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Facebook Sues German Social Website StudiVZ (Studienverzeichnis, Studentenverzeicnis, "Students Directory") for Intellectual Property Infringement

By Andis Kaulins

Facebook, which has not been successful in establishing itself on the German market for online social networking, has in California federal court filed an intellectual property law suit against the leading German-language (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) social networking website StudiVZ (Studienverzeichnis, Studentenverzeichnis, i.e. "students directory") claiming that StudiVZ is a clone of Facebook. In response, as reported by Reuters:

"The German company sued by Facebook for running a "knockoff" of the social networking Web site said on Sunday it asked a German court to declare that Facebook's claims are without merit....

StudiVZ filed for declaratory judgment at the District Court in Stuttgart, also on Friday.

Facebook's suit also seeks compensatory damages in an amount to be determined at trial.

StudiVZ claims Facebook is suing them only because Facebook has failed to transplant its success in the United States and other countries to the German market.

"Their strategy appears to be: 'If you can't beat them, sue them,'" said Marcus Riecke, chief executive of studiVZ, which is owned by Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, a German publishing company.""

We personally know people who use StudiVZ and the reason they chose 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.

It may appear initially curious that the suit is being brought now, several years after Facebook considered buying studiVZ.de and even entered into negotiations with them, but the reason for the suit is clear when one becomes cognizant of the fact that Facebook more recently entered the German market with a German-language version and has made little headway here since then.

We are not fans of Facebook or its management by any means and regard this as a very stupid lawsuit. In our view, Facebook has little prospect of winning here in Germany, and a defeat will give other social networking websites the motivation they need to press forward.

The name of the game is competition and we think that the German courts will so decide. There is very little innovative about Facebook or MySpace, the two leading social networking websites in the US - but not elsewhere, whose origin can be traced back to online development in progress long before these sites existed. As noted at the Wikipedia:

"History of social networking services

The notion that individual computers linked electronically could form the basis of computer mediated social interaction and networking was suggested early on ^[7]. There were many early efforts to support social networks via computer-mediated communication, including Usenet, ARPANET, LISTSERV, bulletin board services (BBS), and EIES: Murray Turoff's server-based Electronic Information Exchange Service (Turoff and Hiltz, 1978, 1993). The Information Routing Group developed a schema about how the proto-Internet might support this.^[8]

Early social networking websites included Classmates.com (1995), focusing on ties with former school mates, and SixDegrees.com (1997), focusing on indirect ties. User profiles could be created, messages sent to users held on a ?friends list? and other members could be sought out who had similar interests to yours in their profiles ^[9] Whilst these features had existed in some form before SixDegrees.com came about, this would be the first time these functions were available in one package. Despite these new developments (that would later catch on and become immensely popular), the website simply wasn?t profitable and eventually shut down ^[10]. It was even described by the website?s owner ^[11] as ?simply ahead of its time.? Two different models of social networking that came about in 1999 were trust-based, developed by Epinions.com, and friendship-based, such as those developed by Jonathan Bishop and used on some regional UK sites between 1999 and 2001.^[12] Innovations included not only showing who is "friends" with whom, but giving users more control over content and connectivity. By 2005, one social networking service MySpace, was reportedly getting more page views than Google, with Facebook, a competitor, rapidly growing in size.^[13] In 2007, Facebook began allowing externally-developed add-on applications, and some applications enabled the graphing of a user's own social network - thus linking social networks and social networking.^[14]

Social networking began to flourish as a component of business internet strategy at around March 2005 when Yahoo launched Yahoo! 360°. In July 2005 News Corporation bought MySpace, followed by ITV (UK) buying Friends Reunited in December 2005.^[15][16] Various social networking sites have sprung up catering to different languages and countries. It is estimated that combined there are now over 200 social networking sites using these existing and emerging social networking models,^[17] without counting the niche social networks (also referred to as vertical social networks) made possible by services such as Ning and KickApps. ^[18].

Facebook did not rise to popularity because of innovation but rather because of investment.

In any case, although we think Facebook has no chance in Europe, what the California court will do in the US suit is unclear as the California courts are prone to aberrations.

The irony of this lawsuit against studiVZ is that Facebook just settled a lawsuit with ConnectU (we posted about this earlier at LawPundit), which claimed that Facebook had "ripped off" ConnectU's original social networking website ideas.

John Palfrey, (former?) executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, is quoted by Michael Levenson of the Boston Globe regarding the merits of the Facebook-ConnectU case, as Levenson writes:

"The case underscores the difficulties in pinpointing the originators of ideas on the Internet, particularly for social-networking sites.

"One thing about the Internet is that most ideas are developed collaboratively in the Internet space, and one thing that was difficult in this matter was trying to parse what was an original idea they had and that somebody else had taken advantage of," said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. "That was going to be awfully hard to show."

Palfrey said both sides should be happy the case was settled."

Now, undeterred, Facebook is itself busy cloning the applications of others for its own platform.

The fact that Facebook is now bringing this legal action against a German competitor tells us a lot about this company, which we would not touch with a ten foot pole.

Full post as published by LawPundit on July 21, 2008 (boomark / email).