By Elmer on December 15, 2009

China is known to be home of some great imitators from shoes and golf clubs to movies and theme parks but now it’s hard to believe that a multinational company based stationed in China has been accused of basically copying code and design of a Canadian microblogging service. Plurk has accused Microsoft China of copying the code of its service, claiming that 80 per cent of the code of Microsoft’s Juku service was allegedly copied from Plurk.

Plurk learned about the apparent code theft after receiving tips from users, and a close comparison between the two services disclosed the uncanny resemblance as posted on the Plurk blog. The similarity was pretty obvious that some users even thought if there was any partnership between Microsoft and Plurk. No, there is no such partnership, only that Microsoft may have hired someone who had prior experience of copying websites or a newbie pressed for time that the only way to save his job was to copy someone else’s ideas.

“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,” Plurk said on its company blog.

As a response, Microsoft has restricted access to its Juku service yesterday. Such plagiarization may not be uncommon in China but it is definitely unheard of from a giant company like Microsoft. Perhaps out of words and reasonable explanation as to why such theft ever occurred, Microsoft still has no answer to the allegation. If this is such a big slap to the Microsoft brand, this is indeed one of the best things to happen to Plurk, more than just flattery.

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