eBaum's World and the First Watermark War

FEB 15 2001 · 12:00

Numa Numa, Gary Brolsma's 2004 webcam lip-sync to O-Zone's Dragostea Din Tei. The Newgrounds Flash original was scraped by eBaum's, watermarked, and rehosted, the move that defined the forum era's villain economy. Place: Rochester, New York Figures: Eric Bauman, founder · Neil Bauman, father and business partner Eric Bauman launches eBaum's World from Rochester in February 2001 as a content-aggregation site. The model is simple and, for several years, very profitable: scrape GIFs, Flash animations, and sound clips from the rest of the web, stamp an eBaum's World watermark across each one, host on their own servers, sell display ads against the traffic. Within two years the site claims tens of millions of monthly visitors. The aggregation is not new. The watermark is. eBaum's brands stolen content as its own and removes the original creators' attribution as a side effect of the brand stamp. The site becomes the first industrial-scale theft operation directed at the animated GIF — a format whose lossless re-encode and absent metadata make ownership claims nearly impossible to enforce after redistribution.