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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."
Strange that they are not suing http://www.vkontakte.ru/ on this one they've copied even the colours :) I'm not mentioning that many of the features and such are the same as the facebook was a couple of years back. Although, they did make this knockoff when there was no Russian translation for the Facebook and thus Facebook was pretty unusable by the general population :)
Does facebook have any case? Even if it was similar isn't it still "different", not the same. Even if they called it "faceLook" say, isn't that still different and not legally copied? I guess it comes down to the legal aspects and law.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Not sure how it's different?
It's a re-use of code, functionality, layout, and features...and it's a conscious ripoff of the name.
It's not a joke taking a crack at a competitor. Orkut didn't rip off Myspace more or less verbatim.
Defending style elements are critical to maintaining trademark protection, when that trademark is dependent on look and feel. Facebook is not so innovative as to be worth copying for any legitimate technical aim, nor is it so generic that it was an accident.
It uses a distinctive configuration of layout elements, text styles, and interactive elements. Even details such as the use of square brackets and grey shading around text boxes for emphasis are duplicated exactly. Just browsing the two home pages and looking at the two registration forms, the resemblance is obvious. It's so painstakingly reproduced in terms of spacing, CSS element sizing and positioning, and text formatting that it's obvious it's a copy-and-paste job, not even a handcrafted reproduction.
They're not designing their site so that it's similar--they're downright copying it. It's absurd and pointless, and Facebook has every right to defend their distinctive marks in the consumer space. If some other website flat-out reproduced Slashdot's appearance, changing the green to orange, would a person with basic familiarity with Slashdot look at the new site and consider that the two might originate from the same people? That's substantial confusion when you're not directly selling a product.
Live Search and Google don't look anything alike.
Fact is, Facebook was late in opening up to the German market, and an abbreviation like StudiVZ is an excellent name to target abbreviation-loving German students. It reeks to me like the barbie-vs-bratz issue, where Mattel tries to sue only after it noticed that the success of the other was immense.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
http://web.archive.org/web/20051216121754/http://www.studivz.de/
vs.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060511053819/www.facebook.com/
I'd say, go get them, Facebook.
As an aside, the founder of StudiVZ has shown some really bad taste in the past:
http://seclog.de/pub/2006/11/voelkischer_beobachter_studivz.jpg
xiaonei.com (WARNING: Chinese language, with Fl*sh and animated GIF, a bit slow to load).
Xiaonei.com was designed to mimic both the look-and-feel and the function of Facebook.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Try these:
http://web.archive.org/web/20051127084214/http://www.facebook.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20060101110221/http://www.studivz.de/
Read up the history of how Mark Zuckerberg allegedly nicked the idea from some Harvard guys he was supposed to be working for to develop a similar site. Makes for interesting reading though I notice the wikipedia entry has been sanitised to remove some inconvenient facts about facebook's gestation.
To me this lawsuit is hypocricy of the worst type.
I always thought "gruscheln" was made up from "grüssen" (to greet) and "kuscheln" (to cuddle)... but I may be wrong.
Quote Financial Times Deutschland:
"Facebook wirft dem sozialen Netzwerk, das dem Verlag Holtzbrinck gehÃrt, unter anderem auch vor, ohne Erlaubnis auf Facebooks Computersysteme und -netzwerke zugegriffen zu haben, um sich unrechtmÃÃYig Daten zu verschaffen."
Which kinda translates to:
"Facebook accuses the social network [edit: studivz], which belongs to the Holtzbrinck publishing company, among other things of accessing Facebook computersystems and networks without permission, in order to procure illegitimately data."
Rumors say that the bunch of students that founded studivz payed some ukrainian it-students to crack facebook to steal the code. And after studivz took of they sold it to the Holtzbrinck publishing company for 50 million Euros.
Yes, it does have a meaning. Gesichtsbuch or Buch der Gesichter (The first noun would be in the genitiv case) means book of faces, a book that contains faces of people. In german you can virtually create absurd long words simply by combining nouns. Example: Dampfschifffahrtskäpitänsvereinigungsgewerkschaft. Translation: Union of the coalition of captains of steam navigation. So Gesichtsbuch has a meaning in german.
"Die endgueltige Teilung Deutschlands - das ist unser Auftrag." - Chlodwig Poth
Well, actually, they do, in some way.
Facebook started a German website some time ago, after ignoring the world outside of the United States for years.
But they are very unsuccessful, while StudiVZ is one of the biggest community site of that kind in Germany.
So most people over here believe that Facebook went to court to get rid of a competitor.
I don't think that they reuse the code. Facebook doesn't have nearly as bad a reputation as StudiVZ, which is a data mining goldmine. If you submit ANY data to the website you can be sure that someone can extract it from their database with minimal effort.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Nothing you said says anything about reusing code. Adding datamining is a copy and paste operation, which they've plainly already mastered:
http://flickr.com/photos/bumi/285541845/sizes/o/
Also note that their "poke" function is named...poke.php. Most of their functions and libraries, in fact, are written in English...and named identically to their Facebook counterparts. The rest of the code, however, is in German (i.e. what they added or bothered to rename).
I have never heard the word "Gesichtsbuch" (indeed a neologism in German) and it would certainly not be translated into "Studentenverzeichnis" (not a neologism).
Exactly my point.
A facebook is not a yearbook. It is a student directory--literally, a 'Studentenverzeichnis'. Neither 'Gesichtsbuch' nor 'Jahrbuch' would be appropriate translations of 'facebook'.
Oh, and don't forget that it's difficult to claim rights to generic terms.
No one is making any such claim. Perhaps you are not familiar with the concept of trade dress, nor the steps involved in defending it.
It is not any one element of duplication that is dispositive; it is the replication of an entire ambiance. A translation of the name, coupled with the lifting of code, the extensive similarity in layout (even outright duplication of CSS in previous versions of the site) all combine to constitute more than sufficient grounds for a trademark claim.
StudiVZ really did manage to capture a huge chunk of Facebook's old core of users, the students. Back when I was more interested in Facebook, there was a problem with the Germany network, namely that some Canadians tried to usurp the network message boards to post racist and offensive crap. Facebook did nothing for ages, despite tonnes of complaints, and many students migrated to StudiVZ instead.
Whether earned or not, StudiVZ has a better overall rep amongst Germans, and Facebook had been too slow in the past to react. Now they find themselves unable to crack the userbase, so they'll try to kill the competition with this strategy.
I think whatever they do, Facebook just doomed themselves in the German market. Either they look like another American trying to quash a local hero, or they look like the Goliath that the little StudiVZ managed to take on and beat.
If the markup is this different, imagine how different the underlining server scripts probably could be. Facebook appears to be powered by PHP (/*.php) but studiVZ is hiding extension and doesn't expose its PHP if that's what it is even using.