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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."
Seriously? I just checked both sites, and they look kind of similar, but not much. They're not even the same color, or the same language. I seriously doubt anybody would confuse the two.
http://www.studivz.net/
http://www.facebook.com/
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
..are bullshit.
Compete on features and stop whining that people copy your look. When they do that, it means you're winning. No one confuses Microsoft Live Search for Google despite Microsoft copying the style.
I would imagine it is much, much harder to bring a case in Russia - look at the AllOfMP3 debacle. So they hit the soft targets in a country with more copyright friendly laws first.
Of course, being sued by Facebook on stealing code and ideas, is much like being told to sit up straight by the hunchback of Notre Dame.
What is it with the software industry that makes it think it has a special case with so-called "Look and Feel"? Unless its trying to pass itself off as an exact copy of FaceBook a.k.a. fraud then I don't see the problem.
In the fashion industry people will get design patents and others will create copies with say four buttons instead of three. In the auto industry things like body panels are even patented so when you get a copy it does n't fit exactly because its not a 100% copy.
Let's deal with these one by one.
Code? So you've seen the source for both these sites? And they're the same? I didn't think so.
Functionality? It's like any other social networking site... You login, you add friends, you write blogs, you post comments, you upload photo's and videos etc. Nothing unique to Facebook.
Layout? They both have a login screen on the left. Ohno! And Facebook hasn't actually trademarked their layout or font, which TFA says are two of things their case is based on.
Features? Essentially the same as functionality. Facebook doesn't over much unique things over other social networking sites, you can hardly call this a rip-off of one and not the other.
The name is an abbreviation for the German "Studentenverzeichnis" or "Studienverzeichnis", which means "Students' Directory". Which is pretty much what it is. Not sure how Students Directory = Facebook.
This is StudiVZ. It doesn't look like a ripoff. This is what a ripoff looks like!
I am German, so I know both StudiVZ and Facebook. It is true that StudiVZ copied just about everything from facebook except the color and the name. Functionality, fonts, even the order of buttons is the same. Hell, StudiVZ even had a directory in their URLs named "Fakebook". Whether this is legal or not - the courts may decide that.
More interesting about this case is the fact, that this has been known for a long time, even to Facebook. But they (facebook) only recently started to expand to Germany. As they are too late and thus largely unsuccessful (Metcalfes Law anyone?) they decided to sue them. But this is purely business: if they want to be sucessful in Germany they have to buy StudiVZ. And sueing might help lowering the price. Pretty straight-forward.
Code? So you've seen the source for both these sites?
Server side, no. But take a look at the source presented in the browser.
Functionality? It's like any other social networking site
They're not all the same. The functionality of MySpace is considerably different from that of LinkedIn, and likewise from Orkut, and likewise from Facebook. Further, TFA makes reference to the Facebook-specific "poke" feature.
Layout? They both have a login screen on the left.
They also have the same arrangement of top and bottom links, boxed in. The curved top bar is from an earlier layout of Facebook's homepage, and the text area and dimensions of the interface elements are the same. How do you know whether or not Facebook has filed a look and feel trademark? It seems they have, based on their legal policies online.
Features? Essentially the same as functionality.
Features are not the same as functionality. Features are the on-screen graphical elements (i.e. the content inside a layout), functionality is the underlying mechanics. Again, Facebook is distinctive in its home page, profile, and other elements, as compared to other social networking sites.
Not sure how Students Directory = Facebook.
Now it's clear to me. You are some combination of an idiot or a troll.
A facebook is exactly a student directory. It is a publication of contact information, interests, activities, and the like distributed to students or members of an organization.
What do you think a design is? It's the combination of the layout and fonts used in a webpage.
But what seems obvious, exactly? That they're similar? That StudiVZ is inspired by Facebook? That's hardly a crime. Every function and layout concept found on either site can be found on hundreds of other social networking sites around the Internet. And of the millions of websites in the world, you'll have trouble finding even one that doesn't borrow nearly every element of design and functionality sites that came before.
Reuters doesn't even mention any specific legal complaint by Facebook, just that it's a "knockoff" and Facebook wants daddy to make the big bad German site stop. It seems to me, though, that if the German site is popular, it's because it's reaching a user-base that Facebook was either unable or too slow to reach.
Facebook hasn't lost anything. They're still growing in popularity and users worldwide. What's there to complain about? The world owes them even more than the wild success they've already achieved?
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
At the expense of feeding the incompetent troll...
So according to you, if I wanted to make another social networking site aimed at college students I'd have to call it something random, otherwise I'd be a plagiarist?
Yes, you'd have to come up with something other than a translation of "facebook" (which is neither narrow nor slang, regardless of whether or not you've encountered the term before), if in addition to copying the name, you lifted entire sections of code, layout, features, and functionality.
It's not any one thing. It's not the name alone. It's not the layout alone. It's not the font family alone. It's the combination of those and the others. There was no need to duplicate so carefully--it was either intentional wagon-hitching or malicious sloth. Neither is acceptable. Plenty of other social networking sites manage to get started without being complete ripoffs.
I'm not talking about some function they offer; I'm taking about ridiculously bad security. Last semester one of the members of my student project wrote a little crawler during the lunch breaks that would crawl StudiVZ and extract the personal data of as many users as possible for future application in spam mails. It took him what, two weeks? While he was eating and chatting with the rest of us. (We could finally talk him out of spamming, however. Now he wants to use the data for targetted advertising.)
StudiVZ is simply badly written. If the same applies to Facebook I can see the ripoff, but I haven't heard much about Facebook being extensively mined against their own will so far.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
That's indicative of their idiocy and evidence of their literal copying. They can ripoff the files with wget, but they still had to put together some form of backend--that would be their failure. If they had any skill whatsoever, they'd have a more original layout.
It's just a bad copy by talentless hacks. It doesn't have anything to do with whether or not they lifted the frontend web code.
It's the database that would be targetted by the crawler, not the web pages.
I don't contest that much of StudiVZ was copied off Facebook. However, I doubt that the name claim goes very far. "Facebook" is not a synonym for "student directory", it is a specific instance of a student directory. And even if "facebook" were a synonym for "student directory" that still would not give Facebook an automatic claim to any term that describes student directories. "StudiVZ" is a very distinct name that is unlikely to be confused with "Facebook", especially not by the intended audience.
It's also unlikely that someone will think "hey, 'StudiVZ' means 'Studentenverzeichnis', which is the same as a 'facebook'" as StudiVZ operates in Germany where - surprise - everyone speaks German and simply doesn't encounter the term "facebook" anywhere escept the name of the social networking site.
Again, I don't contest Facebook's case per se but I do contest the claim that the name was ripped off. "Studentenverzeichnis" is a rather obvious name choice for a student directory and a contraction that makes it both easier to type and is a non-generic term is the obvious next step. Facebook didn't come up with the term "student directory" so I fail to see why they should get exclusive rights to the term and any derived terms.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
What _exactly_ is wrong with a ripoff from a _legal_ (not moral) point of view? Can Facebook claim copyright infringement?? Is there a law against "doing more or less the same thing independently"? If there is, I'm scared.