Bad news for Facebook from Germany today. Facebook has had issues with Berlin-based social network StudiVZ (”student directory” in German) for years before deciding last summer to finally sue their German clone in the US. In November, Facebook filed another suit [PDF], this time in Germany. The allegation in both cases: Intellectual property theft, with Facebook saying StudiVZ infringes on their site’s design, features and services. In addition, StudiVZ is accused of having stolen PHP source code from Facebook.
Anyone who spends more than 2 minutes on StudiVZ must come to the conclusion that the site is a total knock-off of the American original. It’s even rumored that several lines of very early StudiVZ code contained the word “Fakebook” and as a German, I can say StudiVZ is more or less a translated duplicate. But today the County Court in Cologne (where the suit was filed in November) decided against Facebook. And the judges were pretty harsh in their verdict.
The court argues that it can’t identify any unfair practices, mainly due to the fact that StudiVZ isn’t trying to trick users into thinking they are actually on Facebook. Another factor in favor of the German site: When StudiVZ went live in Germany in November 2005, Facebook was virtually unknown in that country. The court says this changed only in March last year when Facebook started specifically targeting German users.
And as if that’s not enough, the court criticized Facebook’s lawyers for being too sloppy, saying they made too many unfounded guesses instead of presenting hard facts that prove StudiVZ stole source code. As a consequence, the judges refrained from getting the opinion of independent experts who could have looked into this specific allegation. However, it was acknowledged in court that StudiVZ and Facebook “obviously share some similar and identical elements”.
Take a look at this screenshot of a profile page below:
It’s still open if Facebook will appeal the ruling (a Facebook spokeswoman said her company would now review all legal options). The lawsuit against StudiVZ in the US is still on.
And Facebook might want to boost their efforts to at least win that one since winning in Germany means winning in Europe’s biggest web market, where the StudiVZ network is a big player: A total of 12.9 million people from German-speaking countries are registered at StudiVZ itself (mainly for university students) and its spin-offs schuelerVZ (for high-school students) and meinVZ (for everybody else). Facebook has about 2 million users in Germany.
Screenshot from Golem.de
facebook suing about stolen code pot calling ……..
Maybe the Germans copied from connectU
Design is not code you fools. It is blatant copy of “old facebook”. If they launch english version i would love switching to studi….what?
this is exactly the reason why companies need to plan for globalization and secure domains and seek local partners.
If http://static.p...ur/img/wozu.gif isn’t facebook then I’m an attractive male with a social life.
That was… pretty funny
Facebook lost huh? That’s bad for facebook.
How could that code be stolen?? Hacking FB servers??Or bribing a FB employee? This sounds a bit ridiculous…unless they are talking about HTML, CSS, Javascript code…
Yea I was thinking the same thing. How could that code be stolen?? Sounds a bit fishi don’t you think..
Facebook claims StudiVZ illegally (what else) accessed their computer systems.
uhm – @serkan: how does that work?
Sorry TC, I think this whole article is too harsh and characterize Germans as the bad stealing society – and American are (as usual) the poor vicitms -
now I wait for not being posted or deleted again like in other posts where I asked TC to explain me what the Loic (who is a great guy and definitely very smart) Seesmic model is all about!
great
Yea.. Germans are not as bad stealing society as Chinese.
And since it is server side code, facebook wouldn’t know about it unless they illegally accessed StudiVZ servers.
LOL.
Facebook the hypocrite. Suckberg and his sister are a joke. Anyone putting their trust in him is foolish.
If they couldn’t present hard facts, maybe it’s because there aren’t any??? These lawyers aren’t stupid. If there were a proof for stolen PHP, they would definately have presented it. Since they didn’t, I would not assume sloppy preparation but a desperate client who tries to make up things to defend a lost case.
We all know what’s really going on here. Especially the way Facebook Lawyers presented their case. They’ve been heavily trying to penetrate the German market and compete with StudiVZ.
Facebook will have to come up with better ways to compete against them, instead of showing up and throwing out claims without hard facts.
I think Facebook has issues with feature gobbling on its side as well, but I am getting tired of hearing about American companies getting bent the f_uck over by all these other countries’ legal systems.
First China allows blatant and outright theft of the American products they like – while at the same time blocking web sites unethically, then the EU duech bags fill their coffers with the cash reserves of leading American tech companies, now German judges have the audacity to actually criticize an American company that is clearly having their IP flaunted about the net in a different color scheme.
I hope we let them do it on their own next time there is a European “World War”. I’m sure their sentiments on these issues would change if they needed us again, turds.
That’s right my friend. True that, totally agree…There’s a tech war in the world 24/7 and they want to win. There is no way they would support our advancements in technology unless they saw how they could re-create it themselves.
I hope you’re kidding. Well, maybe StudiVZ looked in the first days like facebook. But look at all the other social communities (except netlog). They’re all look like the same – crapy.
So sueing a comapny, because it’s building a social community for students with a crappy website, because your own crappy website is for students too? Don’t get it.
Thats pretty funny – you whining about those bad people that want to steal your American technology. I work in an engineering company and what they told us since my days at the university is, that there are three countries in the world where you have to be extremly aware of industrial spying: China, Rusia und the US.
Funny. I guess what one learns depends on where one goes to university. I learned (in university and real life) you have to be careful of industial espionage everywhere. No country business or industry is innocent, or safe. There are thieves everywhere – if you want to call them thieves. Depending on how you want to see things, maybe Ford, GM and the other US automakers should sue Japanese automakers for using assembly lines! But seriously, I learned in College that you had to be most careful when dealing with China, Russia, Japan, and Europe. I guess it depends on which Big Brother you grow up with.
Solve the problem US style, invade!
Or maybe we should trust the German judges to interpret German legislation.
There is an old saying, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
@Mathias: I don’t know where you are from, but I suggest you restudy European & World history over the last 200 years.
It appears that no-one (including the posters here) bothered to check any facts.
FB is run on open source code. (http://develope.../opensource.php)
How can one sue for “stealing” code when the original writer’s (including FB for code they developed) explicitly gave permission for someone else to copy and use the code.
Facebook are loosers… they can’t take over the German market and now they try to get them via lawsuit.
I think it’s to prepare a takeover of studiVZ by facebook. If you have a vicotry in a lawsuit it’s much easier to dictate your price you’re willing to pay.
At the end, facebook will win. All momentum users i know have switched already.
http://trends.g...=all&sort=0, fyi.
Countdown for when techcrunch starts telling us to hate facebook and love studiVZ in 5…4…3..
Soooo, is twitter going to sue FB soon for integrating the ‘twitter product’ (FB internal label for the new feed) into their service?
Can’t touch this! Sorry Facebook
Facebook won’t win in Germany as long as they continue to permit Holocaust denial and other racist content.
That definitely seemed related.
By definitely I mean “is probably not.”
Facebook is in danger of collapsing, and it’s not because the site can be easily duplicated. The Social Networking category does not have enough people to keep it going.
Take broadcast media, you easily had 3 major networks, it was so big that when Fox became the 4th network, it also made money.
For Social Networking to be viable, it needs to be able to sustain more than Facebook, but MySpace is clearly declining and may even disappear. If MySpace disappears, then Facebook does not have a future.
The Search category is alive and vibrant, you have Yahoo, Google and now Bing (formerly Live). They are all making money and there’s a leader, Google. The competition is actually good for Google, it shows that there is demand for that category.
studiVZ likes to rip off succesful web-whatevers.
they just added some kind of twitter to their site.
that alone would be alright, facebook did that, with proper twitter integration and all.
but studiVZ has a 140 char. limit (come here, captain obvious!!) and doesnt have any kind of integration of the twitter service whatsoever.
i mean come on. its alright to do something LIKE twitter but please at least change the character-limit.
studiVZ is the defacto standard-social network in germany which is why i am registred too. but i still prefare facebook.
I do miss the old Facebook when it was only for college students, as soon as it started opening little by little I started getting floods of unecessary applications and bombarded wih spam and what not. Keep things simple people…
students are always broke (= no business model)
Sorry, but you sound like an old Usenet user complaining about the Endless September.
Given a global population of 6 Billion, Facebook’s real miss from the start has being English-centric. Their growth strategy should have included foreign markets from the beginning – and in country specific languages.
I agree. And there’s more to it than just language. The education system here in Germany works different from the US. Some profile fields and underlying assumptions in facebook simply don’t make sense. That’s why local players are often prefered.
I dunno… my take is that facebook didn’t really have any copyrightable design innovations… i mean look at facebook — its basically just text. How can you copyright using divs with a light color and darker top border?? it presents the same information as facebook but thats because that is whats relevant to a social network
The design is too stripped down to copyright.
JOIN THE CAMPAIGN FOR BETTER BLOGNALISM
ACTION #1: TC GET RID OF MG Siegler!!
This is all about Europe not playing nice with American companies. Jealousy is what it is.
Same thing with the massive fines against Microsoft.
Europe thinks – like it does about everything else – government can solve the problem (by taking their cash).
Screw you, Europe.
As you can read Facebook also lost in USA not only in Europe…
According to this article, the fight is still on here in the USA.
brilliant, you should be a lawyer. The article says just the opposite: “The lawsuit against StudiVZ in the US is still on. “
facebook gets taste of own medicine
The only way they can win in Germany and then Europe is buying StudyVZ….the same goes China and the Facebook version there.
This is how the web rolls. Facebook should know that. Pathetic attempt so somhow damage studivz.
And in the end they don’t even need to do this. Instead they should concentrate of coming up with an awesome Facebook service that has better features and works better than studivz. (What they did pretty successful the last couple of months if you ask me)
nothing more to say… http://www.info...RSSfeed_TechWeb
I wonder if there is ever going to be a discussion about something German-related without parallels instantly beeing drawn to the holocaust, the nazi regime or anything like that.
This is a serious question: Is this the only thing you learn about Germany? Or is it just mor fun milking the stereotypes? (That, I could actually understand…)
oh ..lost …bad for facebook .
After the verdict, Randi stated she would have the judge’s FB pages taken down.
connectU is a parent class, Facebook and StudiVZ are instances of it
… no wonder there will be some similarities.
Truth is: the Samwer brothers promised Facebook to take care of the StudiVZ problem IF they were allowed to invest in Fb. Well that hasn’t happened…
Germany is a nation of copiers and they are proud of it. No innovation. Just copy. Nothing wrong with it since they admit it outright.
The greatest benefit of Facebook is that it has many groups on the site that you can join. So if you are interested in Chicago Cubs you can research Chicago Cubs in the groups section and you will be able to find friends on there that like the Cubs. This is just one example, I know that you can join groups of your favorite football team, television show, or whatever you want for the most part! If you can’t find a group for your interest, you can simply create one!
James
Judges have no clou how web applications are built or even what source code theft is. And I dont think facebook can prove that studiVZ stole their code (they obviously did!). But I wouldnt criticize their lawyers too harsh for losing. The whole sue wasnt necessarily meant to go through. It was effective PR/marketing communication. Germans now know facebook and I give studiVZ maybe 2 more years. After all they are a copy – of facebook 3 years ago. They suck.
Vkontakte.ru is a 1:1 copy of facebook, they didn’t even change the coloures. It’s russias most famous website with over 36 mio registered members. coriously fb doesn’t sue them…
xiaonei.com is also a 1:1 copy of facebook, they do evenhave more than 40 mio registered members. they are also not sued by facebook…
but studivz.de with a bit more than 5 mio members gets sued…
why? – fb might have no chance to become market leader in china and russia, but they have a chance to become germanys leading social network… thats why they sue them, not because of copying the website…
I’ve heard in another article that the guy that made facebook worked with the developers of that facebook lookalike in university and there was a row and some of his source code and ideas were stolen :S. Sucks for facebook really, it definately is a knock off ><
Wow. I can’t believe some comments.Do you guys realize that the fight against “Nazi-Germany”is over?Do you guys realize that there wouldn’t be the NASA and moon trips without german engineering by copying Nazi-Engineers.
Facebook couldn’t proof their case.In every democratic country it leads to not guilty.In Europe and the USA.