As Techdirt put it: “A new Chancellor was selected to lead a Community College District in northern Harris County, Texas. A critical blog was set up to blast the new Chancellor, who quickly had IT block it on all campus computers. As these things always do, it backfired. The college was sued, forced to unblock the blog, and thanks to the media attention, now everyone in Houston knows about the blog.” Didn’t quite work the way he expected, huh? One would imagine that the blog got barely any traffic prior to this. Perhaps ignoring it would have been a better option.

The blog in question: richardcarpenterwatch.blogspot.com

In 2003, Barbara Streisand filed a $50 million lawsuit against Kenneth Adelman because he had posted an aerial photo of her home on his website. His website contained around 12,000 photos of the California coastline as a way to document coastal erosion.

Streisand’s house had gained virtually no attention online until she filed the lawsuit, afterwhich it became very popular.

The image at the top is not the one in question – it’s just a current photo from Microsoft Live Maps. To see the original photo, you can go here.

A man named Robert Lancaster created a site called Stop Sylvia Brown, which makes a case for Sylvia not being a “true psychic medium”.

Whether she is or not, Mr. Lancaster has every right to express his opinion. Sylvia and her lawyers disagreed. They demanded that she stop using her trademark, which showed their lack of knowledge about the law. Trademarks don’t exist so you can stop anyone from using your name — they exist so that people don’t confuse you or your product with another one. For example, if I wanted to say “Coke is awful”, I’m free to do so. However, I can’t create a new beverage and call it “Coke”, as that would be a trademark violation.

As TechDirt put it: “In the meantime, I had not previously been aware of a site criticizing the supposed psychic — but, thanks to her lawyer’s attempt to shut it down, a lot more people know about. You would have thought a psychic would have recognized that such a plan would backfire.”

In 2004, a Senate aide named Jessica Cutler kept a very explicit blog titled “Washingtonienne”, in which she detailed her sexual escapades. One of those men listed on the blogs was another aide named Robert Steinbuch, and he was quite upset to find that kind of information on her site.

In typical Streisand Effect fashion, Mr. Steinbuch waited until most people had forgotten about this story only to have to bring it up in court. The reason was to “restore his good name”, but this had the reverse effect as now a whole new group of people got to hear the sordid details.

Court TV has a more detailed article about this, and Wonkette has a copy of all of the blog entries.