Streisand Effect

In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman for US$50 million to remove an aerial photo of her Malibu mansion from the California Coastal Records Project — a public archive of 12,000 coastline photographs. Before the lawsuit, the image had been downloaded only six times (two by her own attorneys). After the lawsuit became public, over 420,000 people visited the site in the following month.

The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay $177,000 in legal fees.

Tech commentator Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term “Streisand Effect” to describe the phenomenon: an attempt to censor or suppress information that unintentionally draws far more attention to it.