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.


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