Company's response

 

There are several reasons that lead Tencent made unethical decisions. Firstly, social issue. As you may recall, in my previous blog, I mentioned in the past few decades, the most of digital content can be downloaded for free, which means in China, the people’s conscious of protect intellectual property rights is relatively weak, compare to western countries. According to U.S Patent Statistic chart calendar in 2010, the total utility patent applications are around 240 thousands (Chart, 2020), while in China, it is only around 80 thousands (Unknown, 2020), by compare the numbers above, we can see the numbers in China is only one third of the numbers in US. Above all we can see the conscious of people in china protected their intellectual property right is very weak.

We know from previous blog that Tencent has bullying other small companies and stolen their ideas. For example, back to 2004, QQ game stolen the platform design from its competitor Lianzhong World platform, which designed in 2003 (UnKnown, n.d.). However, Tencent never saying anything about the ethical situation or make any statement of why they did unethical action.

From above we can see the design of the game platform is very similar

This picture is credit to: https://www.programmersought.com/article/47122460227/

There are some report claimed that such things happened is not due to higher level or management fault, however, it was because the designer or the developer are lack of the conscious of protecting other’s intellectual property right, in other word, they have not been educated or trained with such information (Cook, 2019). Since the lack of law’s knowledge is a society issue, therefore we cannot only blame Tencent for plagiarizing, but also need to educate the society to do a better job in educate and inform employee the knowledge of law. Recently, Tencent had established Tencent Academy, which Through the design of career development channels and the corresponding perfect law training system, Tencent strive to become the growth consultant of Tencent employees and the development partner of the business team, and cultivate talents for Tencent and society's present and future(Tencent, 2020).

I agree that Tencent is trying to come up with the best solution for itself and this whole society, since people with its professional skills education are not hard to find, but people equipped with knowledge on both laws and professional skills is barely to find, Tencent academy can help society with training more ethical employees.

References

Chart, U. P. (2020). U.S. Patent Statistics Chart. Retrieved from U.S. PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE: https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm

Cook, S. (2019, March 28). Worried about Huawei? Take a closer look at Tencent. Retrieved from The Japan times: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/03/28/commentary/world-commentary/worried-huawei-take-closer-look-tencent/

Tencent. (2020). Tencent Academy. Retrieved from Tencent: https://www.tencent.com/zh-cn/employees.html

Unknown. (2020, March). Statistic Country Profiles. Retrieved from WIPO: https://www.wipo.int/ipstats/en/statistics/country_profile/profile.jsp?code=CN

UnKnown. (n.d.). The death Tencent plagiarism company which users a message:? No explosion models do not plagiarism Tencent! Retrieved from ProgrammerSought: https://www.programmersought.com/article/47122460227/