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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."
Their first version of the site was called Fakebook. Seems pretty obvious.
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.
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.
Rolling Stone magazine just had a big story about how Facebook was itself stolen in the first place.
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