Thanks for the memo. Now release everything else

Barbara Streisand in May 2003 sicced her lawyers on a photographer whose shots of the California coastline, intended to document erosion, had captured Streisand’s seaside Malibu mansion. Streisand demanded the image come down off the Internet.

The photograph had only been downloaded six times, twice by Streisand’s lawyers, until the lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court became public. You can guess what happened then. Hundreds of thousands of Internet users downloaded, published, and shared it.