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The Courts Government Social Networks The Internet News

Facebook Sues German Company, Claims Ripoff 244

Posted by timothy 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."
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Facebook Sues German Company, Claims Ripoff More

Facebook Sues German Company, Claims Ripoff

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  • Their initial name: Fakebook (Score:5, Informative)

    by the grace of R'hllor ( 530051 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:16AM (#24270717)
    Their first version of the site was called Fakebook [wikipedia.org]. Seems pretty obvious.

    • Re:Their initial name: Fakebook (Score:4, Informative)

      by ratbag ( 65209 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:21AM (#24270737)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheLink ( 130905 )
        So what if they've called it fakebook. It doesn't mean they are the same or a ripoff.

        Sure they look similar, but so do most things that try to do the same thing.

        Does the javascript and other code look the same?

        If it does then maybe it's a ripoff. If it looks different, then it's probably different.

        I haven't tried it but if it doesn't require javascript to work, then it most certainly is different from facebook.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Just a few clicks confirms that it lets users register without requiring script be enabled. In other words, if I got invites from studiVZ I could register whereas if I got invites from Facebook I could not (Well I could fire up a VM but I'd probably reverse engineer the javascript). That isn't to say that I would ever register for either but at least it's technically possible for me to do so on studiVZ without compromising my security.

    • Re:Their initial name: Fakebook (Score:4, Informative)

      by kaos07 ( 1113443 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:26AM (#24270761)
      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".

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by mr_matticus ( 928346 )

        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)

          by kaos07 ( 1113443 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:44AM (#24270879)

          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.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by mr_matticus ( 928346 )

            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)

              by tubapro12 ( 896596 )
              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 [w3.org] as valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, Facebook fails [w3.org] 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 expo

          • > Not sure how Students Directory = Facebook.

            Well, admittedly, Facebook used to be strictly for students too before they sold out and decided to become Myspace 2.0.

            The irony of Facebook suing someone else for plagiarism is hopefully not lost on everyone.

            The second irony here is that whether or not anything was ripped off, the alleged perpetrators of said rip-off have made their big .com (or rather Web 2.0) winnings and moved on. The original coders of StudiVZ have sold it for a ton of money, and I doubt

          • >Let's deal with these one by one. ...

            They are more successful in Germany than Facebook, hence the lawsuit.

          • A bit of an aside, but there was short period of time where facebook was serving it's PHP source as plain text. I'm sure it could be found somewhere out there in some obscure location.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Jesus_666 ( 702802 )
          I don't think that they reuse the code. Facebook doesn't have nearly as bad a reputation as StudiVZ, which is a data mining goldmine. If you submit ANY data to the website you can be sure that someone can extract it from their database with minimal effort.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by mr_matticus ( 928346 )

            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)

              by Jesus_666 ( 702802 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @06:51AM (#24271869)

              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.

              • Re:Their initial name: Fakebook (Score:4, Insightful)

                by mr_matticus ( 928346 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @07:03AM (#24271945)

                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.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by drsmithy ( 35869 )

                (We could finally talk him out of spamming, however. Now he wants to use the data for targetted advertising.)

                So you talked him out of spamming, but now he wants to use it for... spamming ? :)

                • We talked him out of unsolicited ads. I don't really know what his current model is or if he even intends to use the data he gathered. I think the latest idea was to see if someone who has already opted in to email ads is registered with StudiVZ and to use the data gathered from them to make the mails sent to him more relevant.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Rocketship Underpant ( 804162 )

      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

      • 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

      • Facebook is very US-centric. As a non-american you always end up with mental questions like: What highschool did I go too? Hmm, I didn't go to high-school, the high-school equivalent education I took, is halfway college-equivalent too. So what is college did you go too? Hmm, I didn't go to college I went straight to university... What did I major in? We don't have majors, what are they talking about?.. Minor? what the hell is a minor? The site sucks.

        • So the real crux to this matter is that Facebook (like Walmart?) has done well in the USA and found that they don't "get" how other cultures work, and fail there. So they are suing. Does this mean that Facebook is attempting to make non-homogeneous culture illegal? "Diversity makes business more complicated."

    • Should really have been called "Tracebook".

      The Worlds premier datamining website :)

  • Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WK2 ( 1072560 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:17AM (#24270721) Homepage

    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)

      by Twigmon ( 1095941 )

      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

      • "[M]ake sure you are providing the best service and marketing properly..."

        Nicely said.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KGIII ( 973947 )
        There are a few more than five [dustinbrewer.com] available, not many but a few, available for the typically configured machine. Seems to me that, in this day and age, there should actually be more fonts available in all the various OSes so that designers have more choices in a simpler way but that's a topic for another day. I should like to think that a judge would just giggle at a claim such as this, I've looked at the sites in question and though I don't speak German it really would be hard to see even vaguely important si

    • Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)

      by WK2 ( 1072560 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:30AM (#24270793) Homepage

      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.

      • 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.

        Technically, sans serif is not a font family but a style (without serifs, those embellishments at the end of the letters (the little hooks or balls) of a font. They are used to make a printed page look better; but are hard to effectively display on many monitors it is the desired style for fonts. There still is a font family associated with it, whether its Tahoma, Arial, etc. The font family defines the font's characteristics - i.e. how to draw an A - that appear on screen.

        In the case of style sheets, it

    • Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)

      by the_other_chewey ( 1119125 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:59AM (#24270967)
      [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.

      • 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.

        When did that happen? It sounds to me as if Facebook might have the timing just right, not late at all, now that it's owned by somebody with enough assets to be suing for.

        • 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.

          When did that happen? It sounds to me as if Facebook might have the timing just right, not late at all, now that it's owned by somebody with enough assets to be suing for.

          The sale was settled in early January 2007. So even if they waited for some sueworthy assets, the lawsuit isn't beyond the fastest.

        • If GP was right about lots of the web design originally being exact copies, the lawsuit comes a bit late.

          Because stolen HTML code is a clear copyrigt violation, while "look and feel" is a lot less clear-cut.

          • Stolen HTML code remains stolen HTML code even if it's no longer the code used on the site. (And yes, for the sake of other readers, I am aware of the controversy over the use of the word "stolen" in the context of IP).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Splab ( 574204 )

        Well if they ripped off facebook, then facebook ripped off about a million other sites with a login form and quick links to important parts of the site...

        There are only so many ways of setting up your login box and the order in which you can put, help, about, etc.

  • Style lawsuits.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:17AM (#24270725)

    ..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)

      by mr_matticus ( 928346 )

      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

      • If some other website flat-out reproduced Slashdot's appearance, changing the green to orange, would a person with basic familiarity with Slashdot look at the new site and consider that the two might originate from the same people?

        What! You're implying that this [bbspot.com] is not written by the /. editors?

  • I know it's unrelated... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:18AM (#24270731)

    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)

      by kaos07 ( 1113443 )
      The case seems even more tenuous when you realise that it's very doubtful that Facebook copyrighted the font that they use...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kaos07 ( 1113443 )

        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)

          by illumastorm ( 172101 )

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

          • It seems to me that website design fails to meet the requirements for trade dress protection, in that the visual elements of a website aren't without function. The purpose of denoting blocks with visual indicators is inherent to HTML, and is meant to be a guide. Claiming that color, font, stylesheets, etc...are part of trade dressing seems backasswards in terms of what trade dressing *is*:

            From widipedia [wikipedia.org]

            Trade dress refers to characteristics of the visual appearance of a product or its packaging (or even

      • 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

        • If someone impersonates you, that means they are trying to make other people think that they are you. Thats a type of fraud. Someone who decides I'm cool, who starts wearing my type and color of clothes, uses my brand of laptop running by fav linux distro, cuts their hair to look like me, starts lifting weights, and eventually looks like me, but never trys to sign my name on a check isn't impersonating me. I should not have the right to tell other people they can't wear leather, for instance, because tha

    • In the United States, one cannot copyright a game's metrics.

      But one can apparently patent them:

      Wizards of the Coast, Inc., a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. (NYSE:HAS), is a worldwide leader in the trading card game and tabletop role-playing game categories, and a leading developer and publisher of game-based entertainment products. The company holds an exclusive patent on trading card games (TCGs) and their method of play and produces the premier trading card game, MAGIC: THE GATHERING, among many other trading card games and family card and

      I believe this patent even in

  • there is another facebook clone in Russia (Score:4, Interesting)

    by psykl0n3 ( 759848 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:20AM (#24270735) Homepage
    Strange that they are not suing http://www.vkontakte.ru/ [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 :)

  • 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)

      by Xest ( 935314 )

      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)

        by rolfwind ( 528248 )

        Microsoft complained that Lindows sounded too much like Windows and for some idiotic reason managed to win.

        ORLY?

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._Lindows [wikipedia.org]

        As early as 2002, a court rejected Microsoft's claims, stating that Microsoft had used the term "windows" to describe graphical user interfaces before the product, Windows, was ever released, and that the windowing technique had already been implemented by Xerox and Apple many years before[1]. Microsoft kept seeking retrial, but in February 2004,

    • Well in the US look and feel lawsuits will fail, due to the precedent set (I assume it was set at the time anyway) by the Apple vs. Microsoft case when Apple sued Microsoft for stealing the look and feel of their OS.

      Given that there are a limited number of possible web page layouts for any given style of website, it is inevitable that some will start to look a bit similar to another one. We're not shocked that cars all look car-like are we? You never got Ford suing GM because GM also sold vehicles with 4 wh

  • 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)

      by pimpimpim ( 811140 )
      Copying the font is a non-argument, but at least in 2006 it really was almost a one to one copy [sebbi.de]. Then again, how many ways are there to make a social networking site look like.

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheLink ( 130905 )
        "Mattel alleges that Bratz designer Carter Bryant was employed by Mattel when he thought up the idea for the Bratz line. If so, says Mattel, Bratz belongs to Mattel. "

        Oooh. Someone else took the risk, and it's a success, so now Mattel wants it. Just because he might have thought of the idea while working for Mattel.

        Say I come up with an "edgy burger idea" while working for McDonalds that McD management would under normal circumstances never approve, so I start my company, launch the burger, become a big su
        • Exactly. The goal of patents and trademarks and such should be to support progress and innovation, not as a tool for the traditional giants to extort the ones that took a substantial risk, a lot of effort, and made a well-deserved gain of it.

          In the case of social networking, one could claim that all were a copy of the first social networking site (friendster? maybe older ones, don't know), as there are only so many ways to do it. But to become successful depends not just on your site layout, it is a combi

  • Grrr I hate the term "Look and Feel" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by msgmonkey ( 599753 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:39AM (#24270847)

    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.

    • 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)

    by dnwq ( 910646 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @03:49AM (#24270915)
    This is StudiVZ [studivz.net]. It doesn't look like a ripoff. This is what a ripoff looks like! [xiaonei.com]

  • Ripoff true, but not the reason for the lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jlp2097 ( 223651 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @04:01AM (#24270979) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • 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.

  • xiaonei.com [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.

  • Ironic given how facebook started (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @04:44AM (#24271213) Homepage

    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.

    • In business, especially the IT business, it is the first to market who wins, not the first to come up with an idea.

      Sure he may have nicked their idea, but if they'd been serious and worked fast enough their website would have been just as good as Facebook.

      As for whether he was being dodgy, well, did they have him working under a contract? If not then its their word against his, and he was under no legal obligation not to use the ideas any way he wished. If you want to stop that sort of thing, you *have* to

  • and right content column with a top header bar on a website, go sue facebook. for, they are piggybacking on your success.

  • What timing! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Atario ( 673917 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @05:21AM (#24271389) Homepage

    Rolling Stone magazine just had a big story about how Facebook was itself stolen [rollingstone.com] in the first place.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by xtracto ( 837672 ) *

      Wow,

      Now that is a story. I had no idea about the origins of FaceBook... according to that story the founder of Facebook is a total asshole.

  • Recently, studiVZ was criticized for the provocative contents of a campaign of viral videos. Reportedly, one of three particular videos, for example, shows a gang that murders a vegetarian and feeds him to pigs.

    -- Wikipedia

    Can't be all bad!

  • Facebook, the largest social networking site in the US

    Facebook is number 2 to MySpace still. It's growing much quicker, so it's likely to overtake in the next six months, but at the moment Facebook is not the largest social networking site in the US.

  • What are you talking about 'copies'. Have YOU seen the sites? One is blue(fb) and the other is clearly RED! RED IS NOT BLUE!

  • So? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Godji ( 957148 ) on Monday July 21, 2008 @10:06AM (#24274401) Homepage
    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.

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