Copyright claims Plurk off Microsoft’s “Twitter rival”
A little-heralded microblogging site backed by Microsoft has been closed after complaints that it stole code from another site. Juku had been launched by the Chinese outlet of MSN.
The site was based around users posting messages of up to 140 characters, which may sound a little familiar to anyone who has come across Twitter. Of course, that’s not necessarily a blatant rip-off as the character limit for Twitter isn’t an arbitrary figure: it’s the maximum number of characters which can be sent in a single SMS text message, making it a logical number to use for any microblogging site.
However, management at Chinese firm Plurk, which is often referred to as the most popular microblogging site in Asia, felt Juku was too close to comfort. Writing on the company’s own blog yesterday, the firm noted that Juku’s “design and UI is by and large an EXACT copy of Plurk’s innovative left-right timeline scrolling navigation system.”
Of course, layout similarities aren’t always enough to be classed as a violation: witness complaints that elements of Microsoft’s Bing site were uncomfortably familiar to a travel company.
Plurk, though, says the similarities go beyond that. It’s published three examples of virtually identical sections of code beyond the two sites, and claims that 80 percent of Juku’s coding is lifted directly from Plurk.
According to Plurk the copying is so blatant that some people assumed the two sides had done a deal to help Plurk get back into the Chinese market, where it’s currently banned.
Microsoft has yet to comment on the validity of the allegations, simply saying it is investigating the issue. However, it’s already deactivated Juku.
If the allegations are true, there’s certainly an irony to the situation, with Microsoft frequently lobbying for Chinese officials to do more to protect the firm from piracy within the country.
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