Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

8 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.

  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 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.

  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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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