That's not blackmail at all. It seems like blackmail because of the questionable morality of selling secretly recorded sex tapes, but giving the movie star the chance to buy the tape first doesn't make the whole thing any less moral than it would be without that chance, and unlike real blackmail the movie star being known not to respond to blackmail doesn't help in any way.

Consider this variation: Instead of a secret tape the movie star voluntarily participated in an amateur porno that was intended to be publicly released from the beginning, but held up for some reason, and all that happened before the movie star became famous in the first place. The producer knows that releasing the tape will hurt her career and offers her to buy the tape to prevent it from being released. This doesn't seem like blackmail at all, and the only change was to the moral (and legal) status of releasing the tape, not to the trade.

I still classify it as blackmail.

Something similar to this happened to Cameron Diaz although the rights to resell the photos were questionable. She posed topless in some bondage shots for a magazine, but they were never printed. The photographer kept the shots and the recording of the photo shoot for ten years until one of the Charlie's Angel's films was about to come out. He offered them to her for a couple of million or he would sell them to the highest bidder. The courts didn't buy that he was just offering her first right of refusal and sentenced h... (read more)

Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

by OpenThreadGuy 1 min read7th Jul 2012209 comments


From the last thread:

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well.  Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent.  If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."


  • How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.
  • Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.



  • I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.
  • I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.