Louis Gray early this morning put up a post entitled: “ReTweet.com’s Rip-off Of TweetMeme Is Embarrassing and Wrong.”

In that post, he detailed the many, many ways that ReTweet has ripped off Tweetmeme – in the code they use, in the concept, in the layout, and even header titles.  If you aren’t familiar with the matter, you should read Louis’s post.  It’s succinct and summarizes the controversy fairly well (as well as taking a hardline position against a startup, something that’s uncommon for Louis).

I can’t help but wonder, though, that even though Louis alludes to it why he doesn’t see this as bit of karmic retribution for Nick Halstead and his previous business (the one that Tweetmeme grew out of – Fav.or.it).

If you’re not familiar with Fav.or.it, it was one of the bitchmemes du jour a year or so ago.  I blogged about it several times, myself.  It always lead to interesting discussions with Nick directly (and I won’t be surprised if he shows up to this discussion as well – he’s very engaged like that).

The summary judgment that I and many other bloggers came to was that despite the fact that Fav.or.it tried to position itself as an app, it was, in effect, a splog of every major blog in the tech world (as well as blogs from many other genres).

They reposted full feeds, pulling up all comments from the original sites, and advertising other Fav.or.it site content around their pulled content. If you leave a comment there at Fav.or.it, it didn’t head back to the original site, either.

Copyright Infringement: What’s Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander

It’s the main reason I don’t have any sympathy for Nick and Tweetmeme, and the main reason I haven’t been defending him in this fight.  He took content I wrote, both from my personal blog for a time as well as my postings from Mashable, reposted them in full on his blog without permission (or at least without asking).

That runs completely counter to how ethics in the blogosphere work.  Here at SiliconANGLE, if we post something that appeared first elsewhere, you can rest assured it’s because we have made an agreement with that blogger to repost at will, or have asked for permission for a specific post, or they’ve posted it voluntarily.

Even in our reposting, we’re particularly careful of what we post.  There are a number of bloggers who’ve given us carte blanche to repost whatever’s in their personal blog – but I (perhaps more than most, given my wide experience) understand what sorts of post are great for SEO value and what posts are simply good for discussion in front of the right audience.  I pick and choose carefully, as editor, which posts get syndicated here at this blog for not only the purposes of satisfying you, the readers and members, but also the original authors.

If they’ve an exceptionally good piece of linkbait or a list post that’s going to rank highly in search engines, I’ve no desire to usurp that from them by reposting it here. 

Fav.or.it made no such considerations – it was a straight rip of whatever was in the original blog’s RSS feed, and no matter how you slice it, that’s called splogging, even if it was (as Nick said many times) bringing the content to a whole new audience. For me to differentiate it or to respect it, there would have to be some sort of editorial control, be it algorithmic or human.

The World’s Smallest Violin

Obviously, two wrongs don’t make a right.  Retweet ripping off Tweetmeme doesn’t make what Fav.or.it did right, nor does Fav.or.it doing what it did make Retweet right.

It does make me completely ambivilant to Nick’s plight when he has a history of building a company off the backs of not just one small group of coders, but a whole cadre of bloggers.  Tweetmeme, by virtue of Fav.or.it, was built on the backs of copyright infringement, and if they ever decide to go after ReTweet.com for copyright infringement, I hope that I won’t be the only one holding their feet to the fire on that.