All Streisand Effects Considered
from the drive-time-radio dept
The Streisand Effect is getting a bit more coverage these days. After the Associated Press mentioned it the other day, I got to sit down and talk with Robert Siegel for today's "All Things Considered" where we discussed The Streisand Effect starting with the Wikileaks case and moving on to some other cases where the Effect clearly made an appearance. If this keeps up, maybe we can look forward to a day when lawyers think twice about trying to force perfectly legitimate content offline.
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Filed Under: all things considered, npr, streisand effect, wikileaks
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It all come back to Congress (for the US). As long as only millionaires can effectively run, not much is going to change.
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"Do" entails suing people, making a stink, etc. Removing something from the public eye isn't something you can do, it's a possible and as we're seeing somewhat unlikely outcome of what someone can "do".
It's very important to realize that the legal system has no say about what's right or wrong. It can only attempt to influence behavior by attaching more results to an action. In this case, there's not much point to changing a law, because the attempted behavior by lawyers had the worst possible outcome for their client in this case - news agencies all over the world are talking ABOUT wikileaks.
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Your Answer
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nice one mike
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npr not working
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Kudos
Heard the interview on ATC last night. Excellent! Kudos on the recognition and your ongoing insightful analysis at Techdirt.
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Re: Kudos
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The basics, as I understand them are this: if you don't actively protect your intellectual property, if someone comes in and steals something, in court you can lose the case. "Use it or lose it," is, to my understanding the "rule," here. So while these incidents may seem trivial to outsiders, the way i.p. works in the United States makes it necessary to go after trivial stuff in order to avoid having to fight a major battle later on.
This isn't to say that there aren't other reasons at work--and it does not address Ms. Streisand's concern. She's a public figure--and there's the key on that tangent: "public"--meaning she goes on stage to make money. And she has people who manage her public image. I doubt any of them live in her home, and I doubt her home is someplace where she rakes in the dollars.
We need to think through all of these ideas very thoroughly as our technologies become more and more ubiquitous...in the least, we need to adjust our expectations and realize that in the now-future, everyone is a potential public figure just waiting to happen...
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The basics, as I understand them are this: if you don't actively protect your intellectual property, if someone comes in and steals something, in court you can lose the case. "Use it or lose it," is, to my understanding the "rule," here.
There are a few points here. First off, the Streisand Effect isn't just about intellectual property claims. In fact most recent examples (such as the wikileaks case) are not. Second, as I was just discussing the other day, the "use it or lose it" claim is not quite accurate.
First, it does not apply to copyright or patents. The only area where it sort of applies is trademark. But the issue there isn't that you *have* to sue everyone (or threaten to sue everyone) but that you need to make reasonable efforts to prevent the mark from becoming generic. That doesn't mean suing everyone.
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Uh. It's been on Wikipedia for quite some time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
That's the first result if you do a google search. The history suggests someone created it in 2006.
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wtf was I entering then?
*shrugs*
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Awesome!
Go figure its just a hair after I got back into listening to CDs on my way home.
Thank you for the link.
Will listen to it later this morning.
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Heh.
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Why blame a lawyer when they are just following their clients wishes?
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I'm way behind
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