FedEx fails to heed the “Barbra Streisand Effect”

We learn from today’s Slashdot that Fedex sent legal ‘nastygrams’ to a young artist whose latest project was to make items of household furniture from redundant FedEx shipping containers. These shipping containers are given away free, and were obtained legally, so why was this young man threatned with entirely bogus leagal action?

Apparantly FedEx were concerned that people like you would follow this young man’s example and swap your mahogany ecretoire for a replacment made from packing cases provided at FedEx’s expense. Naturally they assumed that cautioning this man was a prudent move, the better to discourage you (dear reader) from abusing their generosity.

Had FedEx’s lawyers studied a famous crooner’s failed attempts to censor an inconvenient web-site, they might have acted more subtly or not all:

The Barbra Streisand Effect is (as the name suggests) named after the hapless discoverer of this phenomena. Barbra attempted to sue a company which had published a free photographic survey of the California coastline that just happened to include images of Streisand’s palacial holiday home.

Streisand’s case was thrown out, and ultimately she achieved the opposite of what she had wanted; rather than protect her privacy by forcing the surveyors to take-down the photo, it brought the image to the whole world’s attention. Including people like me who wouldn’t normally care what part of the world Mrs Striesand like so call home. Of course, if Barbra’s lawyers had been aware of recent history they might have shown more caution.

Barbra was not the first fool to discover this remarkable effect; Back in the early days of the Internet, a company called ‘eToys.com’ sued an international arts collective called eToy for an alleged trademark infringement. Ironically, eToy had existed years before eToys. It was no surprise that the case was thrown out, almost bankrupting eToys.com, and substantially boosting the international credibility of the eToy collective.

There seems to be a pattern or a principle at work here: Heavy handed legal action intended to cause censorship of the Internet often causes a dispportionately large but opposite effect. Lets put this theory to test:

When FedEx sued, did the artist shut his down permanently as requested? No, he consulted his lawyer who advised him that the complaint was bogus and that he should continue his project. In the meantime, blogs, journals and newspapers picked up the story. Ultimately the attempted censorship resulted in the story becoming many times bigger than it ever could have been if it had been simply left alone: just another Linux-geek making odd-looking furniture in his bachelor pad.

I suppose this also proves the adage “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it”