Slashdot Log In
Facebook Sues German Company, Claims Ripoff
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Jul 21, 2008 03:12 AM
from the styletastic dept.
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."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Their initial name: Fakebook (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Their initial name: Fakebook (Score:4, Informative)
and from that page:
Parent
Re:Their initial name: Fakebook (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Their initial name: Fakebook (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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Code? So you've seen the source for both these sites?
Server side, no. But take a look at the source presented in the browser.
Functionality? It's like any other social networking site
They're not all the same. The functionality of MySpace is considerably different from that of LinkedIn, and likewise from Orkut, and likewise from Facebook. Further, TFA makes reference to the Facebook-specific "poke" feature.
Layout? They both have a login screen on the left.
They also have the same arrangement of top and bottom links, boxed in. The curved top bar is from an earlier layout of Facebook's homepage, and the text area and dimensions of the interface elements are the sam
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 expo
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
At the expense of feeding the incompetent troll...
So according to you, if I wanted to make another social networking site aimed at college students I'd have to call it something random, otherwise I'd be a plagiarist?
Yes, you'd have to come up with something other than a translation of "facebook" (which is neither narrow nor slang, regardless of whether or not you've encountered the term before), if in addition to copying the name, you lifted entire sections of code, layout, features, and functionality.
It's not any one thing. It's not the name alone. It's not the layout alone. It's not the font family alone. It's the combination of those and the others. There was no
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Their initial name: Fakebook (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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/ [flickr.com]
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).
Re:Their initial name: Fakebook (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Their initial name: Fakebook (Score:4, 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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But what seems obvious, exactly? That they're similar? That StudiVZ is inspired by Facebook? That's hardly a crime. Every function and layout concept found on either site can be found on hundreds of other social networking sites around the Internet. And of the millions of websites in the world, you'll have trouble finding even one that doesn't borrow nearly every element of design and functionality sites that came before.
Reuters doesn't even mention any specific legal complaint by Facebook, just that it's a
User base is the key (Score:3, Interesting)
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 pa
Seriously? (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/ [studivz.net]
http://www.facebook.com/ [facebook.com]
Re: (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 b
Re: (Score:2)
"[M]ake sure you are providing the best service and marketing properly..."
Nicely said.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, 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.
Parent
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Try these:
http://web.archive.org/web/20051127084214/http://www.facebook.com/ [archive.org]
http://web.archive.org/web/20060101110221/http://www.studivz.de/ [archive.org]
Style lawsuits.. (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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Style lawsuits.. (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.
Parent
I know it's unrelated... (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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, according to their terms of use: http://www.facebook.com/terms.php/ [facebook.com]
32665, FACEBOOK, THE FACEBOOK, FACEBOOKHIGH, FBOOK, POKE, THE WALL and other Company graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts and service names are registered trademarks, trademarks or trade dress of Company in the U.S. and/or other countries.
Nothing about trademarked fonts or layouts.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you think a design is? It's the combination of the layout and fonts used in a webpage.
Re: (Score:2)
Focusing on the font is missing the forest for the trees. It's like saying that the guy impersonating you down to the the details used the same shampoo, and thousands of other people use that shampoo. It's absurd. It's not just the shampoo. The font is one element--the font size, formatting, and coloring are others. Take that small set of similarities and add it to the other small sets of similarities. Taken together, there is no chance of coincidence.
Both sites have changed slightly since this issue
there is another facebook clone in Russia (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:there is another facebook clone in Russia (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Same != similar == no case? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
The closest case I can think of to this was the whole Lindows (now Linspire) debacle. Microsoft complained that Lindows sounded too much like Windows and for some idiotic reason managed to win.
I don't disagree Lindows sounds like Windows, but it takes a rather impressive amount of mental incapacity to think the two are somehow the same.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
ORLY?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._Lindows [wikipedia.org]
Button layout and font? (Score:2)
What a menu down the left and arial, verdana, tahoma? I'm fairly convinced Facebook wasn't the first to come up with that setup!
I haven't logged in to the site of course so I don't know what it's like overall but really the frontend whilst admittedly a similar layout, certainly isn't identical or even particularly close to identical by any means. There's some pretty blatant differences and you'd certainly never confuse to the two.
What's Facebook so afraid of?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [typepad.com] issue, where Mattel tries to sue only after it noticed that the success of the other was immense.
Grrr I hate the term "Look and Feel" (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.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not unique to software by a long shot. It's called "trade dress" and it's used by disparate industries. Some examples: airline cabin interiors, restaurant decor, automobile body elements (e.g. Cadillac tail fins, Lincoln's "spare tire" hump and eggcrate grille, Mercedes-Benz double headlights), and quite famously, the shape of a Coke bottle.
In the fashion industry, trade dress covers things quite different from the number of buttons. The allegation clearly indicates you don't have an appropriate fra
Ripoff? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ripoff true, but not the reason for the lawsuit (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.
True Irony (Score:2)
Disclaimer: I have a biased view on this topic, which I've written about in detail here: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html
That being said, given Facebook's history, it's truly ironic that they would be suing anyone for infringement of intellectual property rights of any sort.
facebook should have sued this (Score:2, Interesting)
Xiaonei.com was designed to mimic both the look-and-feel and the function of Facebook.
Ironic given how facebook started (Score:5, 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.
What timing! (Score:5, Informative)
Rolling Stone magazine just had a big story about how Facebook was itself stolen [rollingstone.com] in the first place.
So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Same font? (Score:5, 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.
Parent