New owners of eBaum's World fire ebaum and his staff

http://blog.ebaum.tv/2009/01/welcome.html

by vaksel • 17 years ago

54 73 17 years ago

blog.ebaum.tv

quoderat8• 17 years ago

The more I read about it, the less I am convinced that capitalism is all ponies and manna from heaven, like some here believe.

And it's close to its end, anyway, at least as we know it. No, I am not some raving conspiracy theorist. Automation and innovation almost guarantee that the world in 100 years will look drastically different than it does now.

unalone2• 17 years ago

So Eric Bauman makes a site that profits from stealing other people's content. A song is written insulting him. An entire website blames their mayhem on him in revenge. He is caught altering watermarks and removing citations. He gets enough money to buy an apartment building and sponsor a boxer. His father writes insulting emails. Then suddenly another shady company buys him out and ruins his company, and it's proof that capitalism is bad? On the contrary. This is excellent evidence that the system regulates itself.

TooMuchNick• 17 years ago

Except, I'd think, for the bit where Eric Bauman makes even more money in the sale and faces no charges for a decade of illegal business that funneled capital away from the creators who deserved it.

Dear lord, I think I just gave myself enough cognitive dissonance to stop using Bittorrent for hours.

But my point is that Bauman hasn't really repaid his debt to society. He's been shamed, and a lot of us are glad for that, but only by yet another corporate raider who will likely not redeem Ebaum's World the way College Humor redeemed itself after the IAC purchase.

quoderat8• 17 years ago

"This is excellent evidence that the system regulates itself."

As it regulated itself with the current financial and economic crisis?

Like AIG regulated itself?

Like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, et al.?

rsheridan6• 17 years ago

Bottom line: Eric Bauman got rich by stealing other people's content. I don't know how this provides evidence that the system regulates itself.

Of course, in a truly self-regulated system, there would be no such thing as copyright, so Eric Bauman wouldn't have been stealing in the first place.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

Capitalism I think is as much a necessary evil as democracy, we know it isn't perfect but we've found it to be very very hard to come up with a working alternative.

The best way to prove your point of course is to live it, and I'm very curious what proposal you have to replace capitalism. Socialism has been tried in the sovblock countries and it failed (due to greed and incompetence), so it seems that capitalism is better capable of dealing with those two human qualities.

The financial crisis - as bad as it is - is not nearly as bad as the situation that existed in the former USSR and its satellite states. China may come to some middle ground between capitalism and communism/socialism but they have some way to go before they can call themselves an open society.

What is your alternative ?

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

Do you even know what socialism, capitalism and communism are?

You appear to be stuck in the dogmatic anti-communist teachings that date back to the cold war.

All western countries are socialist, capitalism simply doesn't exist. There is a varying degree of socialism in the west, the US notoriously the least and its citizens suffer for it. A study showed that the UK's poor is healthier than the US's richest and pay less for the privilege. An American citizen pays twice as much as a UK citizen yet is sicker. The US does have better cancer treatment rates, but awful care for basic conditions like heart disease because you have to pay for it.

I moved to Canada and I've noticed one thing, everyone here is happier than people back in the UK and there's still free health care to boot. I would never live in the US because they don't have free health care, I'm a naturally healthy person, but I don't want to worry about falling off my ladder when I'm working.

You site the USSR, however they didn't have a financial crisis, they stopped themselves developing it's a completely different thing. The USSR was a perverted form of communism, they believed that everyone should have a job and then stopped allowing people to lose their job, this meant that when combine harvesters were becoming widespread in the west, the USSR refused because it would cost people jobs. Ironically, most of the people who would have lost their job could have been trained to fix the machines that replaced them!

Similar problems exist in the west. There was mass complaints here in Canada about the closure of a GM plant that produced 4 speed gearboxes. I found this absolutely absurd because I didn't even know 4 speeds existed, I thought they went the way of the dodo! I learnt on a 5 speed, my dad had a 6 speed and Volkswagen is bringing out a 7 speed. People wanted the plant to stay open, producing something that was nearly half as efficient as modern technology! That's exactly why the USSR failed, and exactly why the Chinese are succeeding, because the Chinese are working for the improvement of the whole and if it had to be done the government would close down entire industries.

Thankfully the GM plant is closed, sadly some people are out of their jobs but either they'll begin working in the plants producing 5/6 speeds, in a new plant producing 7 speeds or they'll move to another business.

It's like the phone companies trying to block VoIP usage. VoIP is the next step, instead of trying to block it phone companies should be embracing it, offering 'digital phone' for free when you subscribe to high-speed internet! It'd nail skype and give them great business. Thankfully our system isn't going the way of the USSR and governments are preventing phone companies from blocking VoIP traffic, meaning technology advances even if it will end up costing jobs in the short term.

If you haven't realised, you're already living in the alternative to capitalism!

jfarmer• 17 years ago

Look what you started.

evdawg• 17 years ago

eBaum has a reputation for plagiarism and copyright infringement-- what goes around comes around I guess.

chris112• 17 years ago

Yeah, I would have more sympathy if it was someone else. It sounds like they were just tossed out on the street. I do find it somewhat ironic that Eric accused the new C.E.O. of basically stealing some of his personal computer files when he took all the company's computers without letting staff remove files. Link to description of eviction:http://blog.ebaum.tv/2009/01/so-this-is-how-it-all-went-down...

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

Personal files shouldn't be on a company computer, simple as. I know ebaum's situation is slightly different being a startup and all, however in reality there should never be personal files on a company computer even if you own the company.

kwamenum86• 17 years ago

In the past couple of years their site format changed and they began to look more like a break.com.

jim-greer• 17 years ago

I guess our songs reached the heavens!

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/ebaumsworld

"Once upon a time, upon the internet, There was a guuyyyy. A very deeply flawed man, They called him Eric Bauman. He was a total asshole, And nobody knows why."

chris112• 17 years ago

Does anyone know how much actual content was stolen? I'm wondering why someone would pay a minimum of 15 million in cash to acquire a company where most of the property has been stolen. It looks like the legal penalties have been basically inconsequential for Eric.It also looks like HandHeld Entertainment has a good chance of keeping the content/stealing, but if that is what they plan on doing, I really question their ethics.

jlouis• 17 years ago

You may or may not like eBaum. But I think his new company will prevail in the long run. The modern worlds companies are extremely different from an old taylorism-ideology. You need the right people. Now eBaum is just going to rebuild the new sites in a couple of days, which is easy since they've done it before. They will probably make it better as well. They know how to gather content (legality of this content i'll rather not comment on).

New owners of eBaum's World fire ebaum and his staff

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