eBaum's World
| Company type | Corporation |
|---|---|
| Industry | Web Based |
| Founded | 1998 |
| Founder | Eric Bauman |
| Headquarters | Rochester, NY USA |
Key people | Eric Bauman, CEO/Chairman Neil Bauman, VP |
| Products | Ebaumsworld.co |
| Revenue | Unknown |
Number of employees | 20 |
| Website | www.ebaumsworld.com |
eBaum's World (subtitled "Media for the Masses") is a website featuring videos, Macromedia Flash cartoons, and Flash games, all of which are taken from other websites and rebranded with the eBaum's logo, as well as other humor material. The site was founded in 1998 by Eric "eBaum" Bauman (born 1980). The vice-president of the site is his father, Neil Bauman (born 1941). According to the New York Department of State, Bauman's website is part of a corporation. eBaum's World Inc. is a Domestic Business Corporation, based in Rochester, New York. Registered to the same address is eBaum's Holdings LLC, and eBaum's Real Estate Development LLC. It was incorporated in 2002.
In an interview, Eric Bauman has claimed that in high school he was a poor student and a prankster, playing practical jokes such as bringing universal television remotes to school and using them in class. The website itself began as an inside joke between him and his fellow classmates, but eventually became a comedy website. Bauman dropped out of school to pursue this pastime of running this domain.
eBaum's World is one of the more highly-visited sites on the Internet. Some of the most popular content on the site are soundboards, which are web pages of recordings of celebrities saying words and phrases, intended to be used for prank phone calls. As some of the celebrities featured on the soundboards are associated with Viacom, this has led to an ongoing (as of November 2005) dispute between Viacom and Bauman; Neil Bauman has challenged Viacom to risk looking like bullies.
The site also features "Forum Fun", a set of images to be used on online forums for multiple purposes; the majority of these images are taken from other websites and rebranded with the eBaum's logo.
The site also has games and animations, as well as jokes, a chatroom and a store. Since the site receives many emails with content to add, there is a section called "Moron Mail" for submissions that do not meet the Baumans' standards. eBaum's World has a very large forum community, with thousands of members and over one million posts. In the forum there are areas to post pictures, videos, and high scores for games (among other subforums). Every Friday, Bauman selects some of the forum content for display on the site's main page, along with 2-3 jokes. It should be noted that the majority of this content is taken from other websites rather than created by the forum users.
Controversy
Critics of the site point out that a significant amount of the content—in particular the Flash content—is taken without consent from other Internet sources, and that Bauman replaces any original mark of authorship with the phrase "hosted by eBaumsworld", decompiling them if necessary. They also claim that Bauman does not have the right to use or profit from the work of others, and point out that Bauman's site draws considerable advertising revenue in large part due to the flash content on the site. Some people have made their hate of him public. In response to such criticisms, Bauman has claimed that he believes that most material on the Internet is public domain and he is doing a service by providing it all in the same place. His critics argue that this is false, because according to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, sufficiently unique works are copyrighted as soon as they are created, unless explicitly released into the public domain. They also point out that much of the content on Bauman's site, such as the Monkeyball game are copyright, and so clearly are not in the public domain; similarly, rebranded versions of the FenslerFilm GI Joe animations remain on eBaum's as of November 2005, accompanied by a fourteen-month-old Cease-and-Desist letter from Hasbro.
While critics have described Bauman's actions as copyright infringement at best, and outright theft at worst, to date there is no evidence of a successful legal action against him. Critics point out that the sources for some of the content on the site are small, independent sites which lack the resources to successfully prosecute. Many claim that the owner ignores requests to remove content despite having a disclaimer to the contrary. As a result, several people have resorted to attacks which discredit Eric Bauman for such practices, such as found on a site started after a recent clash between eBaums World and Something Awful united with several other websites [1]. eBaum's World has been accused of stealing content from the sites, and creating malicious code to perform a simple Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against Something Awful.
Some of the content has been considered distasteful by many, including the "Epilepsy Test" (an animation constantly flashing black and white with the word 'epilepsy' on it), a prank flash that is a parody of the Where's Waldo series, and Pentagon Strike, which challenged the government's report of the Pentagon crash on 9/11. Bauman has complied with several of the higher-profile requests to remove some of the content or place a warning on it, but he does not, in the eyes of many people, take criticism seriously. There is a section on the site called "Hate Mail" which exhibits emails "with all bad grammar and typos left intact" sent to him containing negative remarks by visitors. Bauman does not directly refute or denounce the opinions of these visitors; he merely places it in the public domain.
Something Awful
In November 2005 Something Awful's founder, Richard 'Lowtax' Kyanka, contacted eBaum's World with a request to remove original works created by Something Awful members. When the requests to remove original works were ignored, Lowtax encouraged those who had created the images to register as users at the site's message board in order to manually and personally request removal of the works. Users were told specifically not to use this encouragement for a justification of malicious activity or debasement. In response to the influx of requests for removal, an administrator at eBaumsworld inserted JavaScript code into the template for every page on the site (no claim of malicious, external interference with eBaum's World servers has been made, indicating that an authorized user implemented the malicious code). The inserted code was recorded by internet users, and can be seen here. The items constituting the inserted Javascript are:
a=new Image();a.src="http://archives.somethingawful.com/index.php"; a=new Image();a.src="http://archives.somethingawful.com/search.php"; a=new Image();a.src="http://archives.somethingawful.com/member.php?action=loginform";
Each web page opened on ebaumsworld called upon this set of commands to create traffic of three times the amount on Something Awful's server. Notably, the pages were served and downloaded, but never displayed on the end users' computers. The first two pages retrieved were index.php and search.php from Something Awful in order to increase traffic load, and the third of which was implemented in order to create server processing load. The login page specifically incorporated a CAPTCHA which is generated randomly for every request made upon the page. The subsequent flood of page requests (and subsequent creation of CAPTCHAs) caused noticeable slowdown of Something Awful's forums systems. As this code was most likely implemented by the ebaumsworld.com webserver admin, such an agent would be aware of the overwhelming load created by CAPTCHAs and off-site requests. Something Awful's CAPTCHA generation was disabled for some time, before the login page was relocated to an alternative URL.
The actions taken by eBaums world can be considered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. While the full motivations for these actions are unknowable, they were made subsequent to repeated requests by Something Awful members to remove original material. Furthermore, the concealment of the loading of this material from the viewers of any ebaumsworld.com page indicates the inconspicuousness with which the author wished for it to operate and the target represents a website with whom ebaumsworld.com held some recent emnity. It is important to note that while these actions may or may not be considered a DDoS, the apparent motivations of the author and the attack's consequences are congruent with this classification.
This ordeal was the impetus for the creation of the flash video at the website http://www.ebaumsworldsucks.com/, a parody clip made to highlight the allegedly underhanded actions of ebaumsworld.com.
Viacom
Viacom once threatened eBaum's World with a lawsuit, asking the website owner to remove material related to Judge Judy, Dr. Phil, Howard Stern and Tim Meadows; Eric Bauman refused, stating that Viacom would look like bullies (see external link). When another party asked that material related to Fred Rogers be removed, however, Bauman complied, stating that Rogers was not a fit subject for parody. However, in spite of this the site still contains Fred Rogers-related content, specifically the Mr. Rogers Soundboard.
Trivia
- The website was started as a prank in Bauman's junior year of high school.
- Ebaumsworld.com is on Alexa 500.
- In 2005, Bauman had earned enough money from his website to sponsor a professional boxer. He has also purchased an $850,000 office building, and has a staff of twenty.
- The Ebaumsworld.com forum registration was still disabled 4 days after users from Something Awful Forums invaded it to mass request their original work be removed from the site, after emails from Richard Kyanka, the owner of Something Awful, were ignored. Registration on the forums has since been reopened.
- Howard Stern has mentioned the website on his TV show.
- The URLs http://www.somaforum.com http://www.Hai2U.com http://www.lemonparty.org/sexygirl.jpg and http://www.albinoblacksheep.com are censored from the ebaumsworld.com forum.
