Cele|bitchy | Bill Cosby goes after blogger for posting videos mocking him

Bill Cosby’s legal team has sent a cease and desist order to popular blogger Andy Baio of Waxy.org for posting the “House of Cosbys” video files. “House of Cosbys” is a cartoon that depicts multiple cloned Cosbys living in a house together, similar to the plot of the Micheal Keaton film, Mulitplicity. Baio is standing his ground, and says that “House of Cosbys” is a parody which falls under fair use guidelines. He points to many other parodies of Cosby, and says that he refuses to be legally bullied:

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…

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, was forced to remove the videos because he couldn’t risk the possibility of an actual lawsuit. And when Channel 101 decided to take a stand, Cosby’s lawyers targeted their ISP instead, forcing the videos offline.

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.

Here’s House of Cosbys episode one:

Bill Cosby seems like even more of an asshole when you consider that he recently pointed out to Katrina victims that there were high crime rates in New Orleans before the natural disaster:

Humorist Bill Cosby lectured black residents of New Orleans over the weekend, saying their community was “wounded” by crime even before Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city and killed their neighbors.

“It’s painful, but we can’t cleanse ourselves unless we look at the wound,” Cosby told the rally of about 2,000 people at the city’s convention center, where thousands of Katrina evacuees had gathered seven months earlier.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you had the highest murder rate, unto each other. You were dealing drugs to each other. You were impregnating our 13-, 12-, 11-year-old children,” he said, in quotes picked up by Reuters.

[via]

This is typical of Cosby, who has lashed out in the past at what he perceives as a violent black popular culture and an unwillingness to change. Cosby has seemed to blame the African American community for their plight and maintains a dismal perspective instead of looking at more broad sociocultural factors and seeing the positive aspects of black culture.

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