It's no secret that Bill Cosby has lately generated more controversy than you'd expect out of a guy with such a fatherly demeanor and a sincere love for pudding pops. It's not Cosby's political stances that are shaking up the digital world, however. It's his lawyers, and their attempt to set the laws surrounding parody and satire back a good 50 years in order to protect the pristine, heavenly glow of the Cosby legacy.
Michael Calore at Monkey Bites reports:
If you've felt the itch to watch the "House of Cosbys" series of videos during the past few months, one of the only places to find them on the web is Waxy.org. Andy Baio, creator of Waxy.org, posted the parody videos by Justin Roiland on his blog in 2005 after he became obsessed with the series.
The videos lampoon Bill Cosby, depicting him in a foolish light as the subject of a cloning experiment gone terribly wrong. Cosby's legal team has been cracking down on the "House of Cosbys," asking bloggers to remove links to the videos. Most have complied, fearing legal action, but Baio has stood his ground and left the videos up. Andy also posted MP3s of an out-of-print Cosby comedy album called "Bill Cosby Talks to Kids About Drugs."
In order to discuss this topic with an adequate degree of expertise, I spent all afternoon watching the four episodes of "House of Cosbys." Unfortunately, I'm terrified to link to them, since the last thing that i need is a cease and desist from Bill Cosby's lawyers. But Cosby doesn't have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to trying to get someone to remove what is clearly a parody from a website. The most disconcerting part of these litigious shenanigans lies in the fact that this phenomenon of lawyers sending out C&Ds continues to be directed disproportionately towards parodies available on the web. as Calore quotes Baio:
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.
This is slightly different from the Fensler Film debacle with Hasbro that I've refered to before, since the question the case of the GI Joe PSA's raises is one of the legality of making a derivative work (tantamount to the sampling debate in music. In fact, since this doesn't deal with any of the messy issues of using previously created works to make a new one (messy largely because of lawyers, has-beens, and record labels trying to screw enterprising young collage artists) - it deals with a straight forward cartoon parody. The more you read about these situations, the more you realize that the internet really gives corporate interests and the established order of the entertainment industry a chance to grind their axes against young amateur artists. Granted, in this particular situation the afforementioned young artist, Roland, has cast the subject of his parody basically as an absurdist placeholder, rather than an actual Bill Cosby, in a senseless universe that involves a cloning machine and a set of rules that find every 10th Cosby imbued with super powers. That's a pretty easy first amendment issue, isn't it? It should be.
Also, in this case, Cosby isn't even litigating against the guy who made the cartoons, but against someone who's distributing them. Big Brother wields a pudding pop. And of course, as with many cases in this crazy digital world, the hypocrisy meter is skyrocketing - Cosby doesn't want people parodying him online, but he's a famous comedian? That's not funny at all.
