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.

Facebook has recently taken StudiVZ to court claiming that the German social network is simply a knockoff of their own website.  StudiVZ is one of the largest social networks in Germany with over 16 million users.  Facebook itself has about 2 million active users in Germany.  This makes Germany the country with the 18th most highest number of Facebook users.

To make matters even more interesting, StudiVZ was acquired by a larger company already for a price between €50 million-€100 million in 2007.  Taking StudiVZ to court is leading people to believe that they are going to go after any other clone next.  Xiaonei is the Chinese clone of Facebook.

In order to gain market share in Germany, Facebook started contests such as the German Application Contest and Facebook for Good – Germany.  Facebook also hired a few ambassadors in Berlin and Munich.

[via InsideFacebook]

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.

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A Facebook replica website, StudiVZ has been seizing a large marketshare of higher education students from the European market while Facebook is dominating the U.S. market. How similar do they look? Click on the thumbnails below to find out (opens in new window):
Facebook Screenshot:
StudiVZ Screenshot:
And while I’m discussing Facebook replicas, how about I once again mention Xiaonei, a recently acquired Chinese version of Facebook that I’ve profiled from before:
Not only is Ehssan Dariani the founder of StudiVZ, but he’s also a member that likes the movie Zoolander and is a 26 year old student at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland studying economics. Dariani started StudiVZ about a year ago and now the current user base is 950,000. Dariani claims that 15,000 people are signing up with StudiVZ per day compared to Facebook’s 20,000 people signing up per day. Dariani started this company with an initial investment of 5,000 Euros at an Internet coffee shop and now has 50 people working for him.

How fast as StudiVZ grown? In July, 200,000 users had signed up and then doubled in August and then another 100,000 in September. By the end of this month, StudiVZ is expecting 1 million users to be signed up. “We want to keep the page free and support it with unobtrusive forms of advertising,” stated Dariani about future growth. “Right now, we want to concentrate on making things run smoothly, and we’ve got plenty of work on our hands already.”

Dariani is not afraid to admit that StudiVZ is a Facebook replica, but has stated “it was also clear from the get-go that we would strongly distinguish ourselves by other things, that we wanted to be original.” An example of a distinguished feature is called “gruscheln,” which is the equivalent of a Facebook “poke.” And because Dariani is not afraid to admit that his website is based off of Facebook, he gives advice to Germans complaining about finding a job. “Stop whining about having no job, or a bad job — that’s total nonsense. As far as that goes, we can learn a lot from the Americans.”

Since so many people in Europe had signed up for the German version, it appears that Dariani made a spin-off Italian version as well called studiLN. Dariani has had many problems with servers because of conflicts with telecomm companies in the past and hopes to fix these problems as the user base grows.

To display the actual growth rate, I have placed a screenshot of StudiVZ’s Alexa ranking chart from the last 6 months:

Had this been a more original product, I would have been a lot more impressed, but I give Dariani credits. I have seen other MySpace and Facebook replicas that has not seen anywhere near similar growth.

[Source: Spiegel Online]