Skin Trade: Celebrities Bare All On The Internet

By: Melissa Grego

Periodical: The Hollywood Reporter Weekly International Edition

Date: March 3-9, 1998

Ed Lake was sitting in the library of his Racine, Wis., apartment last September with

his latest mystery in front of him.

The evidence consisted of a photo of a nude woman purported to be actress Sandra Bullock.  The image was being passed around the Internet by computer users who collect pictures of naked stars.

But Lake suspected that the Bullock photo - like so many other celebrity nudes - was in fact a fake.

Lake, who bills himself as "The Fake Detective," is an amateur photo expert who spends several hours daily authenticating this new and dubious kind of Internet art.  He deems many of the pictures frauds and then posts the results on his Web site (www.lairofluxlucre.com/detective/).

He makes no money from such work, claiming he does it "pro bono, for the public benefit."

If such a pastime seems far-fetched, note that Lake, a 60-year-old retiree, has his work cut out for him.

Fake celebrity nudes are rapidly proliferating, thanks to easy distribution via the  Internet and the development of sophisticated software that allows even beginners to retouch and alter photos.

Typing the exact phrase "nude celebrities" on one search engine yielded nearly 36,000 matches, often with the words "hot" and "hardcore" as part of the description.

The majority of manipulated images seem to be of female celebrities, including Bullock, Gillian Anderson, Jewel, Gwen Stefani, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Sophia Loren and Meg Ryan.

Now the trend has Hollywood up in arms.  Celebrities, who claim they have the right to control their own images, are squarely at odds with webmasters, who claim protection under the First Amendment.

Lin Milano, mother of "Melrose Place" actress Alyssa Milano, who has also had her im-age manipulated on the Internet, has founded a Web watchdog business called Cyber- Trackers.  She says a handful of clients pay the company at least $2,000 a month to track Internet material related to their name and image.

CyberTrackers also prepares monthly reports of its efforts to shut down sites featuring fake or unauthorized nudes, according to its attorney, Mitchell Kamarck.  The group is now proceeding with litigation against some offenders who are allegedly packaging photos for sale in CD-ROMs, Kamarck says.

"This is a very, very dangerous place we're going," says the elder Milano.  "We can't let people get away with this."

As everyone in Hollywood knows, image is the principal currency of celebrities.  Stars and their handlers often react vigorously against anything that might damage or devalue that image.

"If there isn't a law against [faked photos], there should be - about faking anything," says Pat Kingsley of the publicity firm PMK, which represents Jodie Foster, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and other stars.  "As these things [Internet issues] become more important, it will become more of a problem."

"[C]elebrities are one of the major marketing tools for [the $50-million] cyber-pornography" business, Kamarck argues in an upcoming issue of the legal journal Sports and Entertainment Lawyer, adding that a star's image is akin to a company's trademark.

He also argues, albeit without evidence, that Web photos can "act as a catalyst to destructive behavior by fans" -  e.g., stalking.

But that point of view is colliding with the young, breezy, frontier-like subculture of the Internet, where individuals with little besides a computer and a modem "publish" Web pages that can be viewed by millions.

More celebrity photos are posted every day, webmasters agree.

"My site is still growing and I'm sure everyone else's is," says Scott Santens, a 20-year-old resident of Spokane, Wash., who has posted fake nude pictures of Cox and other actresses on his site (www.scotss.com/adult.htm).

Creating such pictures typically involves the use of Adobe Photoshop or similar software available for free on the Internet.

Digital artists scan two images, one of the celebrity and another of a naked model, often culled from adult magazines or elsewhere on the Web.  The artist typically "pastes" the image of the celebrity's head on top of the naked body and then uses the software to match shadows and skin tones.  The effect can be almost seamless, invisible to the naked eye.

Santens clearly marks the photos in his 52 celebrity "galleries" as fakes; he says he  acquired most of them from Internet newsgroups or by donation from visitors.

But he has been able to make a living off the site.

Santens gets $10 out of every $16 users pay to an age verification service linked to his site.  He can also make up to $200 a month through advertisements for Internet porn sites.

Santens declines to say how many people have signed up with the verification service, although he notes that the income has enabled him to quit a technical-support job and cover his site's monthly expenses of roughly $1,000.

For Santens and other Web denizens, fake photos are really about wish fulfillment.

"Just the other day, what I would assume was an older guy wrote to me," Santens says. "He'd been looking for a Barbara Eden picture for 20 years and nearly had a heart attack when he saw the one I've got."

There also is a competitive edge.  Digital artists "know 50,000 people will be panting by the end of the weekend and e-mailing them compliments," says Steve Silberman, senior culture writer for wired.com.  "It's like creating a hit parade."

Some are even using fake nudes as satirical weapons.  The FauxNudes site (209.139.58.23/faux/) describes itself as "the world's tackiest collection of fake celebrity nudes and political phonies."  Among the attractions: "Lucy Lawless, Have you Xena naked warrior princess?" and "Nancy Reagan (Just say NOOOOOOO!)."

The webmaster, who wishes to remain anonymous, recently pasted a Ken Starr head to "a completely random male nude, originally a fake nude of Patrick Stewart," he says.

"I actually made a fake nude of Monica Lewinsky and had it up for a few days, then felt horribly guilty and took it down," the webmaster explains.  "She didn't ask to be a public figure.  That's why I thought Ken Starr would be more appropriate."

Such activity doesn't quite pass muster as art, some experts say.

"People have been placing things out of context to create art for years," says Dennis High, executive director and curator of the non-profit Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, Calif.  "But this kind of thing [fake nudes] is not serious.  It's commercial; it's about someone being out to make a buck ... No one would be taken seriously doing this kind of digital art.  It's like goof art."

But the issues will likely be settled ultimately in courts and legislatures, which even now are struggling to balance copyright protection for celebrities and others with the free-expression rights of web surfers.

"There's a growing [legal] area of copyright on the Internet," says Jay Dougherty, a visiting professor who teaches copyright and entertainment law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.  Bills are now pending in Congress to define copyright on the Internet, he notes, and more court cases on the subject will likely arise in the coming months.

In the meantime, lawyers such as Kamarck are battling fake nudes with the mere threat of litigation.

'The webmasters and the owners [of web sites] generally are not sophisticated business people or attorneys; they have little, if any, understanding of intellectual property law," Kamarck writes in his upcoming article.

CyberTrackers is preparing its first case on behalf of two clients in federal court against a company that's selling over the Internet "hundreds of thousands of dollars worth" of CD-ROMs featuring fake or actual celebrity nudes, Kamarck says.

In two separate actions, Kamarck will pursue claims of copyright infringement, loss of publicity rights and portraying plaintiffs in a false light.  Kamarck declines to provide details, but he says that the Canadian-based company he is targeting is marketing at least seven similar CD-ROM packages.

Indeed, the webmas-ter behind FauxNudes says, "If I hear from lawyers, I'll cower like a dog and do whatever they say."

Until that day comes, however, webmasters must contend with the likes of Ed Lake, who has recently busted purveyors of fake photos of Neve Campbell, Steffi Graff, Leeza Gibbons and others.  While "The Fake Detective" has tried his hand at making fake nudes ("It can be an addictive thing," he says.  "For me it wore off."), he most enjoys cracking tough cases - such as that involving Bullock.

As Lake revealed on his web site (case file No. 115), the Bullock photo "is an excellent example of the art of fakery."

"The artist didn't just replace the head, as is the case in most fakes, but he replaced the entire body from the armpits on down - a lot more difficult thing to do.  And he also had to retouch the background to eliminate parts of the overalls."

"While The Fake Detective didn't believe for a minute that this fake was real," Lake told his readers, "he does admire the expertise required to create it."

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