Barbra Streisand is an actress, entertainer, and the best selling female recording artist in history, having 33 albums make the Billboard top 10 and selling close to 150 million records worldwide. She is a multiple time Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, and Golden Globe recipient.
In 2003 Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman to remove a picture of her house in Malibu from his website. Adelman had made a series of 12,000 aerial photographs of the California coastline for the California Coastal Records Project, attempting to lobby for greater erosion protection. Prior to the lawsuit, the photograph had been downloaded six times, two of those by Streisand’s lawyers. After news of the lawsuit went public, over 400,000 downloads were logged, and the photo was then mirrored on sites outside of American jurisdiction, making the lawsuit utterly pointless. The suit itself was later dismissed on anti-SLAPP grounds.
The name “Streisand Effect” was coined two years later when Mike Masnick of Techdirt covered a similar case brought against urinal.net, a photo collection of public urinals. Masnick gave the name to the phenomenon he described as, “The simple act of trying to repress something [lawyers] don’t like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people.”
Thus the Streisand effect is the futility of attempting to censor obscure things in the age of the Internet, especially when the censorship is more newsworthy than the item itself.