The Streisand Effect

Barbara Bauer suing Wikipedia in order to hide information

Someone doesn’t like a literary agent by the name of Barbara Bauer.  Barbara wants to make sure we all know about it.

There was an article put up on Wikipedia that made her look quite bad, referring to her as the “dumbest of the twenty worst” agents, among other things.  The entry was deleted and replaced numerous times over the past year.

As Techdirt explains, Wikipedia is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, meaning Barabara can go after the user the posted the information, but not after Wikipedia.  But where’s the fun in that?  Barbara has decided to sue Wikipedia, thinking that this will help keep things quiet.  Oops.

I think this entry at Slack Aliss’s Dump sums it up best:

You make an ill-aimed fuss about something you want kept quiet, and what happens? Everyone hears about whatever it is you want kept quiet. Me? I’d never heard of you. Now? I’m left with the impression (rightly or wrongly) that you’re a poor literary agent with a penchant for scatter-gun litigation. Sure sounds professional to me!

Posted in People | No Comments »

MPAA promoting another site they hate

Is the MPAA this stupid, or does it just look that way?  Once again, they’re suing a website for copyright infringement and the result is that the site is getting a ton more traffic.

The site in question this time is Pullmylink.com, which links to sites that have various movies and TV shows online for you to watch. That’s right — the site being sued doesn’t even host the infringing content.

However, this story has already hit TechDirt and Reuters (and The Movie Blog, nobosh, cdrinfo, film-industry, etc), and is sure to get much bigger before it’s over.  I had never heard of this site before, but now I have.

Posted in Copyright, Movies, TV Shows | No Comments »

Lacrosse Players’ lawsuit against Duke

(via Techdirt) As you probably know, three Duke lacrosse players were accused of rape a few years ago, in a case that gained tons of media attention.  The case was eventually dropped, but not before they were destroyed by the school, prosecutors and the media in general.

Now, the lacrosse players are suing Duke University and city of Durham.  To keep up with things, they’ve set up a blog at DukeLawsuit.com.  The city and university aren’t too happy about it, so they’re trying to force the blog offline.  Now the website is being mentioned all over the internet, gaining much more attention than it would have otherwise received.

Posted in Colleges | No Comments »

Wall Street Journal rep tries to buy all of the copies of a WSJ parody paper

To mark the April 15 tax deadline, the parody newspaper My Wall Street Journal was on news stands this week, featuring a topless sketch of Ann Coulter.

According to the owner of a local news stand, a man wearing a shirt with a WSJ logo purchased every copy of the parody paper using a corporate American Express card.  He apparently went around to different stands to buy up all of the copies that he could, in an effort to hide the parody paper.

The result was predictable — Huffington Post (NSFW sketch in that link) wrote a story about it, which reached Digg, and now thousands of people have seen the paper.  I would have never seen this story if the man hadn’t tried to hide it.

Posted in Companies | 1 Comment »

Couple sues Google to keep their property “private”

It’s almost like the story that caused the “Streisand Effect” to be coined.  Google StreetView captures images of homes and businesses all over the country.  In this case, they went on a private road to get their imagery, and the owners of a house on that road are suing Google to get the images removed (oh, and $25,000).

Of course, this has quickly caused images of their house to spread everywhere.  More details can be found on the Digital Earth Blog or the Smoking Gun.

Posted in People | No Comments »

Charter boat service gets kicked out of marina and becomes very popular

Smokin’ Em Charters is a charter fishing service that used to operate out of the Fort Pierce City Marina.  Part of what Smokin’ Em offers is bikini-clad or topless women to accompany you while you fish.

After learning of this, the marina has kicked the company out for violating it’s “family-friendly atmosphere”.  Since being kicked out, the owner says “the phone has not stopped ringing” adding that “most of the calls have been from people interested in the tours”.

While I can understand the position of the marina, it sounds like the charter company was keeping it clean while near the shore.  In particular:

• The women come to the boats fully clothed.
• They wait to undress until away from shore.
• Those going topless wait until they’re three miles out before removing their tops.
• They have a strict no-touching policy.

Once again, a company outed as being “bad” has seen a dramatic increase in business after the issue came up.  The charter company is working on a petition to get the city to reconsider the decision to remove them from the marina, and to have the manager of the marina fired.  We’ll let you know the result of that if we find out.

Posted in Other | No Comments »

Wal-Mart is promoting the “Walocaust”

A Georgia man had a creative way to protest against some of Wal-Mart’s policies — he created t-shirts and bumper stickers that said things like “walocaust” and “wal-qaeda“, terms which are obvious parodies of Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart sued the guy for violating their trademark, but the claim was rejected today by a federal judge in Atlanta. Paul Alan Levy, a Public Citizen attorney who was defending the man, had this to say:

“This ruling shows that even the biggest company in America is subject to parody, and that trademark rights must yield to the right of free speech,” Levy said. “This is a resounding victory for First Amendment rights and sends a clear message to big corporations that would try to use their deep pockets to intimidate and silence their critics.”

In addition, Wal-Mart tried to claim trademark violations for the use of “their” smiley face. However, according to a Techdirt comment, there was a battle for that trademark in 1997 which no one won. In other words, Wal-Mart was claiming a trademark violation on something they didn’t even own the trademark for!

So how this this a case of the Streisand Effect? Had you ever heard of “walocaust” or “wal-qaeda” before? Me either. Apparently this guy had only sold one shirt (for $5.10) before this mess began. Now hundreds of blogs are writing about it, giving this man a chance to show why he thinks Wal-Mart is evil. The reason for his sudden surge in traffic is a direct result of Wal-Mart’s own actions…

Posted in Companies | No Comments »

The police tell everyone how to scam Del Taco

Some guys figured out a way to get free food from Del Taco. Essentially, they pretend they had a problem with a previous order, then talk to the manager who then agrees to replace the food from the non-existent “problem” order. In this case, they got about $15 worth of food (seven tacos, large fries, two sodas and two quesadillas) for free. The guys thought it would be funny to take the scam and post it to YouTube.

The police, understandably, didn’t care for it — it’s theft, pure and simple. In addition, these guys allegedly belonged to a local gang, so this video gave police a good reason to arrest them.

The problem is that the arrest has drawn a lot of attention to the video. In an article yesterday in the Press-Enterprise, they report that the video had been viewed 430 times. As of now, just one day later, the video has over 5,000 views and climbing rapidly.

I’ll admit I’m at a bit of a loss as to how the police should have handled it. The guys obviously deserve to be busted for this. However, this has drawn a lot more attention to the video, which has certainly led to copycats at other fast food restaurants around the country.

Update: 3/19/08, 11:12am — The video now has over 16,000 views.
Update: 3/20/08, 9:55am — The video now has over 33,000 views.
Update: 3/21/08 — The video was somewhere over 60,000 views, but has now been removed from YouTube.

Posted in Restaurants | 2 Comments »

Sequoia won’t let people test their voting machines

Ed Felten has built a reputation as someone good at finding problems with machines.  New Jersey election officials wanted him to test one of the Sequoia voting machines before the election to see if there are any problems with it.  Given the wide array of problems with voting machines in the recent past, this seems like a wise move.

Sequoia doesn’t like it.  In a letter to Professor Felton, they say:

 …certain New Jersey election officials have stated that they plan to send to you one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines for analysis. I want to make you aware that if the County does so, it violates their established Sequoia licensing Agreement for use of the voting system. Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis. We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property.

If I was an election official in New Jersey, I would drop those machines as quickly as I could.  They’ve gone from possibly having a security hole discovered (or maybe coming out clean), to looking like a company with a big problem to hide.

Posted in Companies | No Comments »

Bill Kristol, Ronald Kessler and Newsmax

(via Xyre) In a column in the New York Times today, Bill Kristol stated that Barack Obama “was in fact in the pews” when his pastor, Jeremiah White, made some disparaging remarks about the United States last July.

It was pointed out very quickly that the information was incorrect, and Senator Obama was not at church that day. It turns out that Kristol’s source was an article by Ronald Kessler at Newsmax which asserted that Obama was there. Kessler knew that this didn’t reflect well on him, so cleaned up his Wikipedia entry to try to hide it. We know how well that worked out for him…

Posted in Politics | No Comments »