I definitely see what you're saying and still remember 37signals' outraged people are outraged ordeal. But...look at the Twitvid.com before and after shots, they changed to look like Twitvid.io.
I don't know if Twitvid.io has a case or not, but Twitvid.com is treading in the bush league.
That's usual competition :/ Company A does something, company B copies. Just a fact of life :/
The websites are different enough to avoid confusion IMHO, and the .com holds the .com name so has a fair advantage. To the unaware, they'd likely consider .io to be the ripoff, as users trust .com
It's just a raging asshole move online. If you were talking about cars, it might be okay for GM to copy something by Toyota, feature for feature -- because they'd still have to invest a billion dollars or so in reverse-engineering, designing, manufacturing, distributing, and advertising it.
But if you can just apple-C, apple-V your way into stealing someone else's brand value, it's a sleazy trick that adds no value. At best, this means that the next time someone has an idea like this, they'll be more likely to go after the dot-com -- and if they can't afford the dot-com, they may move on to their second-best idea instead.
If they copied HTML code, or graphics, then sure. But if they looked at the site and incorporated similar elements and wording, which seems to be what happened, I'd say "meh - it happens".
IMHO not getting the .com is a really bad idea. The best case scenario is you start paying adwords a ton of money to get the traffic. Worst case is probably what happened here.
"That's usual competition ... Just a fact of life"
Not really. Some of us choose to operate ethically, helping others in our business communities and the public at large. There are plenty of things you can do without screwing over another small business.
And in a funny twist, neither twitvid.com or twitvid.io are showing in position #1. If people really want to help out, they should link to twitvid.io with the anchor text twitvid.
I don't know if Twitvid.io has a case or not, but Twitvid.com is treading in the bush league.