Microsoft China rips off Plurk source code, yawnnnnn

Tom Warren, over at Neowin, just shot me a note about a post he just wrote up. The short story is Microsoft China took a bunch of source code from a popular Asian site called Plurk. While this is interesting, given the recent GPL fiasco, I’m going to say what everyone else is already thinking: Do we expect anything less from the Chinese? While I understand this may sound like a gross over-generalization of who’s at fault, and may even offend some readers, let me rationalize my thinking by providing IIPA’s copyright piracy figures from 2007 and 2008. China ranked in as #1 in terms of estimated losses due to copyright piracy, more specifically over 3 billion US dollars. A commenter on Neowin said it perfectly:

If this was in the US (or just about anywhere else in the world) I'd think it was a big issue, but it's China. Do they even have intellectual property laws?

(Jonathan Marston)

[removed unnecessary jab, may be construed in ways I don’t intend]