China presents a twitter "clone"

You may say this sort of crib is no news in a country like China where people have no understanding of intellectual property; that's right, but just stop and compare the following two pics. Upper is the real twitter and lower is its dead copy in China, komoo.cn.

They look so much alike that even those who don't know how to read Chinese could sign up into the Chinese crib site without any trouble (I could, for instance).

Actually what I was interested in was neither copyright violation nor plagiarism: I wanted to know whether this Chinese site is censored. I tried posting several URL's of English and Chinese news / video articles commonly seen in BBC, RFA, YouTube and so on, some of which may sound inconvenient for the Chinese authorities.

As a result, two of my posts were deleted by admin within 10 minutes. As I re-posted them a few minutes later, I found them NOT listed in the "public timeline" page in spite of my preference settings all public.

Now I'm continuing the test with a new account. So far I can't think of any method to make sure if those news / vids I referred to are accessible from inside China. If any reader has tried a similar experiment, please let me know how it turned out.

See also: Internet exposes plagiarism in China - The Boston Globe

Tags: twitter china copyright internet censorship