Facebook sues German copycat, more to come?

Written on 19th July 2008                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent

Facebook has started to take action against their copycats, and filled a copyright lawsuit against German copycat StudiVZ, in what they claim is an infringement of Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services”. This claim is filled a month after Facebook won the accusation filled by ConnectU, claiming that Mark Zuckerberg was a copy cat and stole the social platform idea in 2004.

Facebook in Germany

Facebook has launched a German version of their social network a few months ago, but has problems to attract visitors. StudiVZ claims to have 10 million users, and call themselves “the most successful social network in Germany, Austria and Switzerland”. Their website is not only similar in usage, it also looks a lot like Facebook. The biggest differences are the color conventions and that the copy does not offer an English interface. Techcrunch reports that StudiVZ was acquired this year for about $100 million. (€ 63 million)

Other copycats are next?

Washington Post reports that there are nine other facebook clones out there, and expects Chinese owned Xiaonei, with an exact duplicate to be next. Facebook has to protect their brand and experience, but a but a laugh every once and a while is important too, let’s hope that parodies as Crackbook, Arsebook and Rightwingfacebook are taken with some sense of humor by the Facebook’s lawyers. As entrepreneurs, the people behind estudiLN have cashed their successful copycat approach.