EBaum’s World has recently hit the headlines due to celebration at the site being taken over by new owners. The cause for celebration being the allegations of content stealing by eBaum’s World. But is YouTube actually any different?
EBaum’s World
EBaum’s World is a long-running and very popular site. Popular in terms of page views but not so popular with content creators. This is because for years there has been widespread accusations aimed in eBaum’s direction concerning the stealing on original content.
For the uninitiated, eBaum’s World is a depository for funny videos, games, pictures, and jokes. It’s mostly user-generated but with site editors also taking responsibility for uploading and managing material.
Alleged Content Stealing
EBaum’s World has fostered a terrible reputation over the years due to the alleged stealing of content from other sites and creators. This content, including video, is then re-branded with an eBaum’s World logo and passed off as original to the site. There have been many such incidents over the years.
The content creators claiming they’ve been wronged by the site include many individuals as well as media companies such as Viacom. The latter of which is currently embroiled in a $1 billion legal battle with Google over copyrighted clips uploaded to YouTube.
ZVUE Take Over
The owners of eBaum’s World, Eric Bauman included, sold the site to the ZVUE Corporation in August, 2008, for $15 million cash and $2.5 million in stock. On January 31, ZVUE took over, fired everyone at the company and booted them out without any notice.
This has once again brought up the question of whether the site was infringing copyrights and doing a disservice to content creators everywhere by claiming material as its own. Basically, those who hated eBaum’s World for these reasons have celebrated the demise of the old management team.
EBaum’s World Vs. YouTube
As Muhammad Saleem at Mashable questions, is the behavior of eBaum’s World really that much different from that of YouTube? They both had a problem with copyrighted material appearing on the sites, and both have had legal trouble because of it. Why, he asks, do we celebrate the demise of one site and will the other on to success?
But, there are differences between the two.
For starters YouTube is a much bigger concern, with hours of video footage being uploaded to the site every second. This makes it harder, if not impossible, for YouTube to filter out all of the copyrighted material before it appears on the site. After it’s up, the material is usually taken down pretty quickly, as anyone who has embedded it in the meantime finds out to their cost.
There is also the fact that YouTube has never taken content created by someone else and claimed it as original or exclusive to the site. Users obviously do this all the time but YouTube is never complicit in these offenses.
Lastly, there’s a big difference, at least in the minds of your average Web user, between content stolen from a big media company and content stolen from an independent creator. People naturally have less sympathy for a company with resources as vast as Viacom than they do for one person working on their own to produce content.
