunning.

mattiss• 17 years ago

This is incredible. Have there been any other documented cases where a MSFT,GOOG,etc. has been caught stealing code red handed?

joubert• 17 years ago

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10415298-56.html?tag=newsE...

pyre• 17 years ago

Plurk's blog page doesn't like being viewed at 1024x768 in Chromium... the left sidebar cut-off by the left side of my screen and the top-right Plurk logo is cut-off by the blog post.

prawn• 17 years ago

No surprises here - knew as soon as I saw the story that it was going to be something created by a contracted third-party and that Microsoft/MSN would not have recognised it as a rip-off.

"According to a source familiar with the situation, the Juku application was created for MSN China, which is a joint venture between Microsoft and a Chinese company. However, the source says the application was not designed by Microsoft or the joint venture, but rather by a third-party Chinese vendor hired for the task."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10415298-56.html

awa• 17 years ago

They have taken down the site and are investigating the incident. The blame apparently lies with a third party vendor contracted for the job. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10415483-56.html

vitobcn• 17 years ago

At this point, Microsoft issued a press release and took the site down while investigating. PR: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-14Sta...

asmosoinio• 17 years ago

Wov, that was fast! This seems like a positive thing for Plurk, let's see how it plays out in the end.

jarsj• 17 years ago

That's nice. MSFT should take action against the vendor and come clean out of this.

jrnkntl• 17 years ago

Basically they just subcontracted the whole MSN Juku thing and nobody at MS ever had a real look into it or didn't know about Plurk?

ironfrost• 17 years ago

Plurk is blocked in China, so it's not so surprising that staff at MSN China don't recognise its UI.

alecthomas• 17 years ago

And an update: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-15sta...

est• 17 years ago

1. Plurk is blocked in China

3. MSN.cn outsourced the microblogging to an independent vendor.

geedee77• 17 years ago

Whilst this really does suck, I think it's valid to mention here that Microsoft have now said that the coding was 'done' by a 3rd party developer so all the comments that MS have done this are no longer valid.

Having said that though, someones head should roll at MS for not checking this out properly before go-live and I'm pretty certain MS themselves are ultra embarrassed and will try to solve this as soon as possible.

I hope that the Plurk guys get something worthwhile out of this ... maybe even more than the copious amounts of free advertising they're currently seeing.

Microsoft rips off Plurk

Related Stories