Along with virtually every other communication technology ever invented, the Internet has been used to communicate pornography. One particular genre of pornography that, as it turns out, has become particularly popular over the Internet is pictures of nude celebrities. The latent demand for such images has been known for many decades--Playboy magazine is renowned for offering famous women large amounts of money to appear nude in its magazine, more downmarket pornographic magazines search far and wide for nude pictures of celebrities taken unawares (for instance, when they are bathing topless or nude at what the photographic subject thought was a secluded beach, or taken before the individual was well-known).
The possibility of civil court action restricts the availability of such photos through the print media. On the Internet, the difficulty of applying court sanction makes circulation of such photographs much less risky. Untold numbers of such photographs circulate through Usenet, and fly-by-night commercial operators, often in countries beyond the reach of U.S. courts (the celebrities concerned are more often than not from the U.S.), also offer such photos for commercial gain.
Images of nude celebrities fall into four categories:
Movie snapshots Many actors have occasionally posed nude in otherwise non-sexual movies. Sometimes this has happened before the actor became famous. Snapshots from these movies are circulated widely and can usually be recognized by the low picture quality (from video).
Paparazzi photographs Occasionally, celebrities are photographed in revealing real-life situations; the most common scenario is a woman bathing topless. The photos are usually taken from a distance and rarely reveal more than breasts.
Genuine pornography Mainstream sex magazines such as Playboy routinely offer celebrities large amounts of money for a nude photo shoot. Digital versions of the photos are then either provided by the publisher or scanned in and distributed by a third party, which can be a copyright violation.
Stolen private materials Rarely, private sexual photographs or videos are stolen and show up on the internet. Two prominent examples are Tonya Harding's "wedding video" and some private videos by Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.
In recent years, the wide availability of ever more powerful personal computers and software that gives the user a wide range of tools to manipulate images has led to an increase not only in the distribution of "conventional" nude photos, but also in the production and distribution of faked images. Sometimes, these fake images are designed in such a way as to look like real snapshots (sometimes even enhanced to look like they have been published in a newspaper or magazine), but more often the "fakers" proudly sign their own work, and sometimes add taglines defending it as a "visual parody" protected by freedom of speech.
The fakes not only depict celebrities in conventional nudity (posing or in shots implying unawareness of the photographer or the nudity) but also during sexual intercourse or in the context of a wide variety of sexual fetishes. As can be expected, the realism of the fakes varies a lot, with some images only immediately recognizable as fakes because of the nature of their content, and others the obvious result of unprofessional cut-and-pasting.
Celebrities have occasionally threatened legal action against websites archiving fake pictures; for example, in 2001, the "Lair of Lux Lucre", a fake celebrity website, has been threatened by pop star Britney Spears, after which all celebrity fakes of her were removed from the site. Currently, the "Lair" archives more than 75,000 fake images.
The large number of fake images, many of which are not marked as such, has inspired some people to try to separate fake from real images for the benefit of collectors, and out of curiosity. One such website, "The Case Files of the Fake Detective" (http://www.fake-detective.com/), analyzes in detail more than 300 fakes (it does not examine fakes depicting sexual action, because these are deemed unlikely to fool collectors into believing they are real) and explains how they have been made.
Another area that is growing is that of 3D images completely artificially generated. Sometimes, celebrity photos are used as textures on artificial 3D bodies, which can then be manipulated in every imaginable way. At the current time, the software for producing such artificial images is not sufficiently advanced to allow laymen to generate photorealistic images.
A few celebrities whose nude Internet pictures have become mainstream items include: Pamela Anderson - Tonya Harding - Tommy Lee - Chu Mei-Feng - Debra Byrne[?]
See also: pornography; nudity; celebrity; Internet pornography
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump