It is not uncommon for Internet companies to sue each other, and the most recent case that has attracted attention is Quark's lawsuit against Gaotu, a smart information product hailed by young people as a "treasure app"; The latter, once a leader in the K12 online education industry, was the first major K12 online education institution listed in the United States in China, with a market value of more than $38 billion, but it was not long-term and was forced to transform to other education tracks after the K12 online education industry was suppressed.
Quark and Gao Tu, two platforms that seem to have well water that does not violate river water, are in court because of the university question bank. Quark sued that Gaotu App, a subsidiary of Gaotu, illegally stole the Quark App university question bank, and Quark demanded that Gaotu immediately stop the infringement and compensate for economic losses of 10 million yuan, which is the first infringement case involving university question bank data in China.
College student question bank data is relatively unfamiliar to most users, why should Quark resort to the public court because of this?
Discovering that the question bank has been stolen, Quark takes up the legal weapon
Quark App is positioned to rely on intelligent search engines to bring information services to users through intelligent tools. It is equipped with an AI engine that is simple, efficient, and extremely fast. In the highly competitive search market, Quark adopts a differentiated competitive strategy, targets young groups such as college students to deepen vertical scenarios, and launches the "University Pass Service" for learning scenarios, providing college students with learning resources and intelligent tools, among which the university question shooting function is at the leading level in the industry in topic identification and learning material sharing. The operation of the university quiz function is based on Quark's accumulation of multiple disciplines and different types of large learning problem databases, and these structured data are the core assets of Quark University's business.
According to media reports, Quark began to find through daily monitoring and user feedback last year that the Kaotu App continued to illegally steal Quark University question bank data without authorization, "the amount is shocking." ”
In Xiaohongshu and Weibo search for the keyword "Kaotu Quark" can also find feedback from many users, such as Xiaohongshu user "gun girl loves to eat grapes" found that Kaotu App plagiarized Quark, "The answer is exactly the same, don't say, actually brought the Quark University Pass brand, plagiarism is so blatant I see it for the first time!" ”
College counselor "Mao Mao" said, "Today a student said that there is software exactly the same as Quark search, I was really shocked!" How can there be educational software plagiarism? As a person in the education industry, it should be the most basic requirement to be strict with yourself and respect intellectual property rights and originality. ”
Judging from the relevant screenshots, some of the answers of the Kaotu App do have traces of plagiarism, not only in the content layout, color labeling and problem solving steps and other key points exactly the same as quark's answers, some answers even directly appear quark logo.
Kaotu App is a question search application for college students under Gaotu, providing textbook online course test paper answers and other content, its official introduction says that "it includes tens of thousands of textbooks and auxiliary books, including hundreds of university disciplines, massive tens of millions of question banks, and detailed and high-quality analysis." "The question search function is the core function of the Kaotu App, which makes it directly competitive with "Quark University Pass", and recently it has finally gone wrong due to the question bank data.
In the Internet industry, product plagiarism has always been the hardest hit area that triggers a war of words, for example, in 2021, NetEase Cloud Music accused Kugou of "pixel-level" plagiarism of some of its functions with the article "Suggestions on Applying for Mid-Year Awards for the Kugou "Cottage Office" team", and earlier there was a clipboard application Pin developer Zhong Ying accusing Hammer BigBang of plagiarism and other similar war of words, and Jobs also had a "famous scene" because of Windows The system adopted a Windows system similar to the Macintosh and accused Microsoft of being a "thief." Due to the lack of legal protection system for software products in the design of UI/UE and other functions, product plagiarism often only has "moral" accusations in the end, without legal responsibility.
However, looking at the ins and outs of Quark's lawsuit for high-way plagiarism, it can be found that this is not simple product plagiarism, but content infringement, whether it is Quark University Pass or the search function of Kaotu App, it seems to be a search service, but it is actually a content service, Kaotu App is suspected of "plagiarism" is not only the "external" product interface, interaction, etc., but the "content" foundation of the question bank, which is essentially to give Quark University to the "one pot end", and the whole process is undisguised, even the logo has been moved over, It's strange if quarks don't jump.
In the complaint, Quark demanded that Gaotu immediately stop obtaining and using quark question bank data, delete its long-term stolen test question and answer (including parsing) data, compensate 10 million yuan for economic losses, and publish a statement in a prominent position of the product for 30 consecutive days to eliminate the bad impact. It will take some time for the final verdict of this lawsuit to come out, but it is not without vigilance for the industry: on the one hand, it reflects the trend of Internet companies "winning the world for young people", but to get young people cannot rely on shortcuts; On the other hand, it reminds the Internet of the fact that "content is king" and that companies need to work content.
High-way anxiety is understandable, but plagiarism is certainly not right
It is not surprising that Gaotu launched the Kaotu App to capture the college student population. In 2021, after the K12 education business was blocked, Gaotu fully turned to the vocational education business. Vocational education is mainly divided into two categories, one is vocational examination training such as graduate school entrance examination, public entrance examination, and certificate examination, and the other is enterprise training, language learning, vocational skills and lifelong education, etc., the former is mainly for college students, and the latter is partially for college students. Therefore, it can be said that college students have become one of the core user groups of Gaotu, and the Kaotu App also focuses on scenarios such as postgraduate examinations.
After the traditional K12 education was blocked, Gaotu was eager to expand new businesses to make up for the huge loss of K12, and its product Kaotu App directly "took a shortcut" to move quark question bank content due to cost or time considerations. Gaotu's anxious attitude of rushing to transform is understandable, and the experience of its K12 education business is even somewhat sympathetic. However, as a listed company, it is not advisable for Gaotu's product Kaotu App to unabashedly copy the question bank of college students who carry friends, which will make it suffer both moral condemnation and legal costs, because the practice of directly moving content and copying business models directly disrupts the market order and is suspected of unfair competition.
It's not just that Gaotu wants to capture the college student user base. On the one hand, the number of college students is large enough, as of 2021, the total scale of higher education in the mainland has exceeded 44 million, they are the key customer groups in training, recruitment, overseas and other industries; On the other hand, college students will soon enter the society to become "white-collar" high-net-worth people, and because of this, leading Internet companies have business layouts for college students.
As an intelligent search tool platform for young people, Quark has always been deeply cultivated for various information service scenarios of different young people, and continues to innovate products to help users solve practical problems in life, study and work.
Nowadays, the Internet "continuous innovation products" can no longer only rely on simple UI/UE and other external function innovation, but involve the deep integration of content and services, such as Quark for the "Internet native" post-00s college students' learning characteristics, as early as a year ago launched the "University Pass" one-stop intelligent information service.
On the one hand, Quark "University Pass" aggregates massive content resources in university learning scenarios, providing high-quality content of different types and dimensions, including textbook analysis, famous school courseware, thesis proposals, thesis journals, and postgraduate examination questions, covering more than 500+ professional content, meeting the needs of college students in studying to find teaching materials, write papers, prepare for graduate school, etc., and facilitate college students to use according to their own disciplines and learning progress. On the other hand, on the basis of massive content, intelligent tools and content such as Quark network disk, Scan King, and Documents help college students efficiently integrate, extract and save the required content.
"University Pass" aggregates various learning needs scattered in the search scene, carries out tooling, productization and service-oriented upgrades, and forms a special product, content and service matrix to help college students improve their learning efficiency. This is also the overall development idea of Quark, for it, product functions have been copied has been difficult to circumvent, content and service has become its product advantages and competitive barriers, so it is willing to invest a lot of resources such as editorial manpower to do content integration and combing, editing and updating, such as college student question bank. After discovering that the resources accumulated at great cost were brutally carried by Kaotu App, Quark's mood to file a lawsuit in court for the first time to protect his rights is completely understandable.
Internet companies have no shortcuts, and deep cultivation is the right way
Quark's path is tantamount to "drinking on the head" for the test app and other players who want to "take a shortcut".
Today's Internet innovation is no longer just a functional innovation on the "surface" of products, but also an increasingly important end-to-end innovation based on the underlying content and service ecosystem. In recent years, phenomenal companies such as Douyin and Shein, as well as rising stars of increasingly popular products such as Quark and AutoNavi all rely on content and services to win, such as Douyin's Internet celebrity ecology, Shein's supply chain, Quark's content and services, AutoNavi travel and life services...
When content and services became the key to Internet innovation, the "plagiarism" model became increasingly difficult to work, and in previous years Copy 2 China this model worked, but in these years people have never seen a product that relies on plagiarism succeed.
As far as the search engine business that Quark and Kaotu App are involved in is concerned, the trend of "content is king" has become more and more obvious, because content in the mobile era is gathered in different super apps, and users' search behavior is becoming more and more fragmented, such as reading Xiaohongshu in life notes, watching Douyin for entertainment, shopping on Taobao Jingdong... The corresponding apps are all resolving the entrance position of search to a certain extent. Therefore, Baidu has made efforts to strengthen the content ecology by investing in content businesses such as Baijia, acquiring YY, and investing in Zhihu. Quark and Little Red Book shine in different vertical search fields, and also show the "power of content".
As soon as Quark came out, it clarified the strategy of rejuvenation, integrating content and service ecology for young people's use scenarios, habit preferences, value orientation, etc., from learning tools, content materials to college entrance examination volunteer tools, and gradually becoming an intelligent assistant serving young people's work, life and learning scenarios. Quark's efforts in this process are definitely not only iterative upgrades of product functions, but a large number of content and service layouts based on a deep understanding of young users, which is obviously not a copy of products, moving question banks can be copied successfully.
To put it more broadly, the barbaric growth stage of the Internet industry has long ended, relevant laws and regulations are becoming increasingly sound, and high-quality growth has become the main theme of the industry. It is not difficult to observe that the biggest opportunity for enterprises in the era of stock operation comes from deep cultivation and excellence, such as these years of intelligent cost reduction and efficiency increase by enterprises, and for example, grasping the vertical scene of segmented groups of people to do deep and thorough has become the consensus of large enterprises. Deep ploughing requires patience, time, commitment, and there are no shortcuts.
I hope that Gaotu and enterprises with similar ideas and practices can wake up through this lawsuit, change their thinking, return to the right track, and do what they should do, so that they can go further.