Coral QQ vs. QQ: What’s Your Opinion?

Written by Tangos on October 3, 2007
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Coral QQIn recent days, the hottest news in China’s Internet industry should be Chen Shoufu, developer of Coral QQ, a popular QQ add-on, was arrested for infringement of QQ’s unintellectual property.

What is Coral QQ? It is a popular QQ add-on, the most attractive features of Coral QQ are blocking Tencent’s ads in QQ IM client and showing the IP address and location of your contacts. The prevalence of Coral QQ will undoubtedly influence the ads revenue in QQ client, that’s why Tencent has started to require Coral QQ to stop distribution since 2003 and sued Chen Shoufu in 2006. (Danwei has a detailed history of Coral QQ vs. QQ)

Chen Shoufu was required by court to pay about 100,000 yuan in 2006 because he was sued by Tencent. But it seems Chen continued to provide Coral QQ for download after the lawsuit. So it is very likely that Tencent filed another criminal lawsuit against him which made him arrested.

Currently, the majority of netizens’ comments for the issue sympathized Mr. Chen and condemned Tencent. Keso, the most famous tech blogger in China, also supported Coral QQ.

However, we only know very limited information on this latest lawsuit. In last year’s lawsuit, the courts made the judgment that Coral QQ’s provision of QQ in its add-on package for download and commercial usage was an infringement of QQ’s copyright, but it did not constitute unfair competition for providing add-ons of QQ.

We would like to know your opinion on this case. Is it illegal for Coral QQ to provide add-ons to block ads in QQ? What if Coral QQ did not use it for commercial interests? Or is there anything Coral QQ did is wrong? Will Tencent’s action hamper the tech innovation in China?

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