Facebook and German social network StudiVZ will be ending their legal battle over plagiarism. StudiVZ will be paying Facebook and undisclosed sum of money in order to have both companies withdraw their claims in the U.S. and Germany. Both companies will continue to do business as they have been doing before.
As of this past May, StudiVZ reportedly had about 13 million users in Germany whereas Facebook had about 2 million. In July 2008 Facebook filed a lawsuit against StudiVZ in California saying that they had infringed on the “look, feel, features, and services.” Facebook was even considering buying out StudiVZ but those talks fell through.
The reason why the acquisition did not take place was because Georg von Holtzbrinck, the parent company of StudiVZ was not satisfied with what Facebook had to offer. In early 2007, Georg von Holtzbrinck bought StudiVZ for $134 million.
Another lawsuit was filed in Germany around November 2008 but the County Court in Cologne ruled Facebook because their company lawyers were a bit sloppy in preparations. Facebook said that they were planning to appeal the decision made in that court. Rather than allowing the legal battle to keep going on, a settlement was made and that is that.
Berlin, Germany based Wooga is a company that develops games for social networks. The company has raised funding from Holtzbrinck Ventures. Holtzbrinck Ventures started in April 2000 and they are the corporate venture company of the publishing group Georg von Holtzbrinck.
The first game that Wooga released on Facebook is called Brain Buddies. Wooga was founded in January 2009 and launched Brain Buddies five weeks ago. Brain Buddies has about 2.5 million users.
Holtzbrinck Ventures has also previously invested in StudiVZ, Germany’s largest social network. StudiVZ is basically a replica of Facebook.
Yesterday Facebook filed a lawsuit against German social network, StudiVZ. Facebook accused StudiVZ of being a knock off and for copying the look, feel, and features that Facebook has. StudiVZ has about 10 million users and they self-describe themselves as the most successful social network in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
In November 2006, I wrote an article about how StudiVZ will be reaching 1 million users. Ehssan Dariani, the site’s founder adminitted that StudiVZ is a Facebook replica. “It was also clear from the get-go that we would strongly distinguish ourselves by other things, that we wanted to be original,” stated Dariani. Because the German version was successful, Dariani created an Italian version.
StudiVZ was bought out by a German media company called Georg von Holtzbrinck for a price that was close to €100 million a few months ago.
