Streisand effect

The Streisand effect is a category of Internet phenomena in which an attempt to censor or remove (in particular, by the means of cease-and-desist letters) a certain piece of information (for example, a photograph, file, or even a whole website) instead backfires, causing the information in question to receive extensive publicity, and often be widely mirrored on the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks in a short period of time. The fact that the piece of information is being sought after severely amplifies its value in the eyes of the public, encouraging everybody to get “one’s own share.” Mike Masnick claims to have “jokingly” coined the term in January 2005, “to describe [this] increasingly common phenomenon.”

Etymology

The name Streisand effect comes from a 2003 incident in which Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman for $50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photo of her house removed from the publicly available collection of twelve thousand California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns. Adelman was photographing beachfront property as a way to document coastal erosion. The picture of Streisand’s house that previously carried almost no interest to anyone suddenly spread all over the Internet.

The Streisand effect can serve as an illustration to the law of unintended consequences.

Notable cases

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

• One of the earliest cases of this effect on the Internet was the Church of Scientology’s attempt to suppress the Fishman affidavit containing Operating Thetan III, the story of Xenu. The document was posted to Usenet in December 1994 and re-posted through 1995, then to the Web in August 1995, upon which it was promptly mirrored on hundreds of websites. See Xenu.

• “Barbra Streisand has filed a $50 million lawsuit against amateur photographer Kenneth Adelman for posting a photograph of her Malibu, Calif. estate on his website.”

• Fox Network’s Married with Children was the target of Michigan housewife Terry Rakolta’s letter writing campaign to get viewers and sponsors to boycott the show due to allegedly inappropriate language. Media coverage resulted in even more viewers, negating the effect of the boycott.

• DeCSS—This code was posted online in 1999 which, similar to the later HD-DVD controversy, allowed users to circumvent a DVD copy protection scheme. A series of DMCA lawsuit threats led to increasingly sophisticated and varied presentations of the code.

• AllOfMP3.com—“An Allofmp3 spokesman [told] local media: ‘Susan Schwab markets us so effectively—she could already be our press secretary.’ ”

• Windows 2000 source leak—“Incomplete portions of Windows 2000 and Windows NT were illegally posted to the Internet. [...] ‘It was on the peer-to-peer networks and IRC (Internet relay chat) today,’ Ruiu said. ‘Everybody has got it—it’s widespread now.’ ”

• iPhone skins for smartphones—“Ironically, Apple’s attempts to have the files removed from the web have only given the skins greater publicity, and they have already begun spreading to other websites.”

• The Pirate Bay—“When the Pirate Bay’s Stockholm headquarters were raided last May and their servers seized, the Motion Picture Assn. of America thought it had scored a major victory. [...] The site was back online three days later, and worse yet for Hollywood, the raid and several mass protests afterward generated so much sympathy for the pro-file sharing cause that both candidates for prime minister announced publicly that they did not think young file-sharers should be treated as criminals.

• An attempt at blocking a HD-DVD key from being published on Digg—“The online uproar came in response to a series of cease-and-desist letters [...] demanding that the code be removed from several high-profile Web sites. Rather than wiping out the code, [...] the letters led to its proliferation on Web sites, in chat rooms, inside cleverly doctored digital photographs and on user-submitted news sites. [...] The ironic thing is, because they tried to quiet it down, it’s the most famous number on the Internet.” “[...] at this writing, about 283,000 pages contain the number [...] There’s a song. Several domain names including variations of the number have been reserved.”

• Bhumibol Adulyadej, the King of Thailand, was portrayed as a monkey in a 44-second video posted by an anonymous YouTube user. “The Thai government charged the site with lèse majesté, insulting the monarch, and [...] banned the site altogether. YouTube users around the world responded by posting a series of Bhumibol-bashing clips [...] Each clip has been viewed tens of thousands of times”

• AT&T $10 DSL offer, “one of the concessions made by AT&T to the Federal Communications Commission to get its $86 billion acquisition of BellSouth Corp. [...] was not mentioned in a Friday news release about AT&T's DSL plans, and is slightly hidden on the AT&T Web site.”. Attempts to hide this information caused the articles mentioning it appear all over the Internet and even major news outlets.

Older related incidents

• It was noted by the Russians that nothing was being published in physics journals by Americans, Britons, or Germans about nuclear fission from 1939 to 1942. They correctly guessed that Allied and Axis powers were working on building nuclear bombs and started their own nuclear bomb project.