Chapter 14: Sharing Pornography

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Overview

I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it.

—Jimmy Carter

Probably one of the few facts the media gets right about the Internet is that despite the promise of online libraries, workgroup collaboration, and shopping from your computer, one of the most common uses for the Internet is looking at pornography, and you don’t have to look very far to find it. Once one of the most heavily trafficked newsgroups on the Internet, alt.sex was where people routinely swapped graphic sexual images to cater to all types of sexual fetishes. Nowadays, alt.sex has been flooded mostly with spam and many other sex-related newsgroups suffer from this problem as well.

Because of the popularity of pornography on the Internet, the porn industry-became one of the first industries to face file sharing problems when people started scanning pictures and centerfolds from magazines and sharing the images over the Internet.

Because the porn industry knew they wouldn’t get much sympathy from Congress, they embraced the enemy and fought back by creating their own websites that charged admission. Many people even credit the porn industry for driving the creation of several Internet innovations, including streaming audio/video content, online payment systems, interactive webcams, and Digital Rights Management (as well as spam, cookies, and pop-up ads).

Today, pornography is so pervasive on the Internet that most people don’t want to steal it as much as they want to get rid of it. Porn sites hijack our web browsers, and unwanted ads for pornography often clog our email accounts. Despite the apparently free nature of pornography, stolen images still cost the porn industry lost revenue, but unlike the music and movie industries, the porn industry just counts their losses as part of doing business over the Internet, and they work to offer a superior alternative that actually makes money.

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