[Infowarrior] - Censorship: The Streisand Effect (Forbes.Com)

[Richard Forno]

The Streisand Effect
http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/10/streisand-digg-web-tech-cx_ag_0511streisand
_print.html

A Web user and his information are like a grizzly and her cub. Come between
them, and you're likely to get mauled.

That's what a group of heavyweight tech and entertainment companies learned
last week when they tried to keep the lid on the code that could help break
the electronic locks on HD-DVDs. On May 1, someone posted the code, which
allows software developers to copy content from high-definition discs, to
the social news portal Digg.com.

A consortium of companies such as Disney, Microsoft and IBM, who have
invested in the disc format, responded with a cease-and-desist letter,
trying to strong-arm the site's owners into removing the code.

Digg's administrators cooperated; its users didn't. Crying censorship, they
staged a digital riot, covering Digg's pages with links to the banned
digits, printing them on T-shirts and immortalizing them in a song that's
been played on YouTube more than 200,000 times.
In Pictures: The Streisand Effect

Thanks to Digg's rebels, the HD-DVD encryption code has become another
victim of the "Streisand effect," an increasingly common backlash that
occurs when someone tries to muzzle information on the Web. When the
Streisand effect takes hold, contraband doesn't disappear quietly. Instead,
it infects the online community in a pandemic of free-speech-fueled
defiance, gaining far more attention than it would have had the
information's original owners simply kept quiet.

The phenomenon takes its name from Barbra Streisand, who made her own
ill-fated attempt at reining in the Web in 2003. That's when environmental
activist Kenneth Adelman posted aerial photos of Streisand's Malibu beach
house on his Web site as part of an environmental survey, and she responded
by suing him for $50 million. Until the lawsuit, few people had spotted
Streisand's house, Adelman says--but the lawsuit brought more than a million
visitors to Adelman's Web site, he estimates. Streisand's case was
dismissed, and Adelman's photo was picked up by the Associated Press and
reprinted in newspapers around the world.

The Internet has been mainstream for more than a decade. But what Streisand
and others fail to realize, says Michael Masnick, the tech consultant and
writer who named the Streisand effect in his blog, Techdirt, is that the
rules of privacy and information control have changed. "Before, you took the
hardest legal stance you could," says Masnick. "You sent out
cease-and-desist letters with a lot of nasty language. But the Internet has
turned that around and allowed people to fight back and get a lot more
people outraged."

Michael Fertik owns ReuptationDefender, a start-up company that helps
individuals and companies manage their online reputation--essentially a
Web-centric crisis PR firm. He says he would have taken a subtler approach
to Streisand's situation. "You have to reason with people and approach them
politely," he says. "People don't like that a large entity can beat up on a
little entity, and the power of the Internet has been arrayed to support
victims."

Despite these new rules of publicity control, the Streisand effect has its
limits. When the celebrity gossip blog Gawker published leaked photos of
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's newborn baby in June of last year, Time Inc.
threatened them with a lawsuit for infringing its exclusive right to publish
the star-child's pictures in the U.S. After a heated exchange between the
two media outlets and threats of a lawsuit, Gawker gave in and removed the
photos--at least until Time's People magazine had a chance to publish its
own spread.

But as the Digg revolt shows, damage control can be difficult even when Web
sites respond to legal threats. Last September, Brazilian model and TV
personality Daniela Cicarelli demanded that Google's YouTube remove a video
clip of her indiscreet sexual behavior on a Spanish beach, which had been
filmed by a paparazzo. YouTube obediently pulled the clip, but users
continued to upload the file with different names, evading YouTube's
filters.

Eventually, a Brazilian judge ordered that the site be banned in Brazil
until YouTube could effectively remove the video. But the ban only brought
more attention to the clip outside of Brazil, as well as inspiring a boycott
of her shows by angry Brazilian YouTube fans. Today, YouTube has been
unblocked in Brazil, and though Cicarelli's sex clip seems to have
disappeared from YouTube, a host of other video sites still feature the
footage.

The government of Thailand has run up against similar limits to its power to
control the international Web. Last April, an anonymous YouTube user posted
a 44-second video portraying Thailand's king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, as a
monkey. The Thai government charged the site with "lèse majesté," insulting
the monarch, and rather than ask for the offending video to be removed,
banned the site altogether.

YouTube users around the world responded by posting a series of
Bhumibol-bashing clips, portraying the king as a clown, as various types of
animals and as a pedophile. Each clip has been viewed tens of thousands of
times, and this week Thailand responded by suing the video site.

But Thailand's lawsuit is more likely to fuel the videos' distribution than
to stop them. Attorney Kevin Bankston argues that unlike the laws of
Thailand, U.S law ensures that sites like YouTube are free to act as a
platform for defamatory materials posted by users. Bankston, a free-speech
advocate for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, cites a provision in the
Communications Decency Act stating that communication services aren't
responsible for the speech that they enable.

That law may have some bearing on the Digg case as well, as the consortium
that owns the HD-DVD encryption code considers how to prevent more users
from seeing the digits posted on the site. As for Bankston, he was happy to
see Digg's users rebel last week in what he calls "a great flowering of
civil disobedience," and he says it should serve as a warning to future
censors about the power of the Streisand effect.

"The Web," Bankston says, "is like the mythical Hydra. Cut off one of its
many heads, and two will grow back in its place."