Facebook Loses Infringement Lawsuit In Germany Over Copycat Site

from the competition-ain't-bad dept

Wed, Jun 17th 2009 10:44pm — Mike Masnick

This is a bit of a surprise, as it appears that Facebook has lost a lawsuit in Germany against a site it accuses of copying Facebook (but in German). It's certainly true that the sites look quite similar, but the German court basically says that looking close is meaningless. If there's no confusion in what site people are on, there's really not much of an issue. And while the sites do have a lot of similarities, being on StudiVZ it's clear that the site is different from Facebook. While this may just be a German court protecting a local company against an American competitor, it seems like a good ruling from a policy perspective. Let the sites compete in the marketplace, rather than worrying about who copied what from whom.

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Filed Under: copycat, germany, social networking
Companies: facebook, studivz

6 Comments

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Big Al, 18 Jun 2009 @ 12:20am

Bad Car Analogy
Ok, let's start with the bad car analogy. You don't see Ford suing Toyota because their latest model has four wheels, has an internal combustion engine and seats 5 passengers, do you?
So, what if the sites are similar in some ways, obviously they are different enough in others for people to know where they are. After all, there are only so many ways you can position text and entry forms on a page...
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Anonymous Coward, 18 Jun 2009 @ 1:14am

dead link.
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CleverName, 18 Jun 2009 @ 6:01am

Re: Bad Car Analogy
Didn't that scenario actually happen ?

http://www.bpmlegal.com/wselden.html
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Mike, 18 Jun 2009 @ 7:39am

Good Ruling
This makes me think about Microsoft's new search engine Bing....which is COMPLETELY ripped off from Google's. And the Palm Pre, which rips off the iPhone in many ways. But that's okay--you establish your product, and other people try to tweak and improve it and call it their own. I agree that the only issue should be if there's confusion.
The take-home lesson seems to be: make sure your product is damn good before you take it to market, because once it's out there, you'll have a target on your back. But Facebook, Google, and iPhone needn't worry. Their products are the best at what they do.
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AnonCow, 18 Jun 2009 @ 9:31am

You can tell that it isn't Facebook because of all the links to schießen videos...
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Facebook Developers, 20 Jul 2009 @ 3:57am

Facebook Developers
Thats really strange. Informative post. THanks
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