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.
Was that really the prime motivator in joining MS? How do you mean "be a voice for startups"? Cool.
People usually cite this reasoning for joining the government -- an organization whose mandate is toward the greater good of its people, but I've never heard it applied toward a corporate entity, whose mandate is solely profit.
Would you mind posting a bit more about your motivations and thinking? I would really like to hear.
So Microsoft VPs want to find out why people do not accept their products. Could be a good thing, if they would then insist on improvement of the products guided by the data that the "dev evangelist" provides. You, though, make it sound like it's a bad thing. Care to explain?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Look and feel is really hard to pin down legally. It's similar to the fashion industry. You just can't copyright a design -- and that is why there are so many knockoffs.
But that's just how it is in the design industry -- new designs come out quickly, so it's usually not worth the effort to fight knockoffs.
You just can't copyright a design -- and that is why there are so many knockoffs.
That's because design is an area covered by trademark, not copyright. You can trademark a design if it's distinctive or innovative enough, at least in the U.S., and have protection from imitation. You don't even have to register a trademark to establish rights, you can declare your rights simply by using the (TM) symbol, although you do have to register in order to defend the rights in federal court or claim international protection.
From a whois check on their domain name, however, Plurk Inc. appears to be Canadian. Anyone have details on the what differences there are in the Canadian trademark system?
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.
>But simply cloning a user interface is legal, at least in US case law.
Can you give us citation that it is legal, or are making your claim based on the above lawsuits?
Having a look and feel that is "similar" but "not the same" is open to debate, but having 90% of the interface ripped off, pixel by pixel can't be just "ok". We don't know that because something so dumb didn't happen before in the highest level.
The Lotus v. Borland decision was, in fact, about an interface that was keystroke-for-keystroke identical between the two applications. Again, there's a very clear case here for copyright infringement of the code. Mixing that with a much less clear case based on the status of the "interface" is just not a good idea.
Lotus v. Borland was not the same. As a matter of fact it was a very stupid lawsuit and rightfully dismissed.
>None of the source code or machine code that generated the menus was copied, but the names of the commands and the organization of those commands into a hierarchy were virtually identical.
In this case MS not only copied the interface of plurk, but from the look of it they also stole the code. Such a blatant copyright infringement has never happened before at this level to the best of my knowledge.
Your claim that it is "legal to copy UI in US law", based on the above example, is false.
Copying a menu, its command name and hierarchy is not the same as copying an interface. A menu is only small sub-set of user interface.
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.
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].
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.
Yes, but just because everyone at the company didn't decide to do this in unison, doesn't mean that the "company" isn't 100% completely responsible for it.
If the "VP level" at MS doesn't have enough control to prevent an entire department in China from ripping off a popular site and going live with it... then damn. I see no difference between that and Ballmer himself copying and pasting the code.
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.
Yeah I know. And if they decide to make use of any 3rd party application or code internally, they make sure they don't unintentionally mess up with legal requirements of the software. This certainly is an isolated case which needs serious investigation.
And yet not uncommon. We (Django) had a rather frustrating mailing-list exchange with IBM folks who wanted to build a DB2 driver for Django; they claimed their corporate policies wouldn't allow them to look at the existing Django DB backends, or anything BSD-licensed, to gather information on the API.
Eventually they wrote an adapter; I don't have any idea how they got the API spec, since they swore up and down they couldn't look at existing code.
(and, to be honest, the initial released version of their DB2 adapter showed some serious issues which may be related to not understanding how the code was supposed to work)
I don't think it's an extreme approach. It would otherwise be nearly impossible to prove that Microsoft's code is not derived from GPL'd works. At least without revealing their code.
I disagree; "you shouldn't read Open Source code" doesn't fix anything much because it's impossible to find out if developers are sticking to it or not (so it doesn't decrease the burden of proof). It's just as impossible to prove that MS work doesn't include GPL code with or without the rule :)
A better (more effective) one is, surely, dont reuse restricted code.... :)
Microsoft actually tries to enforce the policy of "you shouldn't read Open Source code". For example, they block access to Sourceforge from the Microsoft campus.
That is totally false. There are no restrictions of any kind on the Microsoft network in general (apart from your standard virus/malware/firewall type stuff).
I've synced code for my projects from sourceforge/google code/github often.
I realise the policy is probably not as originally worded here: but I was taking it somewhat literally to point out the fallacy of it.
At some point we have to trust devs to do their own work. This should show that no amount of policy can stop people ripping off work! Whatever the intention.
Reading code is always good; there is usually a net gain as long as it is ethical (i.e. not copied)
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.
Just guessing: he's got a layout where alt_gr+t produces a small tau and is typing quite quickly hitting space+alt_gr by accident. I know that's the reason some of my k-s at the beginning of a word are ĸ-s. (you can just miss it while reading later)
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.)
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.