Online: A Never-Ending Supply of Gruesome Street-Fighting

In the U.S., Web sites and DVD makers profit from the popularity of this reality violence. Realfights.com, home to Ghetto Fights DVDs, depicts street brawls from across the country. And like the rest of the genre, Ghetto Fights is looking to up the ante with more "authentic" footage. "We have people scouting areas for us, and we pay them for footage," says Ghetto Fights producer Chris Monroe, who says he has sold more than 200,000 DVDs at $19.95 a pop. "Our footage is as raw as it gets."

But is it legal? Fighting in public is typically a felony, but what about filming and distributing footage of a fight? In Arlington, Texas, one teenager will soon find out. Nineteen-year-old Michael G. Jackson—who says he began filming street combat more than two years ago and marketed his AggTownz Fights DVDs on a now-defunct Web site—is awaiting trial. ("Agg Town" is slang for Arlington.) Much of his footage appears to be of agreed-upon one-on-one bouts, but there are also brawls where willing participation is less clear. The police connected Jackson to one filmed assault that left a teen critically injured. When Arlington authorities discovered Jackson's DVD business, they charged him with organized criminal activity. A police spokeswoman alleges that Jackson was an "active spectator" to the violence. He could face up to twenty years in jail.

"I've never even been in a fight in my life," says Jackson, who claims he merely documents street life. "I just filmed fights because they were happening around here a lot."

One martial-arts instructor in Florida, Phil P., who goes by the online name Roadkill, runs comegetyousome.com, where he has posted hundreds of fight clips. Roadkill claims the videos are for teaching his students the realities of combat. The site attracts tens of thousands a day, and he has been inundated with footage. "I got 500 clips on the site," Roadkill says. "But I have 500 more that I won't put on there. Aryan hate groups send me videos, but I'm not going to perpetuate their fifteen minutes of fame."

"The attraction to homemade violence is that it's raw. It's the taste for violence and the taste for high-tech playing off each other," says UCLA's Mark Seltzer, author of Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture. And, he says, it's something more. "We imagine the technological world is not real, so we want the really real, and the form that usually takes is a torn body."

For the teenagers at Emerald Ridge, posting fight videos online had serious consequences. After the police saw the clip, they arrested Russel's assailant, who was in possession of the same gun he brandished in the video. To avoid being tried as an adult, the teen quickly pleaded guilty to a weapons charge and assault. Almost all who witnessed the initial brawl were suspended. "It should have just been over after the first fight," Russel says. "But it got so big because people filmed it and put it on the Internet."