I may be one of the last human being not to have a Facebook account, but I'm sure that doesn't concern Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook now has over 200 million users and is taking Europe by storm. In fact, Facebook is the leading social networking site in every country in Europe – except Germany. The German knock-off StudiVZ, now owned by Holtzbrinck, has more than double the uses of German Facebook. That doesn't sit well with the US juggernaut, which at one time tried to by StudiVZ. Now Facebook is taking action, this time in a German court:
regional court, StudiVZ violated copyright laws by mimicking its logo,
features and service. The company also claimed that StudiVZ secretly
used Facebook code in order to copy the site.
A spokesperson for the German website, which launched about one year
after Facebook in 2005, told the paper that the case was groundless.
But the two sites do indeed look and function very similarly – with a
few minor style differences. Facebook, which has some 2 million users
within Germany, features blue as its main colour, meanwhile StudiVZ,
with 5.5 million users in German-speaking countries, uses red.
The Web site of Der Spiegel has a pretty thorough report on the legal complaint. Of course, the whole thing is rather ironic, since Zuckerberg himself built Facebook with code stolen from his Harvard classmates. I am not a user of either Facebook or StudiVZ, but on the "face" of it, there is little that is innovative about Facebook, and not much that distinguishes its UI from other social networking sites like MySpace. StudiVZ simply took a fairly straightforward idea and adapted it to the German market, as was recently pointed out on USLAW.com:
StudiVZ was because the site was designed suitably to their tastes and
wishes in German. Just compare the registration pages of the The Facebook.de website and the studiVZ.de
website and you will already see the strong difference in style, with
the studiVZ interface much more European in format. Indeed, the German
registration page for Facebook is a strict translation of the American
version, with no cultural adjustments. Facebook thus has simply been
unable to match German tastes, although no one doubts that all the many social networking sites are by nature similar.
Indeed, the co-founder of StudiVZ, Ehssan Dariani, freely admits that he took some of the basic ideas of Facebook and simply improved them. That's how product innovation is done:
miteinander kombiniert und an die europäische Campuskultur angepasst.
Kreativität und Originalität gehören zu den wichtigsten Werten des
StudiVZ. Deshalb verzichtet StudiVZ – anders als die meisten anderen
Internet-Seiten – auf Anglizismen, und es wurden bestehende Dinge
weiterentwickelt. (We analyzed the American platforms, put together the best ideas and adapted them to the European campus culture. Creativity and originality are the core values of StuiVZ. Therefore StudiVZ – in contrast to most of the other Internet sites – has discarded anglicisms, and existing aspects were developed further.)
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