Streisand effect

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noun - The increase in popularity of an item due to interest driven by the publicized outrage over its existence.^[1]

Streisand Effect is a category of Internet phenomena in which a reckless attempt to censor or remove (in particular, by the means of cease-and-desist letters) a certain piece of information (such as photograph, file or website) instead backfires, causing the information in question to be widely mirrored or distributed on file-sharing networks in a very short time. The fact that the piece of information is being sought after assigns it a previously nonexistent value in the eyes of public, which encourages everybody to get "one's own share". Mike Masnick claims to have "jokingly" coined the term years ago, "to describe [this] increasingly common phenomenon."^[2]

The name Streisand Effect comes from an incident in which Barbara Streisand sued photographer, Kenneth Adelman, for $10 million in an attempt to have the aerial photo of her house removed from the publicly available collection of 12.000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns. Adelman was filming beach front property as a way to document costal erosion.^[3]. The picture of Streisand's house that previously carried almost no interest to anyone suddenly spread all over the internet.

Streisand effect can serve as an illustration to the law of unintended consequences.