Facebook Was in Talks to Buy German Social Site

When Facebook sued the German leader in social networking, StudiVZ, last month, it contended that the company had illegally copied Facebook’s “look and feel” with similar graphics and features.

“A great deal, if not all, of StudiVZ’s success is due to its copying and misusing of Facebook’s intellectual property,” the Web site said in the complaint, filed last month in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

What Facebook did not mention, according to a former senior StudiVZ executive, was that the U.S. company had been negotiating for months to try to buy StudiVZ, which is based in a former bakery in the hip Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of eastern Berlin, the International Herald Tribune reported.