Dont forget the history of that. In Germany, many US-Startups don't work. US-Startups often are damn US-centric. Many won't even allow registration from other countries (google music, netflix). Others have or had no german interface (Facebook got one 2008, before that was a big hurdle for a social network targeting not only young and educated people). I remember predictify, it had a large section of predictions of US-politics, but no area for politics of other countries (and so no such questions). Heck, Youtube is almost unusable here because it gets censored and Google don't seem to care (imagine that in the US-market).
In all those cases and in many more, you will find imitations of these sites as the service isn't accessible here (at least not as good as possible). That is surely a foundation of that copy-culture.
Those copycats are clearly an annoyance. But even such a clone of an unrestricted site can serve it's purpose: Target a specific market (someone pointed out that a difference between those sites are the amount of pictures of woman, which could be caused by cultural difference - USA censors sex, Germany censors violence).
In all those cases and in many more, you will find imitations of these sites as the service isn't accessible here (at least not as good as possible). That is surely a foundation of that copy-culture.
Those copycats are clearly an annoyance. But even such a clone of an unrestricted site can serve it's purpose: Target a specific market (someone pointed out that a difference between those sites are the amount of pictures of woman, which could be caused by cultural difference - USA censors sex, Germany censors violence).