With success comes jealousy, and copying, and then a long legal battle over proving which site was first to the punch, and whether the cloning concerns are justified. This is what is currently happening with Facebook, which has just launched its first legal battle over one of the many (allegedly) cloned sites.

The clone is question is German social network StudiVZ, a site with 10 million users, and which calls itself “the most successful social network in Germany, Austria and Switzerland”. According to the FT, Facebook has filed a complaint in a California court that accuses StudiVZ of “copying the look, feel, features and services” of Facebook.

The timing of this is no coincidence, as Facebook has just recently settled its own intellectual property dispute over the origins and ideas behind the site. The 2004-founded Facebook was claimed to have been copied from ConnectU, a Harvard university site created at around the same time. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was accused of stealing the idea from ConnectU, which enabled students to connect and communicate with each other.

Now that case is over, it seems Facebook is moving to get the many clones launched around the world closed. StudiVZ is surely just the first of many such sites to be cited as a legally-suspect clone, probably chosen as the first target due to the German version of Facebook failing to gain traction due to the popularity of StudiVZ.

It remains to be seen what StudiVZ makes of the complaint, and how it justifies the various similarities on the site. Facebook’s complaint said it was “seeking to end StudiVZ’s illegal activity to ensure that users are not confused and that Facebook’s reputation remains unharmed”.

As Mashable detailed last year, there are at least ten copycat sites, with Xiaonei, a hugely popular Chinese social network, the most notorious. The site looks exactly like Facebook, with the language being the only real noticeable difference.

While I support Facebook’s fight to stop the many clones operating, it does seem a little hypocritical when the site was accused of stealing the idea in the first place. It’ll be very interesting to see how this plays out.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 6:43 pm under Internet, Legal, Opinion.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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