Fighting faked photo abuses
"They were putting Alyssa's head on naked women and little girls," said Lin, who represents Alyssa and has since formed her own firm, Cyber Tracker to help others fight such abuse on the Internet. "I contacted the offending site, and they told me to go to hell."
Instead, she went to an attorney -- she sued the site and won. Now, her company educates other actors and helps them fight against such misuse.
Here come the clones
Yet, technology like Virtual Celebrity Productions' Digital Clone system could quickly reverse such positive advances. It's no longer just photographs, but full-body, 3-D images that can be easily integrated into video and film.
Digital Clone, showed off last week in New York, allows a 3-D image of an actor to be pasted over a stand-in body on screen in real time. The system seemingly resurrected W.C. Fields and allowed him to be interviewed by members of the crowd.
"It's like the Wizard of Oz," said Jeffrey Lotman, founder of Virtual Celebrity Productions. "We have someone in the back doing the movements, but the crowd only sees W.C. Fields."
Similar technology is being used to create the less realistic and more stylized virtual Ed Sullivan for UPN's new variety show.
Owning the image
More worrisome for activists like Lin Milano is that an actor's 3-D data set could easily be pasted into a porno flick or video whose sole intent is to hurt the actor's image.
While no data set has yet been stolen, the mere thought of having a well-marketed actor's image appearing in knock-off films of questionable taste is giving Hollywood a case of the willies.
"When we started our development of the cloning technology, I talked to the Screen Actor's Guild to work through the issues," said Global Icon's Lotman. "There are certainly people out there that will misuse this technology."
One problem: 3-D data sets - the set of scans and software that go together to build a digital likeness of a human -- are uncharted territory on the legal frontier. Attorneys for actors have to use a variety of strategies to protect them, everything from copyright law to rules protecting the images and personas of actors.
No protection
"Digital scans of a human being don't really have any protection," said Joseph Beard, professor of law at St. John's University. He likened the problem to taking a photograph of an actor. The photograph belongs to the person who took it, not the actor.
On to PART III -- SAG hopes to expand actors' rights to control the distribution of their images. If successful, however, such legislation could have wide-ranging effects on normal people's privacy and rights.
Back to PART I -- Virtual actors: Cheaper, better, faster than humans? .