The Original Sues The Clone

July 19th, 2008 by Peter Glaeser | RSS feed for comments on this post | TrackBack URI

Facebook finally decided to sue its Germany clone studiZV. Thank you Facebook. studiVZ did not only copy Facebook’s concept of a social network but to my mind also their look and feel. The only thing they changed is the color. Facebook is made in blue, studiVZ features red.

One can’t sue somebody for stealing an idea. That’s not really protected unless it’s a trade secret. That’s why Facebook tries do sue the German portal over copyright infringement for using a similar “look, feel, features and services.” Now the California Supreme Court needs to decide about that. You can read the full story at Techcrunch.

I hope Facebook wins because I’ve never been a great fan of studiVZ. It hardly offers any features such as AJAX effects, RSS feeds, external applications and so on. Unfortunately most studiVZ users don’t even know that they’re using a sorry copy of Facebook. And by the way, studiVZ is hardly making any money because they haven’t figured out how to monetize their crappy community traffic through ads. The original founders sold the business at the right time.