Microsoft said today that its vendor in China copied code from Taiwanese company Plurk, and it shut down the site on MSN China.

"This vendor clearly violated that contract and we’re frustrated but we do assume the responsibility for this situation," said Mark Murray, Microsoft spokesman. "We’re being very transparent about what happened. We are apologizing publicly to Plurk for the situation. We’ve suspended this feature indefinitely."

Microsoft posted a statement here today.

Plurk, a microblogging site that operates in Taiwan, the U.S. and Canada, accused Microsoft of copying its code in a company blog posting Monday and called on its users to share the news with the world. Plurk said MSN China's new feature Juku looked much like Plurk's own site. Here is our story about it from Monday.

The Juku feature, which became available in beta form in November, was designed for MSN China users to share information with friends and to play online games. Microsoft China in Shanghai had contracted with a vendor to develop the feature, and the vendor said one of its developers had copied the code, either from Plurk or another site that had copied the code.

"Whenever we contract with vendors to develop code, it’s a standard process that they have to warrant the code they are providing to us does not infringe on anyone else’s intellectual property," Murray said, and this was a violation of the contract.

Murray says the service was suspended late Monday and a message was posted on the MSN China site saying that the service is undergoing an audit.

Plurk has not updated its blog since Microsoft posted its statemen, and a spokesman in New Zealand was not immediately available for comment. The current time in New Zealand is about 9 a.m.

Microsoft first learned about the accusations through news stories, Murray said. "We’re not aware of any attempts to contact us" before Plurk posted the blog item. Murray said Microsoft has yet to reach anyone at Plurk via e-mail or phone since Monday.

Update 3:02 p.m.: Monday it was Microsoft China that was asleep and unable to respond. Today Plurk's asleep.

A public relations representative for Plurk says they are waiting for the Taiwan office to wake up so they can respond to Microsoft's site shuttering and statement today.The current time in Taiwan is 7 a.m.

"Given most of our employees are in Taiwan and we’re still waiting for them to wake up," said Dave Thompson for Plurk, who is based in New Zealand. "Maybe we'll engage in conversations with Microsoft directly and see where we can go from there."

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