Barbra Streisand’s Malibu, California home, 2003
31 July 2024
The Streisand effect is when an attempt to censor or otherwise suppress information results in that information becoming even more widely known. The actual effect has existed for as long as authorities have attempted to censor information, but the name for it stems from a 2003 incident involving the singer and actor Barbra Streisand.
In that year, Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and the website Pictopia.com for $50 million for invasion of privacy. Adelman had taken an aerial photo of Streisand’s Malibu, California home and published it as part of a project documenting erosion on the state’s coastline. The photo was just one of over 12,000 that documented the state’s thousand-mile-long coastline.
Prior to the lawsuit being filed, the photo had only been downloaded six times, two of which had been by Streisand’s attorneys. In the month after news of the lawsuit broke, the photo was viewed some 420,000 times. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed, and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman’s legal fees. Streisand’s attorneys claimed at the time that they had initially requested simply to have her name removed from the website but that Adelman refused. Only then did they resort to a lawsuit. Streisand repeated that claim in 2023 autobiography, My Name is Barbra.
The term Streisand effect, however, was not coined until a year-and-a-half later, on 5 January 2005, when Mike Masnick, founder of the website Techdirt.com, wrote about a similar case in which a Marco Island, Florida hotel sued the website Urinal.net for publishing photos of the urinals at the resort:
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.
(Yes, urinal.net is a real website.)
Masnick, had written about the original Streisand-home photography story twice before back in 2003, but he had not used the phrase Streisand effect in those articles.
The term, however, did not immediately catch on, at least not in published sources. It took another technology-related attempt at suppressing information to bring the name to the fore. In May 2007 the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS-LA) attempted to suppress publication of the key that would unlock access to High-Definition DVDs on the website Digg.com. (HD-DVDs were a format that lost out to the competing Blu-ray format in the marketplace.) The website complied with the request, but irked hackers published the key even more widely in response.
A 1 May 2007 tweet read “AACS is totally suffering the Streisand effect.” And on 11 May 2007, the website Forbes.com published a story documenting a number of such cases, including Streisand’s and the AACS-LA’s, under the headline “In Pictures: The Streisand Effect.” That same day, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Irish Times wrote about the AACS-LA story:
Unfortunately for Hollywood, this really was a movie secret: a 20-digit number that is the key for unlocking and decoding the latest in digital home movies.
[…]
The AACS-LA claimed that publishing the number was, in law, as bad as personally unlocking all those HD-DVDs themselves. All discussion of the number in question had to be silenced.
On the internet, such attempts at censorship always risk what is known as the “Streisand effect.”
Barbara [sic] Streisand, irritated at a photography project to take pictures of the entirety of the California coastline, sued the photographer for the small slice of his project that included her beachside home.
A few days earlier, the Irish Times had also published a mention of the Streisand effect in a profile of the singer:
Indeed, she has given her name to the phenomenon whereby, through complaining too vociferously, celebrities merely draw attention to the material they wish to see suppressed. The phrase “The Streisand Effect” came into use after Streisand unsuccessfully sued a photographer whose purpose was to record coastal erosion, to prevent him from posting a picture of her house on the internet.
And use of the term the Streisand effect did not start becoming truly common until around 2009. To illustrate this, there are a few instances from that period where the phrase was used in different senses. One dates to 13 February 2005, about a month after Masnick coined the term, in London’s Independent newspaper about an interminably long stage musical:
But has she [comedian Victoria Wood] become so formidable that no one can tell her when to accept advice, when to stop expanding a slight idea, when to trim and when to just keep quiet?
[…]
The Titanic that is Victoria Wood’s Acorn Antiques the musical. It suffers from what I call the Barbra Streisand effect. Remember Yentl, when the deranged star tried to do everything (acting, directing and scriptwriting) except the location catering?
And there is this more positive reference to the infamously temperamental singer in the New York Times of 16 June 2007:
Barbra Streisand is touring Europe with a 58-piece orchestra composed mostly of the cream of New York’s freelance musicians. It’s a sweet gig for the players. But beyond that the tour has created a mild economic boom for the pool of musicians left behind.
[…]
A look at the Streisand effect, which is especially welcome as the size of Broadway orchestras has declined over recent years, sheds light on New York’s freelance system, perhaps the most vibrant in the country, along with that of Los Angeles.
So unlike the thing it describes, the Streisand effect had something of a slow introduction and build. And ironically, photos of Streisand’s home, including many photos of the interior, are now available in various social media accounts published by the singer herself (or probably more accurately by her publicists.)
Sources:
Clarke, Donald. “Pricey Lady.” Irish Times (Dublin), 5 May 2007, C5/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Greenberg, Andy. “In Pictures: The Streisand Effect.” Forbes.com, 11 May 2007.
Hafersören, Jeder (@chucker). Twitter.com, 1 May 2007.
Masnick, Mike. “Photo of Streisand Home Becomes an Internet Hit.” Techdirt.com, 24 June 2003.
———. “Since When Is It Illegal to Just Mention a Trademark Online?” Techdirt.com, 5 January 2005.
———. Streisand Suing over Environmentalist’s Aerial Shots of Her Home. Techdirt.com, 1 June 2003.
O’Brien, Danny. “Cracking the DVD Code.” Irish Times, 11 May 2007, 43/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Rogers, Paul. “Streisand’s Home Becomes Hit on Web.” Mercury News (San Jose, California), 24 June 2003. Archived at Californiacoastline.org.
Street-Porter, Janet. “National Treasure or a Pain in the Rear?” Independent (London), 13 February 2005, 24/2–3. Gale Primary Sources: The Independent Historical Archive.
Wakin, Daniel. “Streisand Tours, and New York Musicians Cheer.” New York Times, 16 June 2007, B7/1 & B13/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Photo credit: Kenneth and Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, 2002. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.