Barbra Streisand Sued to Hide a Photo of Her House. Now 420,000 People Have Seen It.

In 2003, Barbra Streisand made what might be the most expensive mistake in internet history. She filed a $50 million lawsuit against photographer Kenneth Adelman to remove an aerial photograph of her Malibu estate from his website.

The Photo Nobody Cared About

Adelman wasn't a paparazzo. He was documenting California coastal erosion for the California Coastal Records Project, a legitimate public interest effort. He'd captured over 12,000 aerial photos of the coastline. Image 3850 happened to include Streisand's property.

Before the lawsuit, that image had been downloaded exactly 6 times. Two of those downloads came from Streisand's own lawyers.

The Backfire

The lawsuit made international news. Within a month, 420,000 people visited Adelman's site specifically to see the photo Streisand was trying to hide. The image became one of the most viewed photos on the internet.

The court dismissed the case. Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman's legal fees: $177,457.16.

A New Word for an Old Mistake

In January 2005, Techdirt founder Mike Masnick coined the term "The Streisand Effect" to describe the phenomenon of attempting to suppress information and instead amplifying it exponentially.

The term is now in Britannica and used worldwide. Every time a company or public figure tries to scrub something from the internet and makes it worse, they're experiencing the Streisand Effect — named after a woman who spent a fortune ensuring millions of people saw a photo that six people had noticed.