Nude celebrities on the Internet

Along with virtually other communication technology ever invented, the Internet has been used to communicate pornography. One particular genre of pornography that is particularly popular over the net is pictured of nude celebrities. The latent demand for such images has been known for many decades - Playboy magazine is renowned for offering famous women large amounts of money to appear nude in its magazine, and more downmarket pornographic magazines search far and wide for nude pictures of celebrities taken unawares (for instance, when they are bathing topless or nude at what the photographic subject thought was a secluded beach, or taken years ago when the individual was not well-known). However, the possibility of civil court action restricts the availability of such photos through the print media.

On the Internet, the difficulty of applying court sanction makes circulation of such photographs much less risky. Additionally, the lack of legal restriction makes it commonplace for digitally-altered photos giving the appearance of a particular celebrity nude, where the celebrity's face was taken from a published non-pornographic photo and edited in to existing pornographic imagery. Untold numbers of such photographs circulate through Usenet, and fly-by-night? commercial operators, often in countries beyond the reach of U.S. courts (the celebrities concerned are more often than not from the U.S.) also offer such photos for commercial gain.

If you came to this page looking for actual images of nude celebrities, well, you probably know enough about the topic to add extra information to this entry. Feel free to do so, but remember that we are an encyclopedia trying to describe the topic, not a collection of links to it!