I must say that it can happen even‭ to the greatest world companies so this comes as no suprise to me. As it appears some Microsoft coders, hired to built social networking feature called Juku on the Chinese MSN site, didn’t try to write code; they used code from another Asian microblogging service – Plurk. MS admits it:
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‭On Monday, December 14, questions arose over a beta application called Juku developed by a Chinese vendor for our MSN China joint venture. We immediately worked with our MSN China joint venture to investigate the situation.
‭The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied. This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property.

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‭As Microsoft puts it the blame is on unnamed partner but if that Plurk was mine, I would sue MS and demand… Don’t know, like zillion dollars…
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‭Source…