Facebook Sues German Social Networking Website

Social notworking site, Facebook has filed suit against a German website called StudiVZ, claiming the site is nothing more than a Facebook knock off.

Similar to Apple’s issue with Psystar, Facebook claims the presence of StudiVZ is diluting its brand. Facebook says the German site’s similarities are confusing for the consumer and worry that it may give the impression the two are in some way affiliated.

The flipside of the case is that StudiVZ is saying Facebook is just jealous of their success in the German market. Reuters quotes chief Marcus Riecke as saying, “They’re strategy seems to be if you can’t beat em, sue em.”

So what exactly are we dealing with here? Well, judging by these screen shots, StudiVZ is pretty much a carbon copy of Facebook. You’ve got the slightly harsher red tones in place of the blues but other than that, it seems the same. Facebook complains the site even uses the “wall” idea, where by users can post messages on their friends’ pages.

StudiVZ refuses to comment on the issue because it has yet to receive the court papers but a Reuters report says that on Friday, the website asked a German court to declare Facebook’s claims were without merit.

However, we’re not so sure. Back in May TechCrunch published an article on Web 2.0 and the amount of “me too” websites doing the rounds. This included a piece on StudiVZ and its likeness to Facebook. Tech Crunch says early versions of the site used filenames like fbook.css or poke.php and StudiVZ worked with Facebook in the beginning but Facebook walked away following security concerns about the platform.

This case might sound familiar to Facebook fans. Way back in the beginning, ConnectU, another Harvard social networking site, filed suit against Facebook claiming founder, Mark Zuckerberg had been hired to write source code for ConnectU but instead created and launched his own website three months before the launch of ConnectU. A settlement was reached in April and we thought Facebook was ready to put this “copycat” issue behind it. Apparently not. Although, we do wonder that if they’re going after StudiVZ, whether or not they’ll go after other websites which bear resemblance to Facebook such as xiaonei.