today's world of new information makes Pamela Anderson Lee the Queen of
the Web. This story identifies several trends with the Internet and the
World wide Web. One of the trends is the ascendency of the
non-professional. Neither Ms. Lee nor her husband are porn stars, but her
video is perhaps the most watched porn movie of all time. Another trend
is that others can and do reap economic rewards while the creator of the
work may never seem a dime. Yet another trend is how most use the web.
The little secret of the medium is that the two most common uses are for
investment information and cybersex. Many who are not in liberal urban
centers go online to obtain what is not available in their local
communities. A final trend is the loss
of privacy. A stolen home movie is now on the hard drives of millions.
BTW: I wonder if their are alt tags to the stills of this? Is this movie
audio described? <grin>
kelly
[The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition] [Page One Feature]
April 13, 1999
How Pamela Anderson Lee
Became Queen of the Web
By THOMAS E. WEBER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
When the commercial history of the Internet is written, whose names
will appear among the chief catalysts?
[Pamela Anderson]
Beyond cybervisionaries such as America Online founder Steve Case, you
could also make a powerful argument for including Pamela Anderson Lee,
actress, chronic centerfold and star of what is now perhaps the
world's best-known home movie.
Ms. Lee, owing in part to a naughty self-made honeymoon video and its
strange route onto the Web, owns the hottest name on the Internet. All
across the Web, sites use the name of the former "Baywatch" star and
estranged wife of rock drummer Tommy Lee to attract visitors to their
pages. From Ms. Lee's own official site to thousands of X-rated sites
to random outposts like Expert Bathtub Liners, a plumbing-supply
company in Ann Arbor, Mich., she's the Web's top drawing card.
By some calculations, there are more than 145,000 pages citing Ms.
Lee-most of them hawking products or services. That works out to about
0.1% of the 150 million Web pages indexed by the AltaVista search
engine, which is owned by Compaq Computer Corp. As a percentage, that
doesn't sound like much. But it is the equivalent of walking into the
New York Public Library and finding that 13,300 of the volumes there
are written about her.
Her name has become a brand to rival Coke or Pepsi; on the AltaVista
search site alone, she gets about 9,000 queries on a typical day -- or
about 3.3 million searches a year. As Madonna's cultivation of the
music video once helped convince viewers that the MTV network was for
real, the 31-year-old Ms. Lee -- even if unwittingly -- has done a
huge amount to hammer home the viability of the Web as engine of
commercial importance.
By Michael Tchong's estimate, Ms. Lee's GNP -- or Gross Net Product,
as it were -- is about $77 million a year, though she herself, having
lost control of her video in a tangled legal fight, gets very little
of that. But counting legal and bootleg video sales, plus the
unparalleled power of her name to draw Web surfers to legions of sites
that use her as a come-on, "there's a ripple effect throughout the
entire Internet economy," says Mr. Tchong, an Internet-marketing
expert who runs Iconocast, a San Francisco market-information firm.
"It's amazing," says Martha Rogers, an Internet marketing consultant
and former marketing professor, of Ms. Anderson's Web allure. She
jokes: "I would have predicted Esther Dyson," referring to the New
York technology guru.
A New Kind of Fame
Indeed, Ms. Lee's astonishing digital popularity offers a dramatic
testimony to the Internet's woolly nature -- how, as a new medium, it
is both rewriting the book on celebrity and cashing in on it, all the
while raising complex questions about the ability of notables to
protect their names and images. With the rapid explosion of Web sites
hawking everything from pornography to Bibles, competition for the
attention of the world's estimated 147 million Web users is fierce.
Site creators spare no strategy to get noticed -- and trading on
famous names, which are queried relentlessly by Web surfers, is a key
one.
"You could say that the economy of the search engines, on which Wall
Street has staked billions of dollars, is sort of based on this
obsessive behavior," says Marita Sturken, a professor who studies
popular culture at the University of Southern California.
And of all the famous names, none has been appropriated -- or
misappropriated -- more than Ms. Lee's. This, by a Web culture that,
beyond its sex-obsessed nature, often gleefully flouts copyright laws
and anoints its stars based on a shifting index of raw public interest
rather any particular talent. A Canadian by birth, Ms. Lee has slowly
mutated from buxomy beer-T-shirt model to repeat Playboy centerfold to
B-level TV and movie actress, always trading on her Brigitte
Bardot-like looks and sex appeal to get noticed. But it wasn't until
she married Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee in 1995 and apparently
brought along a video camera to film their honeymoon sexual exploits
that she managed to create a persona that has fused her to the
Internet.
For Seth Warshavsky, a highly successful purveyor of Internet adult
fare who acquired distribution rights to the video after a tangled
legal battle, Ms. Lee's allure is no mystery. "She is as explicit and
graphic as you can get while still being considered mainstream," he
says.
Premiere Online, a cybermagazine, put it slightly gentler in a profile
of the actress shortly before the release of her action-thriller
megaflop called "Barb Wire": "These are heady, hormone-rich times for
Pamela Anderson Lee ... the fantasy object launched from the pages of
Playboy whose blond hair bleached the color of a klieg light,
breathtakingly enhanced breasts and a Bardot-with-a-bullwhip persona
have come to embody the '90s bimbo."
Yet, it is a bizarre, often demeaning stardom that Ms. Lee seems now
to regret; she declined to be interviewed for this article and,
through her lawyer, says much of her exposure on the Web amounts to
blatant illegal exploitation of her name that has become so widespread
she is powerless to stop much of it.
"It's totally out of control," says Edward Masry, a Los Angeles
attorney who represents the actress. "People are violating copyrights
and trademarks left and right."
Net Gains and Losses
For some, though, Ms. Lee's story is a perfect parable for this
tell-all, show-all cyberage: a parable of how risque or even reckless
personal revelation driven by a thirst for celebrity can degenerate
into commercial anarchy when it gets mixed into the hot fires of the
Internet.
The tape first surfaced in 1996. It depicts the couple enjoying a
variety of activities -- fishing and camping, for example -- but also
engaging in explicit sex, most scenes of which appear to have been
filmed by Ms. Lee herself. Despite speculation by some at the time
that the tape was a publicity stunt, the Lees have maintained that the
video was stolen from their home by construction workers.
Whatever the case, it found its way to Penthouse magazine, which
published still frames of the sex scenes after the Lees lost a Los
Angeles Superior Court challenge to gain an injunction to stop
publication. Late in 1997, the tape fell into the hands of Mr.
Warshavsky's Internet Entertainment Group, which announced plans to
show the video to its adult-sites subscribers.
The Lees headed back to the superior court, and again failed to win a
restraining order -- in part because the judge said the couple had
undermined their invasion-of-privacy claim by publicly discussing the
tape's contents on Howard Stern's radio show. Internet Entertainment
immediately broadcast the tape online, a move that placed the images
in digital form and spawned thousands of copies that burned their way
across the Internet.
The Lees then reached a settlement with Mr. Warshavsky's company,
terms of which weren't disclosed. That settlement came back to haunt
them when they tried to stop Internet Entertainment from selling
mail-order copies of the tape. The Lees argued that the settlement
covered only Internet dissemination of the video, not distribution of
the tape. In November 1998, a federal judge dismissed that case,
saying that the Lees had already signed away their rights. Whatever
his original settlement with the Lees, it seems to have paid off for
Mr. Warshavsky. He says Internet Entertainment has sold an estimated
300,000 copies at $34.95 each. That translates to $10 million in
revenue.
For Ms. Lee, though, the cyber payoff seems to be relatively paltry
while the downside seems numbing -- a constant avalanche of
unauthorized porn-site listings that use her name, often in sexually
suggestive and derogatory ways, as a come on. She does have her own
Web site, www.pamelaandersonlee.com, where annual memberships sell for
$33.50 and include an autographed photo. She won't discuss revenue or
the number of subscribers, but the site, managed by her brother Gerry,
has been unable to accept new memberships for several weeks; a site
notice blames technical problems.
The debut offering: underwear, at $19.95 plus shipping and handling,
designed by Ms. Lee. "I've created the most amazing thong ever," she
writes on the site. "Girls -- get this to wear for your man and guys,
get it for your girl!"
Strange Commerce
Over in the darker corners of cyberspace, however, scads of porn sites
that link to Ms. Lee's name, and even use her pictures and images,
invite viewers to "Watch Pam and Tommy" do a variety of things not
printable in this newspaper; in some cases, they even offer free peeks
at short clips of the video. And, thanks to a quirk of Internet
technology, many sites ride on Ms. Lee's celebrity coattails without
explicitly advertising the fact on their Web pages. Search for "Pamela
Anderson" at a big search engine and you might stumble across "Sex
Circus Online," an adult site promising access to explicit photos and
videos for $17.95 a month. But click onto the site and Ms. Lee's name
isn't there.
This is because AltaVista, Excite and most other search engines decide
how to index Web pages in part by examining invisible code words put
there by a page's author. These codes, called "meta tags," are a way
for a Web-site operator to suggest the best way of cataloging a site.
The author of a Web page about cooking, for example, might include key
words like "cooking," "culinary," and "recipes" among the meta tags.
But the creator of a Web page can list whatever they choose among the
meta tags. And many choose to list "Pamela Anderson Lee" among the
code words regardless of a site's actual topic, knowing they can count
on millions of people to search for those words.
The practice isn't limited to adult sites. Tony Keene, an Ann Arbor,
Mich., programmer who produced a Web page for Expert Bathtub Liners,
says sticking Ms. Lee's name in the hidden text is a well-known tactic
for enticing visitors. (The site's owner, however, says he plans to
drop the reference.)
Mainstream sites are figuring out ways to profit from her, too.
Consider those 9,000 daily searches for Ms. Lee's name on AltaVista.
On every page of search results, AltaVista displays a paid
advertisement costing advertisers anywhere from two cents to 8.5 cents
each time it is viewed. That means AltaVista -- itself not in the sex
business -- could book $200,000 a year thanks to Ms. Lee.
This is hardly a fortune. But it is a scenario repeated countless
times across the Web. Search for the word "wine" on Excite Inc.'s
directory, for example, and a promotion appears atop the list of
wine-related sites: "Find Stars on Excite Movies: Pamela Anderson."
Clicking on the link takes the user to an Excite page with a list of
Ms. Lee's films -- and paid advertisements on top. Click on one of the
films and up pops another page -- and another ad.
In other words, when Excite successfully tempts a user looking for
sites about wine or other unrelated topics into taking a detour into
Pam-land, it distracts the user from leaving for a wine site and keeps
the user within the borders of Excite to view paid advertising.
Is all of this really so different from traditional magazines using
celebrity cover photos to drive newsstand sales or sidewalk vendors
selling T-shirts with celebrities names and likenesses? Fundamentally,
no. But as a matter of scale, absolutely. The ease of setting up shop
in cyberspace has spawned new legions of entrepreneurs looking to cash
in online. It is as if those sidewalk T-shirt vendors had suddenly
been granted free access to the supply and distribution power of
Wal-Mart.
Overwhelming Numbers
Ms. Lee isn't totally powerless to stop this. Beyond copyright issues,
which protect works of original creation, celebrities trying to combat
misuse of their name or image often find themselves turning to a
lesser-known protection: right-of-publicity laws. Laws governing
publicity rights vary from state to state, but all share the same
general principle. Individuals should have the ability to prevent
others from using their names, voices or images to sell a product or
service without permission.
All of those legal protections remain in full force in cyberspace. But
having the law on your side isn't enough. To benefit from those legal
rights, celebrities must enforce them by tracking down violators,
asking them to stop and, if necessary, bringing suit in court. Doing
so has always required a substantial amount of work and resources for
a celebrity hoping to guard the use of his or her name, but online,
the task has become Herculean. That is forcing both celebrities and
corporations alike to make tough decisions about how aggressively to
pursue offenders.
"You can't go after everyone," says Jonathan Moskin, an attorney at
Pennie & Edmonds, a New York City law firm that often represents
businesses in Internet-rights disputes. "It is simply too difficult to
police."
Mr. Masry says he has fought a losing battle on Ms. Lee's behalf. The
attorney says he has sent out more than 100 cease-and-desist letters
to specific Web sites, and in most cases, persuaded the sites to stop
using Ms. Lee's name and image. "But the problem is, you close one up,
they go next door and open up another one," Mr. Masry says.
That said, Ms. Lee, unlike Internet porn stars, continues to enjoy a
mainstream Web appeal that seems surprisingly resilient in the wake of
her pornographic overexposure on the Internet. At Mr. Showbiz, a
popular Web site devoted to middle-of-the-road entertainment coverage,
she consistently tops the lists of the site's "Sweet 16" celebrities,
besting even squeaky-clean serious actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow.
Erik Flannigan, managing editor of the Mr. Showbiz site, explains the
paradox. Ms. Lee, he says, is a sort of living Barbie doll. "And, yes,
you can never have her. But you can see every inch of her anatomy."
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright © 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html
|