Chinese Government accused of cyberpiracy
.png)
CYBERsitter, LLC which does business as Solid Oak Software, has filed suit in the US District Court, Central District of California against the Chinese government and two Chinese companies (among others) for software piracy in the theft of approximately 3,000 lines of code from Solid Oak’s internet content filtering program. This software called CYBERsitter, was designed to help parents protect their children from viewing inappropriate pornographic and violent content on the Web. CYBERsitter , the first commercially available Internet content filter, has been published for over 14 years and has over 2.4 million active CYBERsitter users worldwide, including 20 thousands of businesses, individuals, and schools in China.
The law suit alleges that Chinese software developers, in collaboration with the Chinese government, purported to design an Internet content filtering program known as Green Dam Youth Escort. Like CYBERsitter, the Green Dam program was allegedly designed to block pornographic and violent Internet content from children. Unlike CYBERsitter, however, the Green Dam program was found to contain filters to block political and religious content expressing views that differed from those of the Chinese government.
Solid Oak alleges that a group of independent researchers at the University of Michigan confirmed that the Green Dam developers had copied verbatim nearly 3,000 lines of code from the CYBERsitter program and incorporated it into the Green Dam program.
The stolen materials include the heart of the CYBERsitter software: its proprietary content filters. The Chinese government has issued Green Dam usage figures reporting — as of early June 2009 — that over 153 million computers marketed for home use had been sold with the Green Dam program, that the Green Dam program had been installed on more than half a million computers in Chinese schools and that Green Dam had been downloaded by users from the Internet an additional 3.27 million times.
The plaintiff seeks over $ 2 Billion Dollars in damages under a variety of theories including misappropriation of trade secrets, unfair competition and copyright infringement.
The court case will impose significant challenges for Solid Oak including defenses of personal jurisdiction and sovereign immunity and this litigation will take years to unfold.
Diplomacy has been unable to stop, or even thwart, the wholesale violation of US intellectual property rights in China. It will be interesting to see if civil litigation and the risk enormous money damages will provide the needed threats and sanctions to bring a stop to this piracy.
At the end of the day, i.e. years from now, this case will eventually settle - Just the cost of doing business with the world’s most populous economy.
