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Capturing infringers in the 21st century

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

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

Full post as published by IPBiz on July 27, 2009 (boomark / email).