Facebook Sues German Company, Claims Ripoff

azuredrake writes "Facebook, the largest social networking site in the US, has sued German social networking site studiVZ on the grounds that studiVZ has copied the look and feel of Facebook in order to piggyback off their success. According to the article, 'The German company sued by Facebook for running a "knockoff" of the social networking Web site said on Sunday it asked a German court to declare that Facebook's claims are without merit.' However, a simple glance at the two sites' homepages seems to tell a different story — studiVZ copies many things from Facebook, from their button layout down to the font they're using."

Comments

Their initial name: Fakebook

[the grace of R'hllor]

Their first version of the site was called Fakebook. Seems pretty obvious.

Re:Their initial name: Fakebook

[ratbag]

and from that page:

The site's most common criticism is its astounding similarity to Facebook and Dariani admits that it is based on it. Except from some additional features such as seeing who most recently visited one's profile, the differences are in name only to be strictly German. Facebook's "poke" has been named "gruscheln" for example Some of the error messages reveal that one of the folders on the site is called "Fakebook", indicating that the developers were well aware of the similarities.

Re:Their initial name: Fakebook

[kaos07]

It wasn't called "Fakebook". That was the name of a sub-folder somewhere in the directory where error messages came from. Not sure how it's any different to say an Orkut developer poking (Mind the bad pun) a bit of fun at Myspace by labelling a folder "Cryspace".

Re:Their initial name: Fakebook

[mischi_amnesiac]

Facebook can not be translated into german as Studendenverzeichnis. It literally means Gesichtsbuch and as I understand it, it is a play on the english word yearbook. So it's a neologism and has nothing to do with the german word Studentenverzeichnis.

Re:Their initial name: Fakebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a few clicks confirms that it lets users register without requiring script be enabled. In other words, if I got invites from studiVZ I could register whereas if I got invites from Facebook I could not (Well I could fire up a VM but I'd probably reverse engineer the javascript). That isn't to say that I would ever register for either but at least it's technically possible for me to do so on studiVZ without compromising my security.

Re:Their initial name: Fakebook

[Jesus_666]

I have never heard the word "Gesichtsbuch" (indeed a neologism in German) and it would certainly not be translated into "Studentenverzeichnis" (not a neologism). A Verzeichnis is a directory, something you can search through to get current information on something. A yearbook serves a different purpose and wouldn't be called a Verzeichnis. The proper term here would indeed be Jahrbuch.

IAAGUS (I Am A German University Student).


Oh, and don't forget that it's difficult to claim rights to generic terms. The site is called "StudiVZ" because "Studentenverzeichnis" is generic enough to be difficult to defend. So even if "Facebook" translated into "Studentenverzeichnis" Facebook would have a hard time claiming that their name was ripped off because a) it's a generic term used by lots of people (a quick google shows the sites FriendScout24, CampusNet.de, StudentenNet.de, pruefungsgeil.de, LINKSILO.DE and LinkARENA.com all using the term - and that's just the first page) and b) the site's name is different; even though it's a contraction of the term it is quite different.

I know it's unrelated...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the United States, one cannot copyright a game's metrics. I can go out and make a knock-off "monopoly game" by the exact same rules as "Monopoly", as long as I'm not taking any of their copyrighted properties. This has been tested several times in the courts.

In the same regard, I would hope that I could make a complete knock-off of a website (no matter how novel the idea seems) provided that I do not infringe on any copyrights or patents held by the owner.

Copying from copycats

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly, there is a notion here in Germany that wer-kennt-wen, another social network, "ripped off StudiVZ's idea"... Maybe there are simply not enough ideas around any more.

Re:Seriously?

[WK2]

Oh, and get this. They don't even use the same font. They both use the same font family (sans serif), but that's only a fallback. If you have the necessary fonts installed, then Facebook will use "lucida grande", while the German site will use tahoma. Granted, if you don't have lucida grande, then they will both fallback to the same list, tahoma, verdana, arial, and then sans serif.

So, if you have "lucida grande" installed, then you will see two different, although quite similar, fonts on the two pages.

Re:Same font?

[Sique]

Here we have the dominant (Maybe not in sheer numbers around the whole globe, but possibly in Europe, and if not very close) player in the business taking legal action against a new player using the fact that they have the same "font" as a pretext.

StudiVZ is by far larger in Germany than Facebook with 6 mio registered profiles vs. 1.2 mio registered profiles. Here we have a case of a company not expanding fast enough with their business model into other countries, and when they finally do (about two years late) they see their ecological niche already occupied by a local player. And now they are calling the courts to change this.

It was the same with eBay vs. alando in Germany, which ended with eBay actually buying alando in the end, because they couldn't compete against alandos stronghold in Germany.

Re:Seriously?

[the_other_chewey]

[I use neither site, but followed their development from early on]

Seriously? I just checked both sites, and they look kind of similar, but not much.

Facebook is a bit late with that lawsuit. That site used to look exactly like Facebook except for being red.
What was no surprise at all, because most of the stylesheets and templates were exact copies of the original
Facebook ones, down to file names and entity IDs. PHP errors visible to users contained a path ".../fakebook/..." until not
too long ago. Their equivalent verb for "poke" is "gruscheln" (a completely made up and rather ridiculous word) - and the
PHP script to do it was called... wait for it... poke.php.

This list could go on for quite some time.

They basically copied everything they could from facebook (and I mean copy as in "use wget to download everything" and tried
to replicate the backend. If a ripoff lawsuit was ever justified, it is this one. It just comes too late, or the copy would
have been completely obvious to even a casual observer.

No problem for the original con artists though: They sold to a big german media house for an undisclosed two-digit million sum
estimated to be around 50 million Euros.

Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony is that StudiVZ has (successfully) sued other german pages for copying them. Serves them right to get sued themselves I would say.

Re:Same != similar == no case?

[rolfwind]

Microsoft complained that Lindows sounded too much like Windows and for some idiotic reason managed to win.

ORLY?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._Lindows

As early as 2002, a court rejected Microsoft's claims, stating that Microsoft had used the term "windows" to describe graphical user interfaces before the product, Windows, was ever released, and that the windowing technique had already been implemented by Xerox and Apple many years before[1]. Microsoft kept seeking retrial, but in February 2004, a judge rejected two of Microsoft's central claims[2]. The judge denied Microsoft's request for a preliminary injunction and raised "serious questions" about Microsoft's trademark. Microsoft feared that a court may define "Windows" as generic and result in the loss of its status as a trademark. In July 2004, Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows.[3] As part of this licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated $24 million cash (for a case that Microsoft itself brought), and Lindows transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed their name to Linspire.

What timing!

[Atario]

Rolling Stone magazine just had a big story about how Facebook was itself stolen in the first place.