Dude, That Is So Not Funny

Found on Wired on Wednesday, 27 September 2006
Browse Pranks

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.

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.

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."

Asked where he got the video, he shrugs between laughs. "I don't know," he says. "I stole it from someplace."

His site isn't that great at all; there are by far better ones around, and you see the videos on those ealier (of course, since he rips them off). The attitude he brings across is pretty clear: I do what I want. In times where humming a song can get you sued, it's puzzling that a copyright violation of that size can go on without legal problems, because the original creators cannot afford a nationwide media industry fighting for their rights. In my opinion, this is real piracy, because he makes a lot of money with the work of other people; unlike the usual filesharing (as long as it's non-profit).