Voyeurs, Pirates and Privacy
Voyeurs, pirates and privacy.
A google search for the word 'voyeur' generates 41,800,000 hits. 8 of 10 hits on the first page are to adult services of some type or another.
Watching people do sexual things without them knowing, as it turns out, can be a lucrative business and those gaining the income are sometimes gaining that income from people who don't know they've helped make someone very wealthy.
A few people have caught on, though, and those people are starting to create a fuss. Many of the sources of these sites are people who consented to being on camera but who didn't expect what they did on camera to go any farther than the person behind the camera or on the other end of the cam feed. Once something has been caught on camera, though, the fate of the content is unpredictable.
It is the case that for most people caught on camera doing something very intimate that their behavior is unlikely to go beyond the moment. However, the more people do something (like doing sexual things on camera) the more likely it is that someone, somewhere is going to have their experiences taken out of the context of what they thought they were consenting to.
A google search for the word 'pirate' generates 73,900,000 hits. 4 of 10 hits on the first page are to sites directly discussing modern piracy involving the 'stealing' of copyrighted materials.
People whose personal adult material end up on voyeur sites, though, don't necessarily own copyrights for what they have done and therein lies the problem. In the case of a naked woman on a cam site, for example, once the image of her being naked has left her computer, she can't control it and there isn't anything that says that she owns it. Still, for those who have discovered recordings of their cam feeds have been published on the internet in places they didn't know about, they are calling it 'piracy' and they find the presence of this kind of thing disturbing.
So here are a few questions that need addressed:
1) Should a person on camera expect what is recorded or transmitted to be kept private?
2) Should people have a right to use recorded materials of people on other sites without their permission?
3) How should laws apply to this and what rights should the individual have?
A note: I intend to return to this topic in parts in order to describe my perspective on the things that I find tie into it. I will say, though, that people should understand that once you're on camera, you can't always predict what happens to whatever material that camera captures. If you are a camgirl on a cam site, for example, you can't control if the person watching you records it or not - or if they share it or not. If you're a person making an amateur video that you send to your girlfriend, you can't know if she's going to share it and pass it around to her girlfriends.
I will certainly return to this topic soon, but thought I would make an initial post as a launching point to the later sub-topics that will fall under this issue.
