Furth and Fortune blog by Will Murray

Thanks for vis­it­ing the Furth and Fortune blog!
If you’re new here, you may want to sub­scribe to our RSS feed. My blog cov­ers a wide vari­ety of top­ics because I am inter­ested in a lot of dif­fer­ent things. Go ahead, sub­scribe to my feed! You can also receive updates from my blog via email if you pre­fer. Thanks again!
—Will

A close rel­a­tive of the deceased Star Trek Enterprise actress, Kellie Waymire, called me for insight on how to remove the actress’ name from sev­eral porn sites. There are no nude pho­tos, but the sex sites use her name to lure peo­ple in to sell things. The call really touched me; it also made me mad.

Note: I dis­cussed this blog entry with the rel­a­tive, who would pre­fer I not dis­close his or her name or rela­tion­ship to Kellie. Therefore, I will refer to the rel­a­tive as “Vee”.

The Internet is, like any tech­nol­ogy, nei­ther good nor bad. How peo­ple use the tech­nol­ogy is what matters.

Kellie Waymire was a very lik­able and charm­ing young woman enter­ing the prime of her act­ing career. In addi­tion to Star Trek, she was in 36 other TV shows and movies accord­ing to IMDb, and a reg­u­lar or semi-regular in sev­eral of the TV series. Vee also tells me that Kellie was nearly always involved in some sort of com­mu­nity the­ater prod­uct or other stage work since from her mid­dle school years through col­lege. Kellie made friends eas­ily, and there was hardly a place in the coun­try where she did not have a nearby friend who would have will­ingly let her stay while she visited.

The week after she passed away, Kellie’s name hit the Lycos Top 50 at num­ber 19. (The Lycos Top 50 is a list of the most searched for words or phrases on the Internet, and it is updated weekly.) At her memo­r­ial, over 500 peo­ple attended, includ­ing direc­tors, pro­duc­ers, and co-stars. Kellie was admired and respected by her peers and fans. She was loved by her fam­ily and friends who were very proud of her. She con­tin­ues to be missed by all who knew her or have come to know her through reruns.

After Kellie’s pass­ing, Vee’s grief kept her away from the Internet for over a year. She did not want to know what peo­ple were say­ing about Kellie. She prob­a­bly did not want to even think about it more than the dozens of times each day the loss prob­a­bly passed through her mind. Other rel­a­tives con­tinue to avoid Internet sites con­cern­ing Kellie, because the pain is still too much. During that time, sev­eral web­sites filled up with pages and pages of con­do­lences from fans, friends, for­mer col­lege room­mates, peo­ple who saw her on stage, peo­ple who worked with her. It’s all very over­whelm­ing, even for some­one like me who never knew Kellie.

Vee did even­tu­ally ven­ture out into the Internet to see what, if any­thing, was out there about Kellie. It turns out there is a LOT of infor­ma­tion. There is a Wikipedia entry for Kellie Waymire, and nat­u­rally, she is listed on IMDb (as most every­one in the move and TV indus­try are). She has entire mes­sage areas ded­i­cated to her on sev­eral Star Trek fan sites. Kellie even has an “unof­fi­cial” fan club site that does a won­der­ful job cap­tur­ing the beauty of Kellie’s life. Vee is deeply touched by these sen­ti­ments. Knowing Star Trek fans as I do (being some­what of a fan myself, though not a rabid one), it’s fair to say that Kellie Waymire will live on in the Star Trek uni­verse, and in the hearts of her fans, forever.

As one might expect, any­time you enter a celebrity’s name in a search engine, you will find links to nude pic­tures of the celebrity. It doesn’t mat­ter that Kellie never was in any nude pho­tos, but there are still plenty of links to sites claim­ing to have these sexy pho­tos and porn clips. When Vee fol­lowed these links, invari­ably she found one or two pic­tures of Kellie (usu­ally from some scene in a TV show or movie—hardly pornog­ra­phy), as well as links to sexy cen­ter­fold type mod­els, many of which were overtly sex­ual and dis­gust­ing to Vee.

Somehow, these pari­ahs of the Internet (the sex site own­ers) had picked up on Kellie Waymire’s name as being a pop­u­lar search term, and they were using it (and any slightly sexy photo they could find) as bait to draw peo­ple into their sites. Why? Money, of course. Once Kellie’s good name had lured the vis­i­tor to the site, it’s easy to assume that peo­ple likely to click on “nude pho­tos” in the first place, are likely to pay for a sub­scrip­tion to the porn site. Or maybe they will buy a DVD instead. Maybe both. All an Internet mar­keter is hop­ing for is that once they pull some vis­i­tor into their site, the vis­i­tor will stay and spend money.

Imagine for a moment that you are Vee. Your rel­a­tive was such a sweet, hum­ble, and unpre­ten­tious girl. Then you see these sites link­ing her with porn and dis­gust­ing sex acts. It would be almost too much to bear. At first, you prob­a­bly try to ignore it. Then you start to get mad. Then you decide it’s time to take action. You look in the yel­low pages. You call me. (Well, that’s what Vee did. I’m still not sure why she picked my company.)

Unfortunately, there is lit­tle I can do for Vee. I lis­tened to her story, of course. I vis­ited some of the web­sites she had vis­ited. I helped her to down­load some of the touch­ing memo­r­ial videos that had been made. I also tried to help Vee feel a lit­tle bet­ter about the situation.

I pointed out that the only rea­son these site own­ers are using Kellie’s name is because she was so pop­u­lar. The fact that so many fans loved her, so many of them still search for her, so many fans still care for her, makes her name a very pop­u­lar search term. The porn sites sim­ply look at search terms for celebri­ties, and the more pop­u­lar the celebri­ties’ names, the more likely their names will appear on unsa­vory Internet pages.

I men­tioned that I am not a lawyer, so I really don’t know her legal alter­na­tives. It would seem that if she wanted to pur­sue legal actions, she might have a case. After all, Vee is one of the ben­e­fi­cia­ries of Kellie’s estate, and sul­ly­ing Kellie Waymire’s name is likely to cause dam­age to the value of Kellie’s name and estate. That might be libelous. She might be able to per­suade the courts to grant a restrain­ing order to stop these peo­ple one site at a time. She might pay her lawyers a lot of money in the process. Because Kellie was a celebrity, using her name along­side pic­tures of her, regard­less of the sur­round­ing images on the same page, might be con­sid­ered “fair use” of her name and like­ness. She might be able to sue based on copy­right infringe­ment for the pho­tos, but prob­a­bly only if the estate is the copy­right hold­ers. She might pay her lawyers more money to try to sort all this out. She might even lose all the cases. And no mat­ter what, there will almost cer­tainly be more sites pop­ping up using the same sleazy tac­tics to win new customers.

I pon­dered with her of what it must be like to be Pamela Anderson. (The obvi­ous dif­fer­ence here is that Pam DOES have nude pho­tos and videos out there.) She must find it very dif­fi­cult to deal with the fact that pari­ahs are mak­ing money hand over fist, because they sell access to watch (ille­gal) copies of her video and pho­tos. She doesn’t make any roy­al­ties off them. I’m sure it’s not the lost money that upsets Pam the most; it is the fact that sleaze bags are abus­ing her good name and image. No mat­ter how famous you become, I’m sure that has got to hurt, not to men­tion be embarrassing–even if you are Pamela Anderson.

I men­tioned to Vee that most peo­ple search­ing for Kellie Waymire are look­ing for legit­i­mate infor­ma­tion about her. They might be tit­il­lated to think about her appear­ing nude in a photo spread, but they aren’t gen­er­ally seek­ing that out. And if they do fol­low a few of the links, peo­ple will quickly fig­ure out that Kellie was a girl who kept her clothes on, and give up fol­low­ing those types of links.

We dis­cussed the Star Trek fans a bit. Vee was amazed at the num­ber of fans there were, and how long the fan clubs and con­ven­tions had been around. I men­tioned that there was a Trek con­ven­tion right here in Sacramento just about a week ago. William Shatner (“Captain Kirk”), Leonard Nimoy (“Mr. Spock”), and John de Lancie (“Q”) were expected to attend, and tick­ets were in the $30–40 USD range. Vee quipped that she prob­a­bly could have received a free pass if she’d let them know whose rel­a­tive she was. I laughed, and said that she prob­a­bly would have been invited onto the stage to speak. We decided that if she got tired of this whole early retire­ment thing, she might want to con­sider trav­el­ing around to Trek con­ven­tions and raise money for the schol­ar­ship that was setup after Kellie passed away.

I think Vee was in a much bet­ter frame of mind after our talk. That makes me happy.

On the other hand, I was upset. I was think­ing about the site own­ers that mar­ket their sites with mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion hop­ing to lure peo­ple in and get them to part with their hard-earned money based on a lie. These peo­ple do not deserve to make a penny, yet many of them do. Lots of pennies.

It’s not just the porn sites that do this. Being in the infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy indus­try, I often have to track down hard­ware dri­vers, help files, doc­u­men­ta­tion, or other impor­tant files that get cor­rupted. Searching for these files is dif­fi­cult enough with­out the con­stant red her­rings (mis­lead­ing matches) that pop­u­late the search engines. It’s not the search engines’ fault, but the peo­ple who set up “land­ing pages” spammed with keywords–the words for which I’m search­ing. Click a link for a dri­ver of an XYZ wid­get, and have 20 pop-up and pop-under ads and flash adver­tise­ments appear on your screen. If I hap­pen to be hav­ing a really unlucky day, those ads over­whelm my browser, and I end up hav­ing to start over from scratch in my search­ing. Sometimes I even have to restart the com­puter. I also hate to think what might hap­pen if the com­puter I’m using has unpatched secu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties when those things hit it.

There can be a real busi­ness cost for these mis­lead­ing links. Red her­rings waste my time search­ing for legit­i­mate site, waste my time clos­ing ads I will never click (on prin­ci­ple if for no other rea­son), and occa­sion­ally time lost by retrac­ing steps and restart­ing. One red her­ring can result in 10–15 min­utes of lost bill­able time. Meanwhile, the site owner might have earned 10-cents by “show­ing me” all those ads.

So who is at fault here? The site owner? He just wants to make a liv­ing like every­one else. Is it me for fol­low­ing a bogus link? I couldn’t tell it was bogus before I clicked on it. The search engine? I’m sure they fil­ter more bad sites than we will ever know; it’s an end­less bat­tle. The adver­tis­ers pro­vid­ing a cash incen­tive to the site owner? That’s a tricky one. In many cases, site own­ers do not always tell the truth to adver­tis­ers about how they will use the advertiser’s ads. Advertisers might visit and approve one site, but the site own­ers use the ads on other unap­proved sites that are unscrupu­lous. Advertisers have a lot of work to do, and can they really be expected to check, even with the help of automa­tion, every ad impres­sion? Besides, if the ads result in rev­enue for the adver­tiser, are they really going to care? If all adver­tis­ers sud­denly dis­ap­peared and site own­ers were no longer com­pen­sated for mis­lead­ing peo­ple to their site, would it stop the prac­tice? It would prob­a­bly cur­tail it con­sid­er­ably, but then the whole ego thing would kick in, and site own­ers would still want to be one of the “most” sites (most vis­ited, high­est rated, etc.). Money usu­ally only mag­ni­fies char­ac­ter flaws already present in people.

Maybe it’s the government’s fault. They cer­tainly could reg­u­late the Internet to death. Some tech­no­log­i­cal idiot could cre­ate a very broad law that effec­tively blocks all com­merce on the Internet. That wouldn’t be very help­ful. Someone could write a back­wards law (like the ill-conceived CAN-SPAM act) that instead of help­ing the prob­lem actu­ally makes it worse. Someone could write lots of lit­tle micro-laws that deal with such a nar­row focus, that it’s very easy for site own­ers to wrig­gle around the law, thus prov­ing that they are legit­i­mate. Some laws like that actu­ally make it harder to pros­e­cute, because it shows the par­ties are work­ing to be com­pli­ant with the bad laws. No, the gov­ern­ment is no cure for the problem.

I think the whole prob­lem is systemic.

Look at the paparazzi and celebrity pho­tos. You and I love to see and read about our favorite celebri­ties in enter­tain­ment news mag­a­zines. The zines need a steady sup­ply of fresh pho­tos and news to keep our appetites whet­ted. People lit­er­ally show up on their doorsteps with pho­tos and news to ped­dle. The zines pay these peo­ple for the items. We pay the zines for pub­lish­ing the items. The peo­ple ped­dling the pho­tos and news are pho­tog­ra­phers, reporters, and paparazzi. Because they are paid for pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion, the ped­dlers seek out more stuff to ped­dle. That is why they end up get­ting in the faces and lives of our favorite celebri­ties. We are shocked at the insane things paparazzi do to get a photo, but we keep look­ing at the mag­a­zines that pub­lish the photos.

Bringing it back to Kellie and the nude photo sites, it’s sim­i­lar. You and I love to see and read about our favorite celebri­ties on web­sites. Many peo­ple are even inter­ested in see­ing these celebri­ties in the nude or hav­ing sex. It’s a favorite fan­tasy for many. Websites are con­stantly look­ing for a steady sup­ply of fresh pho­tos and news to keep our appetites whet­ted. Sites offer a lot of money to peo­ple to turn over fresh con­tent, which is why if peo­ple have a secret sex tape or photo shoot in their his­tory, it will even­tu­ally end up on the Web. Usually, there is a big­ger demand than sup­ply of legit­i­mate info, so, to fill the gap, sites invent con­tent. People fall like prey into a spider’s web, and the sites cap­ture their atten­tion. Stupidly, enough peo­ple caught in these traps, do not imme­di­ately break free, and they end up feed­ing the spi­der (the site owner) a steady sup­ply of money. So long as they do that, these preda­tors will con­tinue set­ting traps. The money can either come directly from the vis­i­tor, or it can come from adver­tis­ers. Either way, the spi­der gets fat from all this income, so there is no rea­son to stop doing it, and there is plenty of rea­son to expand their web to more and more celebrities.

In both cases, the solu­tion to the prob­lem is to dry up the flow of money. If mag­a­zines sell fewer copies, then they will either go out of busi­ness or become more choosy about their sources. If site own­ers stop earn­ing money from adver­tis­ers who finally wise up, and if they also stop receiv­ing money from peo­ple who fall into their traps, they will stop using these techniques.

The only way to dry up the flow of money is for each of us to stop sup­port­ing orga­ni­za­tions that do these things. It’s much like the organic foods ini­tia­tive. People always need to eat, but if we, the buy­ers of the prod­ucts, can redi­rect the flow of money from sleazy sources to eth­i­cal sources–zines that do not sup­port paparazzi and sites that do not mis­lead you–then the sleazy sources will clean up their acts or go out of business.

It’s not enough for me to com­mit to this. You need to, too. And you need to tell others.

Tell adver­tis­ers. If you find your­self in a sleazy web trap, take a quick moment to glance at the ads. If any are from what you would con­sider a legit­i­mate source, go to that company’s web­site and con­tact them. Let them know that example.com is using uneth­i­cal mar­ket­ing prac­tices to dis­play ads from this com­pany. Let them know that this asso­ci­a­tion is soil­ing the company’s rep­u­ta­tion, and you demand that the com­pany block their adver­tis­ing on all such sites. Many com­pa­nies will quickly act once they become aware of the prob­lem. If not, make them pay dou­ble by not buy­ing their products.

No mat­ter what the issue, vot­ing with your pock­et­book and telling oth­ers to do the same is usu­ally the only way to really bring about a mean­ing­ful change. Otherwise, the money wins.

Similar Posts:

• Don’t Forget — Save the Internet: Net Neutrality — It’s Important!
• California con­sid­ers mak­ing online maps a blurry mess
• Apple turns 500 Million
• The Art and Science of Sitemapping
• Social net­work­ing sites not as social as they need to be

Posts with related tags:

• Should You Have to Have a License to Drive on the Info Highway? (0)
• ‘Millennials’ buck IT security policies (Wednesday, March 26th, 2008)">‘Millennials’ buck IT security policies (0)
• Top-10 That I Miss (0)
• Social networking sites not as social as they need to be (0)
• Save Net Radio and Music Diversity (2)