Qihoo 360's new video venture accused of digital theft

K.360kan.com, a video streaming service created by China's cyber-security giant Qihoo 360, has received a serious accusation from netizens of ripping-off its rivals.

Named as Kuaishipin, or Fast Video, the service came into being in late 2017. Qihoo 360's founder and CEO Zhou Hongyi said the service is focused on streaming videos between one to three minutes.

"Short but packed," read the team's slogan.

But the Internet community found out recently that the service is packed with videos from other sites, including anime fan site Bilibili, mini-video service Kuaishou and micro-blog Weibo.

Some users accused Fast Video for ripping-off rivals' content, with some Bilibili users even accusing Qihoo 360 for hacking their accounts, as they can log into Fast Video with their Bilibili password.

The topic was the most searched term on Tuesday, according to China's largest search engine Baidu.

Denial and evidence

Both Fast Video and Bilibili responded to users' discussions. Fast Video rejected the accusation that they hacked user accounts, but admitted that some of its users copied videos from Bilibili and other rivals.

"We apologize to Bilibili uploaders for the trouble. The copied content has been taken down and related accounts have been punished," Fast Video team said in a blog post.

But the posts were trolled by Weibo users with more than 100,000 comments and dislikes.

The most upvoted comment－which simply read "shame"－got over 10,000 likes.

A Weibo comment of evidence showing Fast Video has the same comments as Bilibili, and video uploaded before the service was born. /Weibo Screenshot

The trolls said Qihoo 360 intentionally copied rivals' videos and pretended they were uploaded by Fast Video users.

Evidences were provided, including a screenshot showing a Fast Video piece uploaded in 2010, seven years before the site was even created.

Some videos have exactly the same comments as in Bilibili, but were posted by different users.

Uncensored pornographic videos were also found, but later deleted by Fast Video, leaving 404 error pages behind.

Although being a victim of the farce, Bilibili announced on Tuesday that they found no evidence of hacking from Qihoo 360, or leaks of users' private information.