The Streisand Effect

The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is well-known for their BitTorrent tracking and is a very popular place for people to share music, movies, software, etc.

In May of 2006, The Pirate Bay’s Stockhole were raided and their servers were seized. The MPAA considered it a major victory and made sure everyone knew about the raid.

Three days later, the site was back online and had to add more servers than before to handle the massive increase in traffic that the MPAA had pointed toward them.

Posted in BitTorrent, Music | |
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The Grey Album

“The Grey Album” was released by DJ Danger Mouse in 2004. It used samples from the Beatles’ “White Album” and Jay-Z’s “Black Album”, and became quite a hit.

EMI, who own the rights to most of the Beatles’ music sent a cease-and-desist letter both to Danger Mouse and to stores that were selling the album.

This lead to a protest known as Grey Tuesday, where around 170 websites posted copies of the album on their sites for 24 hours as an act of protest. This led to more than 100,000 copies of the album being downloaded, totaling over a million individual tracks.

Some of the sites received cease-and-desist letters after that, but no charges were ever filed.

Posted in Music | |
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Samsung Phones

The Samsung SGH-X820 (also known as the “Ultra Edition”) is one of the thinnest phones available at only 6.9mm thick.

In September of 2006, a woman posted a video of her snapping the phone in half.  Samsung was obviously not pleased about this, so they had it removed from YouTube due to copyright infringement.  While copyright infrigement is not the right angle to take on this, it does appear that there might have been some tampering with the phone to make it easier to break.  However, Samsung still screwed this up.

Prior to them getting the video taken down, not many people had seen it.  Since then, it became a huge hit.  Not only have more people seen the video now, but Samsung’s reputation has taken a bit of a hit.

More info about this can be found at Mobile Business Magazine.

Posted in Telcom | |
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DeCSS

DeCSS is a program that is able to decrypt a DVD that had been encrypted using CSS (Content Scrambling System).

The program was first released in October of 1999 and was similar to the later HD-DVD controversy as it provided a way for people to bypass the copy protection on a DVD>

The DCMA lawsuits that followed caused the software to become more popular and more sophisticated.

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MediaDefender

As posted on SlashDot:

“It looks like MediaDefender, in an effort to quell the explosion of negative publicity over its leaked email archive, has instead done the opposite and spread it even more widely. Ars Technica is reporting that MediaDefender has sent scary-lawyer letters to two popular BitTorrent sites, MegaNova and IsoHunt, demanding that they remove the offending content. Both sites have responded with derision. Also, Ars notes that MediaDefender seems to be behind a DDoS attack against the site that originally leaked its email.”

Final word to Ars’s Ryan Paul: “MediaDefender’s entire business model has been based on recognition of the inescapable fact that litigation cannot stop the spread of content on the Internet, so it is ironic that the company has turned to legal threats.”

Posted in BitTorrent, Companies | |
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Married With Children

In 1989, Terry Rakolta and her children were watching an episode of “Married… With Children” titled “Her Cups Runneth Over“.  She was shocked by some of the things she saw in the episode, such as a woman who took off her bra (Playboy’s Miss June 1985, Devin Velasquez), a homosexual and a man in stockings.

Terry wrote letters to all of the show’s sponsors and convinced some of them to cancel their commericals.  This led Terry to appear on some talk shows, and the story eventually hit the front page of the New York Times.

However, all of this publicity was great for the show — the ratings went through the roof and the publicity is sometimes considered the reason the show lasted so long.  In fact, the producers reportedly have sent a fruit basket to Rakolta every Christmas since then.

Posted in TV Shows | |
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Manchester Cathedral

On June 9, 2007, the Church of England threatened legal action against Sony for a PS3 game titled “Resistance: Fall of Man”.  The game features a bloody shoot-out inside of the Mangester Cathedral.  The Church was looking for an apology from Sony and to have the game pulled from stores.

Sony apologized, but the left the game for sale.  The controversy resulted in huge publicity for the game, which has since become the best-selling PS3-exclusive game.

Posted in Church, Video Games | |
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iPhone Skins

When the iPhone was first unveiled in January, 2007, many people were very impressed with the slick look of the interface. As a result, a number of people starting making iPhone skins for smartphones (to make their phone look like an iPhone).

Apple attacked them legally, then took it a step further - they went after bloggers that simply reported on the skins.

As The Age says: “Ironically, Apple’s attempts to have the files removed from the web has only given the skins greater publicity, and they have already begun spreading to other websites.”

Posted in Companies, Telcom | |
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HD-DVD

HD-DVDs are protected using a system known as AACS. In order for someone to bypass AACS and make a copy of a disc, a 16 digit hexidecimal code must be first known.

When the code was first discovered, it was posted on Digg. It was quickly removed by the Digg staff, which very quickly caused a huge revolt. Users posted the number hundreds of times on Digg, while the Digg staff kept trying to delete those entries as quickly as they could.

As a result of them trying to keep the number quiet, it became huge. As of right now there are 857,000 pages in Google with the number, along with a few domain names and even a song about it.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Posted in Companies | |
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FedEx

A guy with no money started making furniture out of FedEx boxes, all of which were given away for free and obtained legally. FedEx decided to go after him.

They weren’t concerned about the use of the boxes, but the fact that he posted photos of his new furniture.

Just to make sure we knew FedEx was inept, they also added that they knew he intended to make money from his website because he used the .com TLD rather than another.

Posted in Companies, People | |
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