With Zynga gearing up for an IPO, it was probably in everyone's interest to get this settled and keep any doubts from investors minds. The company's sent Betabeat a joint statement, “Zynga and Vostu have settled the copyright lawsuits and counterclaims against each other  in the United States and Brazil.  As part of the settlement, Vostu made a monetary payment to Zynga and made some changes to four of its games. The parties are pleased to have settled their disputes and to now put these matters behind them.”

Twenty-five percent of internet users in Brazil play Vostu games, making it by far the number one social games company in Brazil, which is a booming market, and the  fourth-largest social games developer overall. Vostu also counts some real  heavyweights among its backers, including Accel Partners, Tiger Technology Global Management, Intel Capital and General Catalyst Partners.

The bigger Zynga's IPO, the more attractive Vostu will look when it comes time to go public. Everyone wins when you play together.

A side by side of several e-cards

The startup world is rife with clones and copycats, fueled by the ease of opening up shop on the web. You can find ads on Craigslist shopping for scripts to rip off entire sites. But typically it's the small fry who are aping the success of their larger, more established rivals.

So the folks at New York based Paperless Post were a little taken aback when they saw Postmark, a new offering from Evite, which looked to them like a total clone of their product.

To make their case, Paperless Post laid out for Betabeat the nitty gritty details of the overlap between Postmark and their service. To them, it copied the user experience and design assets, right down to individual cards. Everything had an eerie familiarity, from the pricing scheme to the name.

"We kind of stumbled on it while redesigning our logo," said Alexa Hirschfeld, who founded the site with her brother James. "We were checking out the competitors and when we got to Evite's postmark we had one of those moments, it was actually confusing, looking at it and then at our site, realizing we had been cloned."

Take a minute to watch this video the pair created to highlight the similarities they found.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and Mr. Hirschfeld did say that at first, "We did feel that it was a sign of success, a validation of the direction we are going. People at the beginning thought were foolish, to build something so formal and enriched when everyone was talking about Facebook and the democratization of content."

side by side

But the deeper they dug, the more angry the pair became. The found the pricing schemes for Evite's service to be almost identical, but slightly cheaper than theirs. And they discovered that back in 2007,  Evite threatened to sue a Socializr, another online invitation company,for allegedly copying some of its work. In a letter from its attorneys, Evite accused Socializr of “posting designs and page layouts…that are identical, or strikingly, substantially, or confusingly similar.”

It seemed to the Hirshfelds that Evite was now the one making things confusing. "The name, Postmark, is much closer to our brand than to Evite. And on top of this shocking lack of creativity, Evite says this is a hallmark of their innovative spirit."

The founder say they are exploring their options and considering legal action, but it's a tough road to take on a copycat. That's why VCs are prone to ask, What if Google Does It?, when startups are pitching their business plan. Patents are a good weapon, but tough to get on them on startup time, since the approval process typically takes years. "We plan to just keep evolving the product," said Mr. Hirschfeld. "They are a lot bigger than us, but for now our plan is to just keep beating them on execution."

Evite sent along this statement from President Hans Woolley: “Evite, the categorical leader in online invitations and social planning, has been preparing and executing the launch of Evite Postmark since 2009.  We have done so by deploying our very best talent to create a service that evolves the ad-free premium invitation space beyond where it is now.  Currently, Evite Postmark is in Beta mode and has not been officially launched; it is evolving and we have been thrilled with the response it has received from users (who are mostly from the Evite family) so far.  We are excited to continue to incorporate many new features we are currently developing in anticipation of our official launch in early 2012.”

Disclosure: Paperless Post has received funding from Thrive Capital.

Posers

A complete ripoff of Turntable.fm called Rolling.fm has emerged that would make Chinese copycats proud. Because the firm has the distinction of being founded by one Tim Zhou,  who used to work at Google, the tech press has gone gaga for it. Gaga, meanwhile, has apparently chosen to put her funds into the original.

"Hot on the heels of Turntable.fm’s big reported round of funding comes Rolling.fm, a clone that does just about everything the original service does. Will it achieve the same popularity? Who knows, but we’re impressed that someone has already launched such a complete knock-off of the Turntable.fm concept," writes a breathless Eliot Van Buskirk, a former Wired writer who left for music start-up Evolver.fm but continues to contribute pieces of reportage.

Rolling.fm has added a couple interesting features, like a list of everyone present in the room and a way to have private chats with other users. "Should Zhou and company be ashamed? Who cares? The world needs all the neat ways to listen to music it can get, from where we’re standing," writes Buskirk. "It’s also a case of “different strokes for different folks.”

By way of example, Buskirk points out the music on Evolver seems less clubby and indie. Betabeat, who spent the day listening to rare funk and early ska on Turntable.fm, felt the need to interject. Actually, there are better things a smart software engineer can do with his time and money than build a complete rip-off of a service that is less than three months old. As a ploy to get acqui-hired by Facebook for its secret Vibes project, this is pretty clever. But in terms of its contribution to the start-up ecosystem, music or otherwise, its a bad precedent and a poor example.