Max Mosley Really Should Have Heard Of The Streisand Effect By Now
MAX Mosley has just won yet another court case about that sadomasochistic orgy he had a few years back. This time it’s against Google.
The original case was that by filming the fun and games the News of the World had breached his privacy: which seems fair enough really. If you pay out to have yourself whipped then you might expect that you’ve a right not to be filmed as it happens.
However, the video, and more importantly, 9 pictures from it, went viral. So there’s copies out there all over the place. This latest case is really taking things a little too far though. For Mosley agrees that Google does indeed take down links to the images if he tells them about links to them. But now he’s demanding that Google should build software to make sure that it never again links to the images: in effect pre-censorship of the search engine.
Oh, and one other thing: this is French privacy law we’re talking about. Most other countries simply do not protect privacy in the same manner: but this court ruling supposedly applies to Google’s global search engine. Which is stretching the power of a French court just a little bit.
But the really silly thing about Mosley’s campaign is that most of us had forgotten all about it until this latest case. Now that it’s all fresh in our minds his privacy has been violated again, hasn’t it?
El Reg would like to take this opportunity to warn Mosley of a phenomenon known as the Streisand effect, which refers to how trying to ban content from the internet often makes people more likely to share it. Barbara Streisand tried to have pictures of her Malibu mansion removed from a digital collection of Californian coastline photographs, which fewer than 10 people had viewed prior to her unleashing the legal attack dogs. However, after finding out about the pictures, almost half a million people tried to download them.
Quite.
Posted: 7th, November 2013 | In: Celebrities, Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
