EBaum's World is evil!

[Michael Hill]

If you guys haven't heard, there is an internet war going on right now with at least twelve forums with Eric Bauman (The creator of Ebaum's World) The forums are YTMND, 4chan, adult swim, livejournal, KNova, Fark, GameFAQs, LUE (Though part of GameFAQs), LUELinks, LivingWithStyle, SomethingAwful, and D-Day (All with a combined userbase of about 100,000 people).

Now before the bad rep points are thrown, let me explain why this is happening...

Eric Bauman has been stealing work from artists since its existance. It has been threatened to be sued by Disney, Peanuts, Hasbro, Barney, the Smurfs and many more. He refuses to take down the stolen work (which he also threw his logo on). He stole artwork from SomethingAwful's Photoshop Phriday contests (which you guys should check out, they're really hilarious), the badger, badger, badger animation (which was only granted permission to be hosted on select sites), and most recently, from a YTMND of Lindsay Lohan's never changing facial expressions.

There was another (i thought) funny animation made about him stealing on www.ebaumsworldsucks.com
Bauman has also posted about this whole thing here... http://ebaumsworld.com/response-01-10-05.html , which is probably mostly lies anyway considering Rochester Doesn't have a cyber-crime team...

What are your guys' thoughts?

Also, most importantly, he has been making over $6000 per day on other peoples work from ads.

[Ashley Christine]

I say... I am not too worried.

He still has to put time and effort into the site. And he prolly has to have some sort of pretty hefty server.

Its not like he is sitting around all day doing nothing [I would thing]

It is not right to steal... but I dont think it was his intent.
I atleast would like to give every person on earth the benfit of the doubt. =/

Anyways, it would be sad to see an amusing source of entertainment go down.

[Cory]

Probably the same people complaining about his copyright violations and whatnot are huge illegal peer to peer software users as well.

aint irony great?

[Noah Melamed]

This has the potential to get very flamey and proabbly doesn't belong here in the first place, perhaps moderated discussion?

I do not consider myself an artist but I have worked hard with several of my cohorts to create some very popular flash videos. Eric Bauman takes various forms of stolen media, watermarks it as his own, and then reaps the profits gained by the advertising on his portal.

Newgrounds.com provides a similiar portal to ebaum's with one key difference. Content on Newgrounds can be fairly contested and removed at the authors request and credit is given to all those invovled in a piece of media's production.

Originally Posted by Cory

Probably the same people complaining about his copyright violations and whatnot are huge illegal peer to peer software users as well.

aint irony great?

I strongly resent such an implication. I would hope that the artists who create media for the web have an even higher level of understanding for the importance of appropriate ownership and copyright.

As a final note this "internet war" has had aspects involving acts of cyber crime. Members of YTMND banded together to crash the Ebaums portal Board. I do not condone these actions and hope all members of CD would realise the foolishness and the legal implications of such actions.

[sciguy125]

Originally Posted by Cory

Probably the same people complaining about his copyright violations and whatnot are huge illegal peer to peer software users as well.

Originally Posted by Noah Melamed

I would hope that the artists who create media for the web have an even higher level of understanding for the importance of appropriate ownership and copyright.

Disclaimer: the following is a personal opinion

I don't really have an issue with all of this unless money is being made. I think the laws should be rewritten as such.

Bauman is taking work and making money with it. That is where the problem is. If he was just displaying it on his website. Either as a repository of sorts or just a collection, I wouldn't care too much about this situation.