FMyLife has been a true web success story. Not only have the creators turned it into a hugely popular website in under a year, but they’ve already gotten a book deal, and now a TV deal out of it. But with success, comes the need to protect that success. As such, FMyLife is now going after a similar site, FMySexLife, sending them a cease and desist notice today.
The truth is that since FMyLife has seen some success, there have been multiple clones that have popped up using a similar look and feel while slightly tweaking the concept. For those not up to speed on FMyLife, it’s a site that allows you to post (anonymously or not) short blurbs about why your life sucks. Just in case you need me to spell it out for you, FMyLife stands for “F*** My Life.” FMySexLife (I’ll let you figure out what that one stands for) extends the concept to allow you to post about why your sex life sucks.
As you can see in the C&D email below, one of the main issues now seems to be the fact that FMyLife has the book and TV deals. If they’re not going to protect their property, you can be sure that Villard/Random House Publishing or William Morris/Endeavor will.
Here’s the best line from the email, “[FMyLife] is going to be exploited as a TV show by William Morris / Endeavor.” Followed by “We are requesting that you cease all exploitation of our Fmylife concept” — there’s both good and bad exploitation, apparently.
As we noted last year, another site in this vein existed, What The Fail, which translated the popular French site Vie De Merde (also run by Maxime Valette, one of the people behind FMyLife) to English. All now appear to be one in the same as What The Fail now simply forwards to FMyLife.
FMySexLife clearly doesn’t think FMyLife has rights to this concept as they’ve passed along the C&D along with the note that, “They are trying to say we have cloned their ‘concept.‘” Sounds like a perfect FMyLife posting.
Below find the full C&D:
Dear Webmaster,
Your website fmysex.com is a cloned copy of our concept created on 18th of
January 2009, under the name fmylife.com.Our Fmylife concept is currently under use as a book by Villard/Random House
Publishing and is going to be exploited as a TV show by William Morris /
Endeavor.We are requesting that you cease all exploitation of our Fmylife concept, so
we can avoid any and all legal issues.Hoping to hear from you,
Didier Guedj
CEO
Ouiche Lorraine Compagny
Today I discovered my website was cloned. FML.
You should checkout TechMunch
These sites would be a lot more interesting (and funny) if the user-submitted anecdotes were actually true. The majority are quite obviously made up, and most of the rest are implausible at best. I can make up wacky stories too, but that doesn’t make them amusing.
I have doubts about S*** My Dad Says too. There, I said it.
They should go after fmyclone which sells the source code for a simple Fmylife script.
I started out with FML but these days my fav is http://mylifeisaverage.com
I use to love Fmylife as well but I kind of got bored of it. I now check out mylifeisaverage.com and another smaller one that really has not gone big yet which is simplyfailed.com. But over all I think this FmySexlife.com concept is pretty dumb.
fml is full of fictional entries which are not funny at all. they hire authors to write all entries. so stupid.
Judging solely by the homepages – FMySexLife is a lot funnier than FMyLife.
FML trying to scare the little guy, heh.
This is a low blow scare tactic and pathetic attempt by FML to shut down their competition. If they don’t like competition I guess they’re in the wrong industry.
Someone should go after oDesk, the leading resource for cloners and “spinners” of other sites.
lol.. stealing concepts.. fmsex clearly the first site to ever repeat a successful model
what a load of shit
I know the guy behind fmysex, if you didn’t know, he is the same guy same guy who started 2girls1cup(sold it since then)
Thats incorrect, I am the guy behind FMSL… and the sole owner
Incorrect. I am the sole owner of FMSL. I ask you to cease and desist with your lies.
First time I’ve heard of FMyLife – I’m a big fan of Hatebook though – pretty much the same thing – but started 2005.
http://www.hatebook.com
Pretty hard to go after these sites. After all sites like http://grouphug.us and http://www.roofessions.com have been around much longer then fmylife, should they be going after fmylife?
Um, I needed you to spell it out for me…you led me to believe you were going to…then you got asterisk happy. How am I supposed to know what FMyLife means?
out of all these sites http://www.Ventnation.com is the best looking when, plus it has cooler features! just my opinion!!
Shameless plug, I coded up a free aggregator (lacking FMSL at the moment).
You can find it here: http://www.fthis.org ; it has a man hanging of a tree with a banana. So there.
The fact is just that the website (FMSL) is an entire copy of FML.
I love the source code in French. I’m sure the guy behind fmysex.com understand it
(french because the first website was viedemerde.fr then turned into the english version FML, so the same code)
Where does http://www.fmyscript.com/ come into all this?
look at the source code ffs.
div class=”drapeaux”
div id=”haut”
div class=”input_auteur”
div id=”droite”
does this look like ENGLISH to you ?
no it’s pure copy/paste of the source code.
the best part is this one :
function VDM(id,nb)
VDM is for ‘VieDeMerde’.
And the ‘guy’ behind FMyScript put a copyright at the end of the webpage, wtf ?