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Microsoft rips off Plurk

blog.plurk.com

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Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#11

Post by padmanabhan01 »

mustpax wrote: post #7
amix wrote: post #5

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, w…

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…

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?

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#12

Post by credo »

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.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#13

Post by ajross »

padmanabhan01 wrote: post #11
mustpax wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

No. The Apple v. MS and Lotus v. Borland "look and feel" results were about the interface, not implementation. If you steal code (or other copyrighted content) from someone, no amount of obfuscation will "make it OK" legally (though I guess it might make it impossible to detect).

But simply cloning a user interface is legal, at least in US case law.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#14

Post by mikeryan »

archon810 wrote: post #6
phreanix wrote: post #2

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?

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#15

Post by dschobel »

archon810 wrote: post #4
figital wrote: post #3

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

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

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.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#16

Post by mikeryan »

amix wrote: post #5

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, w…

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.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#17

Post by volida »

amix wrote: post #5

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, w…

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.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#18

Post by ericb »

mikeryan wrote: post #16
amix wrote: post #5

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, w…

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.

You forgot 4. Buy you out.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#19

Post by luchak »

axod wrote: post #9
phreanix wrote: post #2

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?

By "their culture' do you mean China, or Microsoft? I really don't think for example Google China would do this.

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.

Re: Microsoft rips off Plurk

#20

Post by figital »

axod wrote: post #8
figital wrote: post #3

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

Read the article. They did.

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.
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