As part of China’s Green Dam Youth Escort initiative, all computers in the country will be required to have the software installed, so as to prevent youths from viewing material the government deems inappropriate. But it seems now that the code behind Green Dam is not actually a Chinese innovation. American software company Solid Oak claims that portions of the code it used in building its CyberSitter internet monitoring software were stolen in the making of Green Dam. The supposed developer of the Green Dam, Jinhui Computer System Engineering Inc, denies this in whole, though reports from the University of Michigan have confirmed Solid Oak’s findings.
This is a double-edged sword for US companies as whatever happens between Solid Oak and the Chinese will set a precedent for how these dealings are handled in the future. Solid Oak wants all OEMs to put shipments of computers with their code on hold until the issue is resolved. The company will file a suit with the FBI’s Computer Crime Task Force. While Solid Oak isn’t a big name, it seems that it should be just as important to let the Chinese know they can’t steal from them, just as OEMs would certainly withold shipments of computers to China if their government ordered millions of pirated copies of Windows.
But not shipping the computers would be to lose potentially billions of dollars in revenue. There is definitely an OEM somewhere in the world which would jump at the chance to fill a giant order for China, even if that means shipping machines with stolen code. So does Dell freeze the orders and risk having the American economy lose lots of money, or does it go ahead and build some computers?
