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Facebook Sues German Company, Claims Ripoff

Posted by timothy on from the styletastic dept.

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."

5 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. there is another facebook clone in Russia by psykl0n3 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 :)

  2. Ironic given how facebook started by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Style lawsuits.. by **loki969** · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Their initial name: Fakebook by mischi_amnesiac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  5. Re:Their initial name: Fakebook by tubapro12 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I'll bite the flamebait. You say the soruce presented in the browser by the two sites is similar?
    • studiVZ's homepage is linked to just over 1000 lines of CSS, while Facebook's homepage includes over 2000.
    • studiVZ validates as valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, Facebook fails trying to call itself XHTML 1.0 Strict.

    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.