Canon has a new 5D MKII camera that apparently is quite awesome.  Robert Scoble was slobbering all over the awesomeness of it, and the CEO of SmugMug wrote a long blog post to show off the amazing video quality.  Canon should have been loving the free publicity.  Instead, they requested the footage be removed, but didn’t say why.  They have some of it posted on their own site, but in much lower quality.

Scoble hypothesizes that the super-HQ video at SmugMug was making someone at Canon look bad, but that’s pretty weak if it’s true.

The only thing I can figure is that it might be an attempt at a reverse Streisand Effect, something that’s never been pulled off successfully — generate publicity by trying to hide something, in the hopes that more people will see it.  In this case, maybe they’re hoping it will draw more attention to their camera.  Maybe it’ll work.  I still think they’re idiots.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Don’t make Canon look too good - mediocre is preferred

As a result, the game has already been illegally downloaded over 500,000 times on BitTorrent, and the number is rising rapidly.  It’s also caused Spore, well-regarded as a very good game, to receive horrible scores on Amazon.com because of the DRM.  As of a few days ago, there were 2,219 reviews and 2,018 of them gave the game just one star.

The bottom line, almost Streisand-like: They wanted to keep people from pirating the game, resulting in way more illegal downloads than if they just let people play the game they paid for.

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DRM propels Spore to “most-pirated” crown

Now a similar thing is happening in Italy.  A prosecutor over there has told ISPs that they need to start blocking The Pirate Bay.  The site has already worked around the blocks, and now they likely have even more traffic as a result of the attempted ban.

(via TechDirt)

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The Pirate Bay gets another boost from clueless officials

I have no idea if the game is any good or not.  However, I hadn’t even heard of it until the feminists starting yelling about it.  Now I know all about it, and frankly, it sounds like it might be a rather fun game.  This once again shows how the Streisand Effect so often backfires whe people loudly complain about something.

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Angry feminists are promoting Sony’s Fat Princess

The owner, Derek Onstott, found the review and was less than pleased. He called the women (he got her number from a mutual friend) and left a number of messages for her. Among other things, he threatened to:

• Sue her for defamation of character.
• “drag her name through the mud”
• “mess up your life and job”

Well, you can see where this is going. Most rational people would have contacted the woman, apologized, and probably offered a free meal. End of story.

Not so in this case. You can read the full details over here, but the summary about should give you a pretty good picture. Derek Onstott is an absolute jerk, and now the world knows it.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Don’t talk about the awful Besa Mexican Grill and Cantina

It’s yet another case where it’s having the exact opposite of the desired effect.  Now everyone knows about these documents, and they’ll never be able to get them taken offline.

Why don’t these people understand how things work?

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Mormons want you to read their old documents

Someone doesn’t like a literary agent by the name of Barbara Bauer.  Barbara wants to make sure we all know about it.

There was an article put up on Wikipedia that made her look quite bad, referring to her as the “dumbest of the twenty worst” agents, among other things.  The entry was deleted and replaced numerous times over the past year.

As Techdirt explains, Wikipedia is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, meaning Barabara can go after the user the posted the information, but not after Wikipedia.  But where’s the fun in that?  Barbara has decided to sue Wikipedia, thinking that this will help keep things quiet.  Oops.

I think this entry at Slack Aliss’s Dump sums it up best:

You make an ill-aimed fuss about something you want kept quiet, and what happens? Everyone hears about whatever it is you want kept quiet. Me? I’d never heard of you. Now? I’m left with the impression (rightly or wrongly) that you’re a poor literary agent with a penchant for scatter-gun litigation. Sure sounds professional to me!

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Barbara Bauer suing Wikipedia in order to hide information

The site in question this time is Pullmylink.com, which links to sites that have various movies and TV shows online for you to watch. That’s right — the site being sued doesn’t even host the infringing content.

However, this story has already hit TechDirt and Reuters (and The Movie Blog, nobosh, cdrinfo, film-industry, etc), and is sure to get much bigger before it’s over.  I had never heard of this site before, but now I have.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

MPAA promoting another site they hate

Now, the lacrosse players are suing Duke University and city of Durham.  To keep up with things, they’ve set up a blog at DukeLawsuit.com.  The city and university aren’t too happy about it, so they’re trying to force the blog offline.  Now the website is being mentioned all over the internet, gaining much more attention than it would have otherwise received.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Lacrosse Players’ lawsuit against Duke

According to the owner of a local news stand, a man wearing a shirt with a WSJ logo purchased every copy of the parody paper using a corporate American Express card.  He apparently went around to different stands to buy up all of the copies that he could, in an effort to hide the parody paper.

The result was predictable — Huffington Post (NSFW sketch in that link) wrote a story about it, which reached Digg, and now thousands of people have seen the paper.  I would have never seen this story if the man hadn’t tried to hide it.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Wall Street Journal rep tries to buy all of the copies of a WSJ parody paper