Every time there's a post on HN about a new business that's the new hotness but which is not available outside the US, there are a bunch of posts asking why. Here are some possible answers:
Another way of looking at it is that by creating the [insert country here] clone of [insert cool service here], you could probably start a niche business pretty quickly by serving the need unmet by the service you're cloning. This worked great for LoveFilm in the UK, who cloned Netflix.
Addendum: And then very likely the most successful European copycats will get acquired by a the same US company when it really wants to expand abroad...
If they did something interesting, i.e. are worth acquiring. More likely, they still sit on a month-old feature set of the original and then are sued out of business – or just ignored.
There is just no way to protect "your business idea" unless you deliver + expand fast. If the German copy-cat industry is faster, you just lost and have to pay a lot (groupon).
I personally don't like copy-cats but that's the way it currently goes.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027066
Another way of looking at it is that by creating the [insert country here] clone of [insert cool service here], you could probably start a niche business pretty quickly by serving the need unmet by the service you're cloning. This worked great for LoveFilm in the UK, who cloned Netflix.