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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.
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.
What do you think a design is? It's the combination of the layout and fonts used in a webpage.
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.