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Streisand effect
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Streisand effect
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon in which an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
In 2003, American singer and actress Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million for violation of privacy. The lawsuit sought to remove Image 3850, labeled as "Streisand Estate, Malibu", an aerial photograph in which Streisand's clifftop residence in Malibu was visible, from the publicly available California Coastal Records Project of 12,000 California coastline photographs. As the project's goal was to document coastal erosion to influence government policymakers, privacy concerns of homeowners were deemed to be of minor or no importance.[excessive citations]
The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman's $177,000 legal attorney fees. "Image 3850" had been downloaded only six times prior to Streisand's lawsuit, two of those being by Streisand's attorneys; public awareness of the case led to more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the following month.
Two years later, Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term when writing about Marco Beach Ocean Resort's takedown notice to urinal.net (a site dedicated to photographs of urinals) over its use of the resort's name.
How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don't like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people? Let's call it the Streisand Effect.
— Mike Masnick, "Since When Is It Illegal To Just Mention A Trademark Online?", Techdirt (January 5, 2005)
In her 2023 autobiography My Name Is Barbra, Streisand, citing security problems with intruders, wrote:
My issue was never with the photo [...] it was only about the use of my name attached to the photo. I felt I was standing up for a principle, but in retrospect, it was a mistake. I also assumed that my lawyer had done exactly as I wished and simply asked to take my name off the photo.
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Streisand effect
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon in which an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
In 2003, American singer and actress Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million for violation of privacy. The lawsuit sought to remove Image 3850, labeled as "Streisand Estate, Malibu", an aerial photograph in which Streisand's clifftop residence in Malibu was visible, from the publicly available California Coastal Records Project of 12,000 California coastline photographs. As the project's goal was to document coastal erosion to influence government policymakers, privacy concerns of homeowners were deemed to be of minor or no importance.[excessive citations]
The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman's $177,000 legal attorney fees. "Image 3850" had been downloaded only six times prior to Streisand's lawsuit, two of those being by Streisand's attorneys; public awareness of the case led to more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the following month.
Two years later, Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term when writing about Marco Beach Ocean Resort's takedown notice to urinal.net (a site dedicated to photographs of urinals) over its use of the resort's name.
How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don't like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people? Let's call it the Streisand Effect.
— Mike Masnick, "Since When Is It Illegal To Just Mention A Trademark Online?", Techdirt (January 5, 2005)
In her 2023 autobiography My Name Is Barbra, Streisand, citing security problems with intruders, wrote:
My issue was never with the photo [...] it was only about the use of my name attached to the photo. I felt I was standing up for a principle, but in retrospect, it was a mistake. I also assumed that my lawyer had done exactly as I wished and simply asked to take my name off the photo.
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