Juvenall Wilson

Let me start of by saying Eric Bauman is a king asshat. He ranks right up there with with others such as Kevin Trudeau, Jim Bakker and 419 Scammers. His site eBaum’s World has been stealing the creative works of others for years. He just slaps his own logo on them, takes all the credit and makes a killing in the process. Even worse, he manages to get away with it because he goes after small, independent artists with no way to defend themselves.

Well, apparently things finally came to a boil yesterday and the war was started.

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, 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, Something Awful, 4chan, adult swim, KNova, Fark, GameFAQs (mainly the notorious private community LUE and its independent sister community LUElinks), LivingWithStyle, and D-Day 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 MySpace, Gamespy, IGN, and Gaia Online. 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. This did not, however, prevent the forums from being compromised and redirected to YTMND, porn sites, and other locations. Still, eBaum’s World forum moderators have made it clear that they will continue to ban spammers and other troublemakers.

I honestly think this is just the beginning of a long, long battle. I also have it on good authority that two Firefox extensions are being tossed together to try and rape eBaum. The first is a mimic of their attack on SomethingAwful. Basically, it’s going to download flash files from the eBaum servers when the user visits any page. The second, and the one I really like, will replace all of eBaum’s adverts with those of SomethingAwful and Fark.

With any luck, this will be the beginning of the end of eBaum.