On Tuesday, Microsoft acknowledged and took responsibility for the theft of code belonging to Plurk.com, although the company also said it was the work of a Chinese vendor.

On Tuesday, Microsoft acknowledged and took responsibility for the theft of code belonging to Plurk.com, although the company also said it was the work of a Chinese vendor.

Plurk had previously with pictures and code that the company had said proved that Microsoft's Chinese microblogging site, Juku, had stolen code and design elements.

Microsoft said it would be suspending access to the "Juku beta indefinitely".

"On Monday, December 14, questions arose over a beta application called Juku developed by a Chinese vendor for our MSN China joint venture," a Microsoft spokesman said in an email. "We immediately worked with our MSN China joint venture to investigate the situation.

"The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied," the Microsoft spokesman added. "This was in clear violation of the vendor's contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft's policies respecting intellectual property."

Microsoft stated that it was a company "that respected intellectual property," and that it typically provided "strong language" in its contracts protecting the rights of others.

"We are obviously very disappointed, but we assume responsibility for this situation," Microsoft said. "We apologize to Plurk and we will be reaching out to them directly to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation.

"In the wake of this incident, Microsoft and our MSN China joint venture will be taking a look at our practices around applications code provided by third-party vendors," the company concluded.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Plurk had not responded to Microsoft's statements. It intially requested that its blog post be transalted and widely disseminated; by Tuesday, the company has posted translations in Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Bahasa, and Japanese.

In November, Microsoft acknowledged improperly incorporating open-source code into a Windows 7 download tool. The company agreed to provide the source code to the community.