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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Suit Says 2 Chinese Firms Stole Web-Blocking Code




BEIJING — A software company in California has sued two Chinese technology firms, charging that they stole its computer code to make an Internet-monitoring program that China’s government sought to install on every computer in the country last year before backing down.
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Associated Press

Seven computer makers are accused of helping the government spread a program used to block selected sites on the Internet.

The lawsuit by Cybersitter also names as defendants seven computer makers, including Sony, Lenovo and Acer, accusing them of willingly joining a Chinese government plan to spread the software, known as Green Dam Youth Escort, throughout the country. The Chinese government was also named in the suit.

Cybersitter said the two Chinese software companies had pirated 3,000 lines of its code to create Green Dam, which was ostensibly designed to block Web sites that featured pornography and violent content.

But critics and computer experts said the Chinese version was tailored to enable Chinese government censors to block some political and religious speeches and other content, like references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, that the government deemed unsuitable.

Cybersitter’s suit, filed Tuesday in the Federal District Court in Los Angeles, claims that the pirated lines of code “include the heart of Cybersitter software: its proprietary content filters” that tell a computer to block sites containing banned keywords.

The chief defendants, Zhengzhou Jinhui Computer System Engineering and Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy, developed and marketed the software. They could not be reached for comment.

Each of the computer makers complied with a Chinese government requirement to install Green Dam on new computers, or to include a CD containing the program with each new computer. The lawsuit claims that the computer makers eventually found out that the software included pirated code, but continued to comply with the government directive.

The government originally sought to require that Green Dam be installed on every new computer sold in China. But authorities backed down last summer after an outcry from computer users.

“They were conspiring to distribute an illegal program to millions of users. They continued to distribute even after everyone knew they were stolen programs,” Gregory Fayer, a lawyer for Cybersitter, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “There were reports just last week that some of the defendants continue to distribute in China.”

The theft by the firms was so shoddily executed, Mr. Fayer said, that some of the software code directs users to the Cybersitter Web site.

The suit seeks more than $2.25 billion in damages, a figure attained by multiplying the number of Chinese computers using Green Dam by the price of the Cybersitter software.

David Barboza in Shanghai contributed reporting.