The internet poses tough challenges for Hong Kong's controversial laws on indecency. The ongoing case involving nude photographs of local celebrities underlines both the difficulties and the need to overcome them.
The pictures of Canto-pop stars that have been appearing on local internet newsgroups, whether fake or real, appear to infringe the law. Police investigating the case have made an arrest and the legal process must now take its course.
But even though the photos have been removed from Hong Kong websites, they are still available to whoever wants to view them. The internet, being a global network, made their distribution beyond the reach of local authorities easy, and they have been posted on websites on the mainland and elsewhere. Anyone who downloads the pictures and distributes them runs the risk of prosecution. But viewing them on a non-Hong Kong website is quite another matter.
For the celebrities, Gillian Chung Yan-tung and Edison Chen Koon-hei among them, this is a distressing situation. The compromising nature of the images, no matter whether they are real or digitally manipulated, is harming reputations.
Chung, of the duo Twins, is particularly protective of her wholesome image. She and her fans were outraged in 2006 when a local magazine published pictures taken without her knowledge of her changing clothes at a concert. The publication was prosecuted for reproducing, without a warning to minors, class II indecent material. The latest pictures raise problems that will not be settled so easily. This is because of the globalised nature of the internet.
Governments the world over are slowly coming to grips with legal issues involving the internet. They have co-operated to catch paedophiles carrying out activities through websites, cracked down on pornographers, stopped people sending spam e-mails, and traced and prosecuted those illegally handling material covered by copyright. The availability of nude pictures of people, particularly celebrities, is more difficult to control. There is high demand for such images and the internet is the perfect way to distribute them. That many are fake does not slow the demand. The number of copies in circulation and their spread internationally makes stopping distribution difficult.