CoralQQ

» see coralqq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Turkey and China ran the same decade on different messengers. Here it was MSN on every machine from about 2002 onward, and the third-party client that fixed what Microsoft would not fix was a plugin you installed on top of it. In China the messenger was Tencent QQ, the client that fixed it was CoralQQ, and the difference in how those two stories ended is the whole grave.

珊瑚虫QQ, CoralQQ in English, was written by Chen Shoufu, a Beijing University of Technology graduate who worked at the university's computing center. It first appeared in 2001, at the start as an add-on package and later as a full installer that shipped a patched QQ of its own. It cost nothing.

Tencent went after him in civil court in December 2006 and won. That settled nothing. In August 2007 Shenzhen police arrested Chen in Beijing and seized the servers hosting the download. The site stopped answering, and on 20 March 2008 the Nanshan District People's Court in Shenzhen convicted him of copyright infringement.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the mod did ~

The feature list reads like a list of complaints. CoralQQ took out the advertising panel Tencent had built into the client. It showed the IP address of whoever was messaging you and resolved it to a city, which turned a chat window into something closer to caller ID. There was a boss key and a filter for the system messages Tencent pushed at users. Skinning for the chat window, memory cleanup, a switch that turned on the display features Tencent reserved for paying VIP members. Every item there is a thing users wanted and a vendor had a reason to refuse.

~ the two courts ~

The civil case came first. In December 2006 Tencent sued in the Haidian District court in Beijing over the modification of its client, and Chen was ordered to pay 100,000 yuan. The judgment changed nothing on the ground. The installer kept circulating and the patched client stayed on machines.

The criminal case was a different weight of thing. Shenzhen, where Tencent is headquartered, prosecuted Chen for copyright infringement, and in March 2008 the Nanshan District court sentenced him to three years in prison with a fine of 1.18 million yuan. He appealed. In August 2008 the appeal court kept the three years and restructured the money into 1.17 million yuan confiscated plus a 1.2 million yuan fine, around 2.37 million yuan altogether.

~ after the sentence ~

Tencent won completely, and the category never came back in the same shape. Third-party QQ clients kept appearing for years afterward, but they were careful ones. Tencent eventually sold an ad-free tier of its own, and the IP display never became an official feature.

The domain answers today. It serves a Chinese site called 狠狠干影视 advertising free streaming of current films and television, which means the address of a man jailed for copyright infringement now points at a video giveaway. Nobody planned the joke. Squatters buy expired domains for the inbound links, and the links pointing at CoralQQ were still worth something nineteen years after the arrest.

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