Facebook loses design theft lawsuit

 

Gallery

By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 14:18

Facebook has lost its intellectual property theft lawsuit against StudiVZ, the German social networking site.

The company had filed a complaint in Germany, claiming that studiVZ had stolen its design and layout. A similar lawsuit is still underway in the US.

StudiVZ is little known brand outside of Germany, but has an extremely large userbase. The main site, which is mostly used by university students, has 12.9 million registered users, with yet more registered to schulerVZ and meinVZ, the versions for school children and the general public, respectively.

Comparatively, Facebook is a much smaller presence in the country, with only around 2 million registered users.

Judges at the County Court in Cologne ruled that studiVZ was not breaking the law as, although there are similarities between the designs, users are not confused as to which is which.

"Although there are overlaps and similarities between the two sites that are impossible to overlook, no dishonest copying could be established by the judge," said a statement released by the court.

The court also failed to uphold a complaint from Facebook that the site had used more than just its design, but had also stolen some of its code.

One of studiVZ's founders, Ehssan Dariani, has admitted that Facebook served as inspiration for the site. However, when it was launched there was no German language version of Facebook available.

It has been revealed, in information gleaned from error messages, that some of the studiVZ code refers to a folder named "FakeBook".