Facebook has lost the first round of legal action against
alleged German copycat site
StudiVZ.
Facebook has accused StudiVZ of intellectual property theft and
taken the matter to court in Germany and the US.
The US case is still underway, but German judges at the County
Court in Cologne have ruled against Facebook,
according to media reports.
The court found that StudiVZ does not pretend to be Facebook,
which was virtually unknown in Germany when StudiVZ was launched in
2005, and that Facebook's lawyers had failed to prove allegations
that StudiVZ stole Facebook's source code.
StudiVZ for students and its spin-off sites for schools and
general users have over 12million German-speaking members, roughly
six times more than Facebook.
Some commentators have said the German court rulingis good from
a policy perspective because it is aimed at letting sites compete
on merit, rather than worrying about who copied what from whom.