The RoLLing cOde

There were two famous funny abbr about Chinese internet industry:
ICP = Internet Copy Paste.
C2C = Copy to China.

Today, we seems to get a new one: TCP = Tencent Copied Perfectly.

Mu Rongjun, a staff at MeiTuan, complained on his twitter about their website being copied pixel-by-pixel by Tencent.

Following images shows how identical their pages are in both texts and screen shots.

Help page about “how to avoid false spam alert in GMail” on meituan.com:

Help page about “how to avoid false spam alert in GMail” on tuan.qq.com:

By take a careful stare to the fonts in the two screen shots, you can see the email address in the second shot, which is from Tencent, is definitely handcrafted by image editing not a real screen shot.

The fun part here is: MeiTuan is one of the earliest clones of groupon in China; Tencent, the 3rd largest internet company in the world(by mkt cap), joins the clone war of groupon recently; so it turns out Tencent has just done a clone of clone.

Since China is a Harmonious Society and MeiTuan is just a small startup, I think this story will just end up nowhere. On the other hand, because most people in this society are all comfortable with downloading and consuming digital content for free, there might not be any powerful moral motivation to accuse others for cloning and pirating.