Solid Oak Software: Green Dam Not Made In China
The Chinese government has mandated that as of July 1 all PCs sold in the country have Web filtering software that blocks access to pornographic or violent sites.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company Friday received an anonymous e-mail Friday that said software code from the company’s CYBERsitter filtering program was used in Green Dam, according to The Wall Street Journal.
After comparing the programs, employees detected similar code in the Chinese software. The copycat code, according to Geek.com included a software update that makes the software compatible with an old version of CYBERsitter; blacklist of terms used by CYBERsitter; list of CYBERsitter serial numbers; and other features.
"I am 99.99 percent certain that, if not the entire program, at least a good proportion of it is stolen CyberSitter code," Milburn told The Journal.
Bryan Zhang of Jinhui's Computer System Engineering Co., denied the allegations and said, “That’s impossible,” the paper reported.
Although Milburn told the paper he is seeking an injunction to block U.S. companies from shipping computers with the Chinese software, he may not be successful according to copyright laws.
"I look at it this way, if we were shipping iPods over to China and China says, “we want all these pirated songs on the iPods when you ship them to us,” don't you think somebody would be up in arms about that?" Milburn told Reuters. "It's the same thing,” he said. “They are stealing proprietary copyrighted material from us, sending it over to the US and saying, “we want this on all the computers you send us.'"