Search and You Shall Find in My World

08 October 2009

Lesson for today

What is STREISAND EFFECT?

According to Wikipedia, the Streisand Effect is "an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. Examples of such attempts include censoring a photograph, a number, a file, or a website (for example via a cease-and-desist letter). Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks.

And yes it refers to Barbara Streisand.

Mike Masnick originally coined the term Streisand effect in reference to a 2003 incident where Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photo of her house removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns. Adelman stated that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially and it became popular on the Internet, with more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the next month.


(full quote and picture from Wikipedia.org)

2 comments:

Sreisaat said...

Yay, naa koy bag-ong nakat-unan. Hehehe. I first heard about the "Streisand Effect" in the photo air-brushing controversy of a Ralph Lauren model... it was an attempt to make the model look skinnier than she already is and ended up in a disaster... Mas daku ang size sa head sa model kesa sa iyang pelvis. Hahaha. Mura siyag alien. Botched job!

Unknown said...

yeah ZJ I actually learned from that article this Streisand Effect. I am a follower of the Photoshop Disasters blog.