Wired article on Ebaums world’s stolen content

Dude, That is so not Funny

Viral media is all the rage these days, and Bauman runs one of the few viral sites actually making money. Without spending a penny on direct advertising, he’s turned the high school hobby he ran out of his bedroom into one of the Internet’s top-ranked humor sites, getting 1.2 million hits a day. There’s a television pilot in the can, a book deal in negotiation, and a potential pact to bring eBaum content to cell phones. Annual ad revenue has doubled over the past year to $10 million, and the only overhead is bandwidth and salaries: Bauman is becoming a rich man. He has 30 employees who handle the coding, marketing, financial affairs, and assorted office details. He drives a shiny black Porsche Carrera. Besides gobbling up real estate around town and gas wells in Kentucky, he sponsors heavyweight boxing champ Hasim “the Rock” Rahman.

But Bauman’s success hasn’t just brought him riches and trips to Vegas. It has also gotten him mired in a messy brawl. His site has been hacked, his office vandalized, and his mug distorted on numerous online sites dedicated to attacking him. “Maybe Zeus and Thor will smite that whore,” goes the theme song for the animated site EbaumsWorldSucks. “Oh, eBaum’s World is going dowwwwwwn!” Bauman is not laughing. “We get death threats all the time,” he says.

Why the fuss? Detractors say Bauman built his empire on stolen goods – snatching obscure media from around the Web, erasing or denying credits, slapping on the eBaum watermark, then selling millions of dollars’ worth of ads around the purloined content. “He steals work and makes all the money,” says Kevin Flynn, an animator who is considering joining a class-action suit against eBaum’s World. Flynn claims that Bauman ripped off his viral ditty “Peanut Butter Jelly Time.”

Bauman is fighting back. “We try to let everyone know this is crap,” he says. “We try to clear our name, but it’s fucking impossible.” He’s a charming rogue, but it’s not hard to understand why some folks are hoping he’ll wake up one day with black marker smeared all over his own face. He walks to a nearby computer to play his all-time favorite eBaum video, “The Prank.” It begins with a guy on a toilet who takes his freshly baked ammo and smears it on a sleeping friend. The friend retaliates, fluidly. Bauman, a lifelong prankster, mouths the dialog by heart. Asked where he got the video, he shrugs between laughs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I stole it from someplace.”

According to federal law, Web sites are generally allowed to host content uploaded by users without liability until someone files a take-down notice. There are now questions about whether this “safe harbor” applies to companies making money off uploaded content through ads. But when the Stern crisis hit, eBaum’s World was able to seize on, and exploit, the law. Bauman realized he could pluck content from across the Net and then take it down only when someone made a major stink – selling ads all the while.

But even though the corporations couldn’t intimidate him or slow his growth, Bauman soon discovered that the kids who created his content were another story. A scorned geek, it turns out, doesn’t bark. He bites.

LINDSAY LOHAN’S facial expression never changes. That’s what 23-year-old college student Derek Lutz noticed one day last October while surfing the Web. “It’s just a staring-forward-with-the-mouth-open kind of blank expression,” he explains.

Lutz decided to poke fun at the actress. He assembled several symmetrical shots, set the pictures into a looping sequence, and then uploaded it to a site for viral-media makers called You’re the Man Now Dog. “I just wanted to get some attention,” Lutz says.

It worked. After making a splash on YTMND, the Lohan Facial, as it was dubbed, popped up on eBaum’s World. While YTMND includes author credits with each clip, eBaum’s World didn’t bother to give Lutz a shout-out. “What really pissed me off was that they placed their own watermark on it,” Lutz says, “as if they created it.” Bauman says he was simply indicating that his site was hosting a video that had been submitted without a watermark. But Lutz was hardly alone in his anger. For years, contributors to viral-media sites including Something Awful and Newgrounds had reported similar treatment. “There’s a history of [eBaum's World] screwing over other authors and other sites,” says YTMND founder Max Goldberg.

Lutz says he emailed eBaum’s World requesting to have his work removed, but he got no reply. “After that,” he says, “the people on YTMND took it into their own hands.” A torrential denial-of-service attack was soon launched against eBaum’s World. Then, Bauman claims, delivery trucks showed up at his offices with pallets of empty boxes that pranksters had sent to sow confusion and clutter. Worse, Bauman tells of emailed death threats and of a suspicious white powder emptying from an envelope that Rinaudo opened at her desk.