Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
This is StudiVZ. It doesn't look like a ripoff. This is what a ripoff looks like!
Here we have the dominant (Maybe not in sheer numbers around the whole globe, but possibly in Europe, and if not very close) player in the business taking legal action against a new player using the fact that they have the same "font" as a pretext.
StudiVZ is by far larger in Germany than Facebook with 6 mio registered profiles vs. 1.2 mio registered profiles. Here we have a case of a company not expanding fast enough with their business model into other countries, and when they finally do (about two years late) they see their ecological niche already occupied by a local player. And now they are calling the courts to change this.
It was the same with eBay vs. alando in Germany, which ended with eBay actually buying alando in the end, because they couldn't compete against alandos stronghold in Germany.
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.
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
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.
ORLY?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._Lindows
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.
Rolling Stone magazine just had a big story about how Facebook was itself stolen in the first place.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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.
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.