Facebook sues ‘knock-off’ German site

Facebook on Friday filed an intellectual property lawsuit against a German company that it has accused of running a “knock-off” of the social networking website. In a complaint filed in a California court, Facebook accused StudiVZ - a German company that claims 10m users and calls itself “the most successful social network in Germany, Austria and Switzerland” - of “copying the look, feel, features and services” of the Facebook site. Facebook, which was founded in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, recently settled its own intellectual property dispute. It resolved a legal battle with ConnectU, a rival website launched at Harvard around the same time, whose owners claimed Mr Zuckerberg stole its idea for a site that allowed Harvard students to connect to each other online.