The loudest blockchain plagiarism scandals

Plagiarism exists in any sphere where there is innovation. Last year saw thousands of blockchain startups, so the scandals concerning plagiarism became an everyday thing. Even the successful projects are exposed to the charges of plagiarism.

I will begin with one of the latest and loudest scandals.

Telegram

The representatives of an Estonian company “Cryptocean” accused the founder of Telegram of plagiarism and even brought an action. The Estonian startup declared that Telegram had used their blockchain technology of user identification without permission. The Telegram Passport service, which Pavel Durov presented as his own development, completely copied the functionality, interface and the work principle of the application developed by Cryptocean, the creation of which cost 800 thousand euro.

How this hassle will end is not yet clear. At the end of July, 2018, Telegram officially announced the launch of its user identification service.

TRON

At the beginning of 2018, a similar scandal flared up, this time concerning the project “TRON”. Experts found borrowings from the White Papers of IPFSbot and Filecoin in the project’s White Paper. The representatives of TRON tried to evade scandal by declaring that, initially, the White Paper had been written in Chinese and had later been translated into other languages by volunteers, so this translation was incorrect. The scandal did not result in anything, but it did not stop the rapid falling of the currency’s value, which followed a few months later.

Dadi

Another scandal, connected with the Dadi project . The team, which is engaged in the development of a decentralised cloud service, simply copied certain pieces from the White Paper of SONM, launched half a year earlier. Dadi owned up to the mistake and has removed the copied page.

However, it is not only developments and technical documentation that get plagiarized. Projects also borrow marketing strategies from each other.

Pink Taxi

For example, in May, 2018 the project of a women’s taxi service on blockchain, Pink Taxi, was criticized for plagiarizing the marketing materials of A2B Taxi Token. It all began when the influencer, John McAfee, supporting Pink Taxi, jokingly bragged on his Twitter page of the fee he had received for the advancement of this project.

“My tweets are now $500,000 per tweet. If clients want me to reply to comments, then it is $100,000 per reply. But what is your point? Obviously, people feel that it is worth it. Statistically, each tweet averages over $3 million in revenue for my clients — a 600 % return”, — was his answer to a question by a user.

Just 40 minutes after that, A2B Taxi Token informed that Pink Taxi had borrowed their design, site contents and also parts of the White Paper.

After the end of the ICO, Pink Taxi confessed borrowing the marketing materials and apologised for their use.

Apple

Plagiarism scandals have also impacted the corporation “Apple”. In June, 2018, a blockchain startup Shift accused the company of stealing their logo. Allegedly, the symbol of a new application Apple Shortcuts was the same as their logo. The representatives of Shift declared, that it was even flattering that Apple had used their design, but nevertheless demanded indemnification to the tune of 200 000 dollars for using their intellectual property.

There are tens of times more examples of borrowing in this sphere. Even if such large projects as TRON, Apple or Telegram are suspected of plagiarism, one can imagine the amount of plagiarism in smaller projects which do not receive wide public attention.

Follow FairWin:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FairwinGambling

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fairwin.gambling/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fairwin_team/

Chat with us:

Discord: https://discord.gg/Hbardp2

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/fair-win

Telegram: https://t.me/fair_win