Capturing infringers in the 21st century

IPBiz notes how quickly infringers/copyists can be snagged in the 21st century:

Tweetmeme, an aggregator that finds popular content on Twitter, accused a still-unlaunched competitor called Retweet.com of copying its code verbatim. Although Retweet.com hasn’t yet opened to the public, Tweetmeme’s founder Nick Halstead discovered some code through a commenter, who left a link to his rival’s development environment on a review of the site over the weekend. Retweet.com acknowledged parts of its code were based on Tweetmeme’s scripts and agreed to remove them.

Text from the originator:

We are happy for others to learn from our endeavors and flattered by the copying but some of our more complex JavaScript was obfuscated to deter others from attempting to re-use our code. We take a dim view of trying to pass off our code especially when it is attempting to create a competitor.

[from an article by Kim-Mai Cutler]

Contrary to the world vision of Mike Masnick, this incident was not deemed one of "re-imagination" and, yes, copying was asserted.

See also


Is it real or is it Masnick?

Techdirt plays fast and loose with the patent facts about India

***On twitter

In a study of 2000 messages on Twitter, Pear Analytics, based in San Antonio, Texas, found 40.55% of them to be pointless babble. Masnick better not let these guys analyze TechDirt.