LEVEL 1 - 83 OF 119 STORIES Copyright 1995 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc. St. Louis Post-Dispatch June 28, 1995, Wednesday, FIVE STAR LIFT Edition SECTION: WAR PAGE; Pg. 5B LENGTH: 853 words HEADLINE: NEW STUDY CHARTS POPULARITY OF PORNOGRAPHY ON INTERNET BYLINE: Lou Dolinar 1995, Newsday DATELINE: WASHINGTON BODY: ON-LINE PORNOGRAPHY is popular, profit-driven and ubiquitous, encompassing an unusual, wide-ranging repertoire that includes everything from pedophilia and bestiality to pursuits seemingly more appropriate for the bathroom, a new study says. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 28, 1995 Many of those images, according to researcher Martin Rimm, are originally posted on the Internet by pornographers who run pay-as-you-go bulletin board services - essentially using the Internet as a sophisticated advertising and marketing vehicle to lure new customers to their systems. The report, funded by Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, is drawing interest in Washington, where Congress is wrangling over what, if anything, to do about cyberporn when it deregulates the telecommunications industry. Researchers suggested on Monday that their study is the first systematic look at pornography on the information superhighway, and is the only study on pornography - electronic or published - that focuses on what people actually consume, not what they tell researchers they consume. The study is scheduled to be published next week in the Georgetown Law Review, but advance galleys were released to the press Monday. It reports that about 20 percent of all communications by volume and 83 percent of all photos downloaded from Internet's Usenet usegroups were sexual in nature. Usenet constitutes about 11 percent of Internet traffic. Additionally, the researchers identified individual consumers in more than 2,000 cities in all 50 states, and 40 countries worldwide. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 28, 1995 The 18-month study is based on an analysis of 450,620 images, animations and text files that had been downloaded from Usenet groups and "adult" bulletin board services about 6.4 million times. Rimm said the study was created to examine the relationship between pay-for-porn bulletin board services - some of which earn their operators more than $ 1 million per year - and the popular, but free, Usenet groups that specialize in sexually explicit topics with names like alt.sex.bondage. The study found that just two commercial bulletin board services accounted for 36 percent of the sexually explicit photos found embedded in Usenet news groups over 18 months. In addition, the study says, "The more sophisticated computer pornographers are using databases to develop mathematical models to determine which images they should try to market aggressively. They are paying close attention to all forms of paraphilia, including pedophilic, bestiality, and urophilic images, believing these markets to be the most lucrative." Mike Goodwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Washington, which opposes all forms of censorship on the Internet, said Monday that Rimm's study used "questionable methodology." St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 28, 1995 "The study is based on a subset of private personal computer bulletin board systems that are dedicated to the distribution of pornography. It is difficult to draw any conclusion about the Internet, Usenet or any on-line service from that study." But Catharine MacKinnon, a professor of law at the University of Michigan, called the report important because it notes the amount of pornography that is related to sadomasochism. "The greatest achievement of the Carnegie Mellon study lies in simply noticing what is there," MacKinnon said. "The shift . . . from books and videos to cyberspace has had the effect of revealing to simple empirical documentation that what is done to women in pornography is . . . an ongoing social atrocity. "Computer networks are contributing significantly to abuse of women and children by facilitating access to such pornography, expanding its reach, " she added. The study says that more than 98 percent of computer users on sexually oriented bulletin board services are male and that many of the remaining users are women paid to be on the service. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 28, 1995 Pat Trueman, a deputy attorney general in George Bush's administration and now a spokesman for the American Family Association, said the report would increase pressure on Congress to do something about cyberporn. "It is important that a respectable source without an ax to grind has pointed out the prevalence of pornography there," he said. But Carlin Meyer, a professor at New York Law School, said, "It would be a tremendous waste if the Carnegie Study were used as fodder for a futile but damaging effort at cyber-censorship instead of as support for wider and more democratic access to the open, informal and anonymous and yet public world of the Internet." Meanwhile, Rimm said the report's origins were apolitical: He wanted to study how business could use the Internet to sell its wares, hence the title, "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway." "The pornographers were the first to succeed in marketing products on-line," Rimm said. "The main point is that the Internet and public computer networks are being used by pornographers as an advertising medium. As soon as protocols become available and charging and billing procedures are in place, the pornography on computer networks may not just be for advertising but for St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 28, 1995 commerce, too." LANGUAGE: English LOAD-DATE: June 30, 1995