Part One: The Barbara Streisand Effect
If you haven’t explored the California Coastal Records Project (resource), you should. The website hosts nearly half a terabyte of images, approximately 100,000 in all, which include, obviously, the California coast, and spans much of the Oregon and Mexico borders as well. Some areas are omitted for national security reasons, for example Vandenberg AFB, however, much of the state’s coastline is included in the project’s database. Beyond beautiful coastlines, the database also houses, and makes publicly available, images of properties overlooking the Pacific Ocean; including Malibu estates, to the chagrin of some celebrity and high-profile residents.
In early 2003, Barbara Streisand sued Kenneth Adelman as well as the now-defunct Pictopia.com, for what the lawsuit alleged was, at the time, an invasion of privacy. Prior to the lawsuit, which sought to remove the residence’s images from the database (and all public records for that matter), the estate of Barbara Streisand, according to legal records, had been viewed (downloaded) a total of six times from the website — that is not a misprint, literally six times. How many times would you guess that the images were viewed or downloaded after the lawsuit made front-page news?
Within one month of the case becoming national news, the images were downloaded over 420,000 times (and this was during the early internet era), the exact opposite of what Streisand and her legal team had…
