Pooja Bhatt isn't the first celebrity to be caught with her pants down on the Internet. A generation ago, young men traded football cards. Today, they trade star-grade smut.

There is a worldwide cottage industry in doctoring celebrity pictures with the Photoshop programme and other image-control software. These are then uploaded to public access Web pages. More committed fans, who have run right through the Web and have nowhere left to go, congregate in the Internet Relay Chat channel #nudecelebrities, open 24 hours a day, where whole libraries of pictures can be traded, person to person.

Over the past three years, practically everyone has been traded, from Madonna to the unlikely John Wayne. Indian pictures started appearing about two years ago -- undoctored shots scanned from magazines by fans and put up on their personal Home Pages, along with bios. They were unauthorised, but no more illegal than unauthorised biographies.

And then, following in the footsteps of their Western counterparts, Indian fans found smut. There are beautiful shrines to Cindy Crawford on the Net. There are also pictures of Crawford in extremely compromising positions. And that's only one of a few hundred precedents to Pooja Bhatt's predicament. The Infoseek search engine has links to 51,600 Web pages on her. A good quarter of that content would be of the sort that raises the hackles of the Akhil Bharatiya Agnishikha Manch.

The problem is difficult to deal with because there is no common sense legal parallel in the offline world, making it impossible to apportion praise or blame. Pooja Bhatt is certainly not to blame for the use of an image without her knowledge. Suvrit Varshney of Fullerton, California, who, according to the Internic database, runs the bollywood.com server, may not be aware of the existence of the offending pictures. They could have been put up by anyone with access to the server. Stardust magazine did a blameless download, and then printed in the laudable interests of public awareness and circulation figures. Probably, no one is to blame except the Manch, which is yet to hear of the amazing possibilities of Photoshop. The ethics of cyberporn have been discussed threadbare in Geneva and Washington over the past two years. National and local governments as far apart as Germany and Australia have legislated freely -- and ineffectively -- on the problem. The US Communications Decency Act has whole sections on pornography.

But very little can be done because unlike other media, the Internet is public-access and transnational. If a picture has been uploaded from Austria and offends people in Turkey, no single government has clear legal jurisdiction. Besides, the Webmasters who actually put the content out cannot be held culpable because they may not even notice it. It would be lost in the gigabytes of data they -- or their machines -- handle every day. It would be like jailing a man for letting his house out to strangers who look perfectly harmless but turn out to be terrorists. Only public opinion works against cyberporn. In the wake of the Marc Dutroux child sex case in Belgium last year, Johann Helsingius, an Internet entrepreneur in Finland, was targeted by the media. It appeared that most of European cybersleaze was running through his servers. In a few months, Helsingius was forced to close down his more questionable operations, by sheer public pressure.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.