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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."

25 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Their initial name: Fakebook by the+grace+of+R'hllor · · Score: 5, Informative

    Their first version of the site was called Fakebook. Seems pretty obvious.

    1. Re:Their initial name: Fakebook by ratbag · · Score: 3, Informative

      and from that page:

      The site's most common criticism is its astounding similarity to Facebook and Dariani admits that it is based on it. Except from some additional features such as seeing who most recently visited one's profile, the differences are in name only to be strictly German. Facebook's "poke" has been named "gruscheln" for example Some of the error messages reveal that one of the folders on the site is called "Fakebook", indicating that the developers were well aware of the similarities.

    2. Re:Their initial name: Fakebook by kaos07 · · Score: 3, Informative

      It wasn't called "Fakebook". That was the name of a sub-folder somewhere in the directory where error messages came from. Not sure how it's any different to say an Orkut developer poking (Mind the bad pun) a bit of fun at Myspace by labelling a folder "Cryspace".

    3. Re:Their initial name: Fakebook by kaos07 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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

      Facebook can not be translated into german as Studendenverzeichnis. It literally means Gesichtsbuch and as I understand it, it is a play on the english word yearbook. So it's a neologism and has nothing to do with the german word Studentenverzeichnis.

      --
      "Die endgueltige Teilung Deutschlands - das ist unser Auftrag." - Chlodwig Poth
    5. 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
    6. Re:Their initial name: Fakebook by Jesus_666 · · Score: 4, Informative

      I have never heard the word "Gesichtsbuch" (indeed a neologism in German) and it would certainly not be translated into "Studentenverzeichnis" (not a neologism). A Verzeichnis is a directory, something you can search through to get current information on something. A yearbook serves a different purpose and wouldn't be called a Verzeichnis. The proper term here would indeed be Jahrbuch.

      IAAGUS (I Am A German University Student).


      Oh, and don't forget that it's difficult to claim rights to generic terms. The site is called "StudiVZ" because "Studentenverzeichnis" is generic enough to be difficult to defend. So even if "Facebook" translated into "Studentenverzeichnis" Facebook would have a hard time claiming that their name was ripped off because a) it's a generic term used by lots of people (a quick google shows the sites FriendScout24, CampusNet.de, StudentenNet.de, pruefungsgeil.de, LINKSILO.DE and LinkARENA.com all using the term - and that's just the first page) and b) the site's name is different; even though it's a contraction of the term it is quite different.

      --
      USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
    7. Re:Their initial name: Fakebook by Jesus_666 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Adding datamining is a copy and paste operation, which they've plainly already mastered:

      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)
    8. Re:Their initial name: Fakebook by mr_matticus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    9. 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.

  2. Seriously? by WK2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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/
    1. Re:Seriously? by Twigmon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I agree completely. I just looked as well.. I went to the registration pages - they look completely different. How can 'using the same font' be considered a rip off? We only have about 5 fonts that we can use on the web!

      I have a client who believes that every 'business directory' is ripping off his business directory. Fact is - there are going to be similar sites simply because there are so many sites. Dodgy thing about this client is, when he first told me what he wanted, he showed me examples from other business directories.

      You don't become or stay the biggest by taking every other site to court, just make sure you are providing the best service and marketing properly...

    2. Re:Seriously? by WK2 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Oh, and get this. They don't even use the same font. They both use the same font family (sans serif), but that's only a fallback. If you have the necessary fonts installed, then Facebook will use "lucida grande", while the German site will use tahoma. Granted, if you don't have lucida grande, then they will both fallback to the same list, tahoma, verdana, arial, and then sans serif.

      So, if you have "lucida grande" installed, then you will see two different, although quite similar, fonts on the two pages.

      --
      Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
    3. Re:Seriously? by the_other_chewey · · Score: 5, Informative
      [I use neither site, but followed their development from early on]

      Seriously? I just checked both sites, and they look kind of similar, but not much.

      Facebook is a bit late with that lawsuit. That site used to look exactly like Facebook except for being red.
      What was no surprise at all, because most of the stylesheets and templates were exact copies of the original
      Facebook ones, down to file names and entity IDs. PHP errors visible to users contained a path ".../fakebook/..." until not
      too long ago. Their equivalent verb for "poke" is "gruscheln" (a completely made up and rather ridiculous word) - and the
      PHP script to do it was called... wait for it... poke.php.

      This list could go on for quite some time.

      They basically copied everything they could from facebook (and I mean copy as in "use wget to download everything" and tried
      to replicate the backend. If a ripoff lawsuit was ever justified, it is this one. It just comes too late, or the copy would
      have been completely obvious to even a casual observer.

      No problem for the original con artists though: They sold to a big german media house for an undisclosed two-digit million sum
      estimated to be around 50 million Euros.

  3. Style lawsuits.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ..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.

    1. 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. I know it's unrelated... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:I know it's unrelated... by illumastorm · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  5. 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 :)

    1. Re:there is another facebook clone in Russia by apodyopsis · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  6. Grrr I hate the term "Look and Feel" by msgmonkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:Same font? by Sique · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  8. Ripoff true, but not the reason for the lawsuit by jlp2097 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  9. 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.

  10. What timing! by Atario · · Score: 5, Informative

    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