In 2003, Barbra Streisand's lawyers filed a $50 million lawsuit against photographer Kenneth Adelman. His offense: an aerial photograph of her Malibu mansion, one of 12,000 coastline images in his California Coastal Records Project, a public-interest survey of erosion. Before the lawsuit, exactly six people had downloaded the photo. Six.
The lawsuit did what lawsuits do. A month after filing, more than 420,000 people had visited the page. The photo went from the least-viewed image in the archive to the most famous aerial photograph on the early internet. Streisand lost the case. The court ordered her to pay Adelman's $177,000 legal bill.
The phenomenon got a name: the Streisand Effect. Trying to bury something is the single most reliable way to give it a stadium tour. Every censor since has run the same play and gotten the same result — the harder you squeeze, the more it slips through your fingers, in front of everybody.
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