The Streisand Effect

Never heard of Httpshare? Now you have, thanks to the IFPI.

The IFPI, the RIAA of the UK, has convinced a judge to have Httpshare.com — a torrent tracking site — shut down.

The site is located in Israel, and doesn’t appear to be breaking any Israeli laws. Like many other sites, this site is simply a torrent search engine and it doesn’t actually host any infringing content. Mike Masnick predicts that this will end up being a big win for Httpshare, much like a similar situation with the Pirate Bay. Lots of people that have never heard of Httpshare (like you and me) are now curious about what’s going on. Traffic to the site is probably going to soar, but I’m guessing the IFPI will call it “a big blow in the war against piracy” or some garbage like that.

Posted in BitTorrent, Music | |
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Lawsuit against Wikileaks dropped

Bank Julius Baer, the Swiss firm that sued Wikileaks last week and had their site taken offline, has dropped their lawsuit.

Techdirt has the details, where they add that this is “One more lesson for overly aggressive lawyers to think about the consequences of certain actions, rather than just launching lawsuits because they can.”

I agree completely.

Posted in Companies | |
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We’ve switched to WordPress

Since I created this site about a year ago, it’s been running on a simple CMS that I built.  I finally took the plunge and converted to WordPress for a number of reasons.  The biggest two were so you could subscribe to our RSS feed if you wanted to stay updated, and so you could leave comments on items when you had something to say.

To help facilitate some comments, I’ve installed the “Top Commentators” plug-in.  This lists all of the top commentators in the sidebar on the right side of the site.  If you’re in that list and you’ve put a URL with your comments, it will automatically link your name to your site — it’s an easy way to get a nice backlink!

We hope that this new format makes the site easier to use.  If you have any story ideas that we’ve missed, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Thanks!

Mickey

Posted in Site News | |
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Wikileaks

In an efforts to showcase some illegal activity (tax evasion and money laundering) at Swiss bank, the Wikileaks site posted some information about some of the bank’s clients.The Bank Julius Baer fought back and successfully convinced a San Francisco judge to have the site taken down, which succeeded. As is the case with other Streisand Effect situations, the information exploded all over the internet.

An AP article quotes Mike Masnick, who coined the phrase “Streisand Effect”, as saying:

It’s a perfect example of the Streisand Effect. This was a really small thing that no one heard about and now it’s everywhere and everyone’s talking about it.

I agree completely.  I’m amazed that companies still haven’t figured out that this always backfires on them.

Posted in Companies | |
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Fat College Girls

In April of 2007, a group of girls at Framingham State College went to a lacrosse game and cheered on their team, bare-bellied. When they found out that a photo of them was going to be on the front page of the student newspaper, they stole nearly 1,000 copies of the paper to prevent people from seeing the photo.

It’s worth noting that it is a free paper, so it wasn’t technically theft. However, the girls were concerned that they looked too “fat” in the photo, so that’s why they took the paper. I have no idea which ones think they’re fat, because none look that way to me.

Of course, now there are many thousands more copies of the picture all over the internet, as you can see above.

Posted in People | |
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Daniela Cicarelli

In September of 2006, fashion model Daniela Cicarelli was videotaped having sex in the ocean with her boyfriend, Merrill Lynch employee Tato Malzoni. The video was quickly posted on YouTube and then was quickly deleted. Despite being deleted, the video was still showing up on various websites and file sharing networks.

Later that month, the couple was granted an injunction by the Sao Paulo state supreme court against YouTube, Globo.com and IG. However, the video continued to show up on YouTube as users kept uploading it with various names.

Cicarelli sued YouTube again in December, where the Supreme Court ordered that YouTube must find a way to permnently block the video or to shut down their site until they can. Shortly after, Brasil Telecom, Telefonica and other ISPs implemented a block on the site, making YouTube inaccessible in Brazil. The decision was revised a few days later and the block was removed.

In June of 2007, a Brazilian judge told Cicarelli that since the sex took place in public, she was not entitled to privacy and therefore had acted in bad faith in trying to get the video removed. She was ordered to pay R$10,000, as well as court and legal costs, to each defendant.

Posted in People | |
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Beyonce

At a show on July 24, 2007 concert in Orlando, Beyonce fell down a some stairs and tumbled to the stage. While it appeared to be quite a nasty fall, she hopped back up and continued the show.

At the end of the concert, she asked her fans to please keep the video off the internet. It’s not clear if she was joking or not, but a number of the videos on YouTube were quickly replaced with “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Sony BMG”.

As of this writing, there are still about six copies of the video available on YouTube, with more showing up all the time. They’re undoubtedly appearing on other video sharing sites as well.

Here are a few to try on YouTube, but there’s no telling how long they’ll be up before YouTube pulls them down.

Posted in People | |
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Joe Dail’s Stepdaughter

This one is quite odd. A man took his 14 year old daughter on a camping trip with his wife (the girl’s step-mother) and later the step-mother posted the pictures on her MySpace page. The pictures included photos of the 14 year old in her bikini, though none of the pictures could be considered inappropriate.

The step-father, Joe Dail, didn’t like his step-daughter’s photos being posted in a public forum like that, so he went to the news to tell the story. The result? The newscast showed all of the pictures in question, as well as showed a link to the MySpace page where they were hosted.

The story was then picked up by other sites (such as Fark) and promoted even further. As of now, the news video has been viewed almost 30,000 times by Fark users, as well as presumably thousands of times by other people.

It was obviously a slow news day for them to waste their time showing this, but it was a pretty funny newscast. At one point, they tried to scare their viewers by showing “how easy it is to steal pictures and do whatever you want with them”. The horrors!

At one point, Mr. Dail said “there could be somebody that could see these pictures and find her and do whatever that they want to do to her”. They couldn’t find her before? Or it’s harder to find her now that they’ve shown the photos all over the news?

Posted in People | |
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King of Thailand

A YouTube user created a video of the King of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej, in which he was portrayed as a monkey.

The Thai government decided their best course of action would be to ban all of YouTube from the country.

The result was YouTube users everywhere creating more clips bashing the king, each of which received tens of thousands of views.

Posted in People | |
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Paula Abdul

In early 2007, Paula Abdul appeared on the “Good Day LA” show and seemed to be a bit tipsy. Her and Fox explained her behavior as “technical difficulties”, but many people felt otherwise.

As the buzz was beginning to die down from the incident, Fox decided to send a DMCA takedown complaint to YouTube and demand that the videos be removed. As expected, this brought renewed interest in the story and many more people watched the video.

Posted in Music, People | |
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