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Like a black cloak caught in the midnight winds of winter I will flutter through the window of Mark McGwire's home and secret myself within his drop ceiling. Thusly concealed, I will wait for him to slumber. While he sleeps with parted lips I will slowly lower a wire down to his mouth and let gravity carry a fortune in anabolic steroids down his gullet. He will drink heartily, for the taste suits him well. By dawn he will be a cube of muscle and hate. It will take only a shove and a look at your photograph and you will have a primal destructive force unleashed in your direction. Synthetic hormones will boil his brain until he has no will, no desire, but to crush you into a meaty paste beneath his cubical body.
The funny part is that you guys defended the "copyright" of a guy who made his picture by stealing from magazines and photographers. If you defend copyright, you're opening the floodgates to destroying almost all the cool sh*t on the internet. Do you really think we'd survive a lawsuit for the trillion Mario sites? For the use of the Muhammad Hassan theme? For sampling ANY musician with deep pockets? For running whole scenes of Family Guy? Find a better reason to hate ebaums (there are plenty) and quit being hypocrites on this intellectual property sh*t.
arte, max never said he had nothing to do with any of this. What he said was he had nothing to do with the death threats and people ddosing ebaums will and going to their property lol of their own free will. He is in no legal trouble but that doesn't mean he's not against ebaums world's practices, read his reply to neil bauman again...
inkdrinker there is a difference between intellectual property that is used as parody as so many people have mentioned, and this lindsay lohan doesn't change facial expressions was a compilation of various images. It was a creative "product" so to speak. Whereas if ebaums world took a family guy scene just like ytmnd, nobody would be in an uproar over that. There are huge differences here.
There's a huge ARTISTIC difference. The legal difference is very very slim. Don't act like I don't understand the implications of sampling, okay? Sampling is valid art. It's also a sure way to get sued if you don't clear your samples with the original artist. There's no way we can have it both ways here. Either we're pirates and we make kick-ass stuff and copyrights be damned, or we care about intellectual property and we delete almost every single site here.
Freemark, do you think I can't tell the difference? But it's a moral difference. Not a legal one. Just because Max is a good guy and this site is sometimes funny doesn't mean illegal is now legal. Don't debate me unless you can dredge up some court cases to prove me wrong. (And while this isn't making Max money, you might notice he's selling ads. And shirts. And sponsorship slots.)
Basically, I'm saying I don't dispute the ARTISTIC AND MORAL validity of jacking people's sh*t to make YTMNDs. It's a shame we're talking LEGAL. Which is what EVERYONE was talking about before I backed them into a corner on this. DMCA doesn't make provisions for "it stole AND it sucks" or "it stole AND its creator is a douchebag." If YTMND actually tries to pursue some kind of copyright protection bullsh*t, it's going to be the beginning of the end.
Exactly. I'm all for using stolen material. Because, like I said, I respect the artistic validity of it. I think stolen art is a fantastic creation, and I think recontextualizing it is important. But let's not be litigious DMCA douchebags over stuff that we stole ourselves. I've said it before, but destroy ebaums because they suck sh*t. Not because they steal.
"parody does provide some protection and to some extent, depending on the circumstances, parody may permit the use of copyrighted or trademarked material" - okay, now take this "some extent" and "depending" and "may protect" and put it up against high-priced lawyers. The legal protection of parody is limited and fuzzy. And plenty of what we host is NOT parody, including clips lifted from TV shows in their entirety, for example.
Ottervomit: Nobody's disputing that here. Nobody wants to get rid of the sites that violate copyright. But how can we violate copyright and consider the whole world fair use then flip the f*ck out and cry DMCA any time someone takes our work? Anybody who tries to explain the difference between ebaums lift and our lifts see my above posts. Artistic and moral validity aren't what we're talking about. We're talking strictly legal.
Here's a link for you guys - http://www.negativland.com/fairuse.html
Negativland are a group that uses samples from popular music to create collage pieces.. not unlike what we are doing here. Read that link and more here - http://www.negativland.com/intprop.html to see the kinds of issues they have had with "fair use" laws.
Inkdrinker: Nobody here is thinking of suing ebaumsworld. But there is a difference between us using material to amuse the other users on this site, and ebaums using it to make millions on advertising. The fact that he is making ludicrous amounts of money off things lifted from hobby sites just pisses more than a few people off.
see, I dont know what you guys are mad about, but I wasnt so much mad that someone else used the YTMND stuff, its put out there and designed to make people laugh, I was pissed off about the fact that he makes money off of it. THAT is the only thing that made me mad. sharing is cool, but not when you share and then the other dude makes 2,000,000 a year on it... (obviously he doesnt make that because of this one ytmnd, but its the point)
Legally speaking, I wouldn't care to postulate on Eric Bauman's practices or anyone else's for that matter, as I am not qualified. One must assume however that since its been stated that he has a "team of lawyers" that someone has challenged him before in a legal arena and failed. So legally he is probably in the clear somehow, even though there is no doubt he is a douschebag and almost universally hated. A successful legal assault against ebaums could backfire on YTMND considerably.