Andy "Waxy" Baio has been threatened with a lawsuit for hosting a parodical video about Bill Cosby called "House of Cosbys." In the video, a Bill Cosby fan clones the comedian several times, and each Cosby comes out more degraded than the last. It's clearly parody and clearly fair use, but the originators of the series shut down their effort when Bill Cosby's lawyers threatened them.
But Andy isn't backing down — instead, he's vowing to defend this in court. He's also collecting videos of well-funded TV shows parodying Cosby, and has already compiled a list that includes Family Guy, the Simpsons, South Park, Saturday Night Live and MAD Magazine — none of which have received the legal threats that Cosby's lawyer seems to reserve for independent creators.
More than anything, this strikes me as a special kind of discrimination against amateur creators on the Internet. Mad Magazine, Saturday Night Live, South Park, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and countless other mainstream media sources have parodied Bill Cosby over the years (see growing list below).
But because it takes so little effort to threaten a small web-based artist (or the blogger who hosts their work), the Net is constantly targeted regardless of just cause. Justin Roiland, creator of House of Cosbys, and Channel 101 were forced to remove House of Cosbys because they couldn't risk the possibility of an actual lawsuit.
But I know my legal standing, and I'm not backing down unless ordered by the court. This is free speech and creative freedom, and even though it's just one guy's goofy labor of love, that's worth fighting for, dammit.
(Thanks, Andy!)
Update: Ed sez, "For clarification, channel101.com stood its ground for several months after receiving the ceast&desist. When Cosby's lawyers realized that channel101 was not going to fold to their bullying, they sent a legal threat to channel101's ISP who told channel101 to remove the videos or find a new ISP. Their strategy seems to be to keep sending legally baseless threats until someone finally folds. You can read the details
here."
