Eric Bauman was a notorious thief of content from around the net, slapping a watermark on mirrored content, doing nothing to credit authors, and not sharing revenue as he got rich off the ads displayed alongside. He didn’t seek permission, and would ignore the requests of authors to remove their content.

He sold his site for millions, but now the karma police have caught up; he and his team were brutally laid off by the new owner. He’s blogging about it like he deserves some kind of sympathy, and the comments are a glorious indulgence. It’s the internet at its most self-satisfied as his victims and others who’ve wished ill on him over the years queue up to piss on his corpse.

I appreciate their joy, since Eric Bauman is clearly a shitbag bursting at the seams, stealing content without remorse is appalling, and he appears to have trained an entire community of moron followers to believe that theft is ‘just how the internet works’. That said, I am baffled as to why — in the age of the DMCA — legal recourse has apparently not succeeded against him. He’s been operating for a very long time, after all.

Last word to Ferd from the comments:

Some guy stole your files and now he says they’re his? And he’s going
to use them on the internet to make money?

Hm. What are these ten thousand spoons doing here?

See also: Comments on ‘So this is how it all went down…’ and Comments on ‘Welcome’.