eBaum's World
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| 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.com |
| Revenue | $6+ a day |
Number of employees | 20 |
| Website | www.ebaumsworld.com |
eBaum's World (subtitled "Media for the Masses") is a highly controversial website featuring videos, Macromedia Flash cartoons, and Flash games (all of which are taken from other sites, typically without permission). 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 among 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 agree with the Baumans' opinions. 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 all of the content, particularly 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, associates of Bauman have 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 most of the content on Bauman's site, such as the Monkeyball game are copyrighted, and so clearly are not in the public domain; similarly, rebranded versions of the FenslerFilm GI Joe animations remain on eBaum's as of January 2006, accompanied by a sixteen-month-old Cease-and-Desist letter from Hasbro.
There have been occurrences of mockery and subsequent banning upon the original creators' requests to have their work removed. [1]
While critics have described Bauman's actions as copyright infringement at best, and outright theft at worst, to date there has been no 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 their content despite having a disclaimer to the contrary. As a result, his detractors have resorted to attacks which discredit Eric Bauman for such practices, such as a Flash animation created after a recent clash between eBaums World and Something Awful, united with several other websites [2]. eBaum's World has been accused of stealing content from the sites and creating malicious code to perform a 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 spread a conspiracy theory over the September 11 attacks. 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.
eBaum's World recently changed their watermark from "ebaumsworld.com" to "This image is hosted on ebaumsworld.com", perhaps in an attempt to appease detractors.
ebaumsworldsucks.com
On January 14, 2006 Eric Bauman of eBaum's World contacted the domain registrant of ebaumsworldsucks.com attempting to exert a claim over the domain. Additional to his claim, his email made the statement that he would be in control over the DNS settings of the domain within 72 hours.
With the help of knowledgeable parties on the Something Awful forums, the registrant of the domain tailored the content of the page to remove any potential avenues for tenuous legal claims. Domain names which append "sucks" to a known trademark seem to be defended under US legal precendent as valid forms of criticism. (Taubman v. Mishkoff) Other notable examples of so called "gripe sites" include paypalsucks.com and bestbuysux.com, both of which have thus far resisted any legal proceedings.
The current registrant presently holds no intention of transferring control of the domain in the face of eBaum's World's threat.
Sega
In early January 2006, eBaum's World edited their page showing Sega's 'Super Monkey Ball Mini' game, apparently at the behest of Sega. The page no longer offers this game, but instead declares "You're a homo". The game in question was a proprietary work by Sega and permission was not given to eBaum's World to host or include the game. To compound the theft of intellectual property, eBaum's World directly embedded the game from Sega's servers into the eBaum's World website, assuring eBaum's World of advertisement profits without actually paying bandwidth costs associated with the game. Reference - note the lower bottom transfer bar. Advertisements are not included as they were filtered by this user.)
The infringement was reportedly brought to the attention of Sega Corp by a Something Awful member.
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 unknown, they were made subsequently 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 controversy sparked the Flash video at the website eBaumsWorldSucks.com [3], a parody created by Something Awful members Altf4 and Neil Cicierega to highlight the allegedly underhanded actions of ebaumsworld.com. On January 13, 2006, Bauman attempted to persuade the domain owner to remove the site and forward visitors to ebaumsworld.com. He claimed ownership to the domain name because it includes "eBaumsWorld", a trademark owned by his company. Contrary to his assertion of ownership, U.S. court rulings have favored the original "-sucks.com" domain holders [4]. Bauman later repeated this threat to the flash creator. Bauman claimed that the site is drawing a significant amount of criticism towards him.
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 [5]. 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.
YTMND
YTMND is one of the most recent targets of eBaum's World for content theft. The image content of the page "Lindsay Lohan Doesn't Change Facial Expressions" [6], which has since been edited in response to the theft, was hosted and displayed by eBaum's World without the consent of the site creator and edited to display the site's watermark. A large number of YTMND users were infuriated by the theft, creating anti-eBaum's World YTMND sites and organizing a raid on eBaum's World regardless of YTMND's lack of a static forum. As of January 7, 2006 YTMND users have persuaded others from Newgrounds, 4chan, adult swim, KNova, Fark, D-Day, GameFAQs (mainly the notorious private community LUE and its independent sister community LUElinks), to help with the raid, although no direct link can be made from the other web communities to the attack as of yet. Other web communities have been rumored to be in the raid; these include Genmay, Interflop, MySpace, Gamespy, IGN, Something Awful and Gaia Online. The attackers made use of a variety of electronic methods, including spamming, pinging, and distributed denial of service attacks, as well as physical means of protest such as prank calls and vandalism of the eBaum's World headquarters. Two LUElinks forum members who lived near the headquarters looked up the address in the phone book, and documented their visit to the headquarters with several photos. They taped two signs to the door, taking photos, but removed the signs immediately after taking the photos, leaving no physical harm to the building (photos were hosted on a YTMND page but it was soon deleted). The eBaum's World forums have repeatedly shut down over the course of the attack and its chatbox has been backlogged, but in response to the early forum spamming, Bauman has since modified the forum's registration process to prevent mischief. Still, the eBaum's World forum moderators have made it clear that they will continue to ban spammers and other troublemakers. This was such a problem, even Fark removed eBaums from their Friends list. These events are the opening salvos in what is referred to by many people as World Wide Web War I.
On January 10, 2006 Eric posted a message on his web site [7] claiming he was the victim of cyberterrorism. Furthermore, Bauman has claimed he has the full rights to the animation in question:
Q. Did ebaumsworld.com steal this animation?
A. Absolutely not. We received this animation as a contest submission by someone claiming to be the original author. We have a digitally signed and dated consent and release form that was filled out by the author in question. In fact, it is our policy for ALL content we receive to be accompanied by this consent and release form before we feature it on the site. We also log contact information, the originating IP address and any information given to us about the original creator of any content, including any other proof of origin the author can provide. Beyond all of this, our editorial staff manually researches the origin of the content looking for references to or appearances of the same content on other websites. Any discrepancies are researched fully before a decision to post the material is made.
He also claims to respect copyright laws and honors requests to remove content. Ironically, eBaum's World has a webpage [8] dedicated to the copyright infringement and cease and desist letters that they themselves have ignored in the past. In addition, Weebl (of Badger Badger Badger fame) has claimed otherwise. [9] It should also be noted that hotlinking directly to a game with a copyright note on the bottom of it strongly contradicts that claim (see here).
A copyright notice was later put on the original Lindsay Lohan animation ("© 2005 Derek Lutz" [10]). On January 11, by the original creator's request, eBaum's World removed the image from the page — however, for a while the image still existed on the server, with a modified file name: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/images2/lohanfacialfucuguyz187.gif (link is dead). Note the file name has a message, Lohan-facial-fuc-u-guyz-187, meaning "fuck you guys, 187". The number "187" is the numeric code for "murder" used by law enforcement, which may be interpreted as a death threat from eBaum's World itself.
Two cease and desist emails [11] were sent to YTMND's webmaster, Max, on the 10th from Neil Bauman (Eric's father) concerning the actions of YTMND's users. Both letters threatened police involvement and litigation, were filled with ad hominem attacks (Bauman likened YTMND users to "pathetic, pimply-faced maladjusted pre-teens whose parents don't love them ... [whose] best Saturday night date takes AA batteries ... Obviously you have lost possession of your Yiddish cup ... Please feel free to post this if you have the gonads." "Yiddishe kop" is Yiddish slang for a Jewish mind. It is undertermined as to whether or not Bauman was making an anti-Semitic remark, or if he is himself Jewish and improperly invoking a reference sure to be lost on YTMND's users.).
As of late January 11, 2006 Eric Bauman agreed to remove the image, after the original author sent a cease-and-desist letter via certified mail [12] claiming he had, in fact, violated U.S. Copyright Law.
Trivia
- The website was started as a prank in Bauman's junior year of high school.
- 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 a $150,000 home, and has a staff of twenty.
- The eBaumsworld.com forum registration was still disabled 4 days after users from Something Awful Forums registered 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 radio show.
- The URLs http://www.somethingawful.com/, http://www.fark.com/, http://www.somaforum.com, http://www.newgrounds.com, and http://www.albinoblacksheep.com are censored from the ebaumsworld.com forum. In light of recent events, http://www.ytmnd.com/ has also been censored.
- In January 2006, Drew Curtis removed eBaum's World from Fark's list of "Site Friends".