Guess who might sue and win… the celebrities aren't exactly throttling the Internet porn business. And the reasons are not as simple as you or they might think.
Not even figure skating superstar Nancy Kerrigan could take a big enough slice out of it. The 29-year-old Olympic silver medalist sued last month and forced the shutdown of a Web porn site which fooled Net search engines into thinking the site was about her. It wasn't the first time Kerrigan had won such a battle. Last year, she won an undisclosed amount from an Internet company that allegedly showed doctored images of her, making them pornographic.
But even her success can't stop the Net porn train quite yet. Even small Net porn sites can make up to $10,000 per month. And Kerrigan's attorney, Victor Polk, says you don't even have to take your clothes off for it. "If you're a famous woman in this country," Polk says, "your name is going to be used to sell pornography."
The Net's combination of cheap access and worldwide reach make it almost impossible to regulate tightly, experts say. Celebrities such as Kerrigan have some legal ammunition to fight for their names, but high costs and potentially low returns discourage many from using it. Indeed, the Net pornographers needed nothing more than to spell Kerrigan's name properly to use her.
From there, they needed only to insert it 32 times in a text block called a metatag used by Internet search engines, thus fooling the engines into believing the site was about the skating star. Curious fans found themselves directed to pornographic pictures on the site even though Kerrigan's name was never seen there-nor were any nude photographs of her.
An attorney who represented television actress Alyssa Milano in a lawsuit against online firms calls the atmosphere "the wild, wild West with just a couple of marshals." Mitchell Kamarck says the tools are there, "(but) it's a matter of applying the tools." And one Net law specialist says protecting names and images will boil down, most likely, to adjusting existing laws toward the still-new medium. "It's really a case of adjusting fairly well-established principles to new facts," said D.C. Toedt, a Houston attorney.
Polk thinks that copyright law could apply because indiscriminate use of Nancy Kerrigan's name without context is not "fair use" of her name. Other legal principles used effectively include a "right of publicity"-a person has the right to control and profit from the commercial use of his or her name, as well as trademark, privacy, and defamation statutes.
Even if the law evolves to favor celebrities, "practical considerations" make it all but impossible to shut down every illegal or unethical site, according to Mitchell Zimmerman, a Palo Alto, CA attorney who works in Internet law.
Zimmerman says the decentralized nature of the Internet, a major part of its appeal, is a major reason there will always be illegal celebrity porn sites. As it is, simply finding the offenders is a chore in itself, because they can shut down and start again for little money at the first hint of trouble. And the worldwide girth of the Net makes unresolved the question of whose laws apply when material is produced in one country but seen in another.
"The Internet…(is) inherently uncontrollable," Zimmerman says. "There's nobody in charge, and there can't be anybody in charge."
And perhaps stopping misuse of celebrities' images altogether isn't realistic quite yet, but one who isn't giving up is model Alley Baggett. The 1998 Playboy Lingerie Model of the Year says she'll fight to shut down as many of those illegal sites as she can. She's seen her name and image on hardcore Net porn sites and is not amused. "I love the Internet," Baggett says. "I love what it's done for me. At the same time, you definitely have to try to have control, or everyone's going to walk all over you."
