Never heard of the Streisand effect then? Attempts to remove or ban online content inevitably leads to further interest and publication.I expect those images will go viral by the end of the week now that everyone knows about them.Well that didn't happen and neither did any of the other things suggested by the naysayers. The only blip we seem to have had to date in enforcing the order is that some wag decided to post a link to identifying information on AMP via the Daily Telegraph comments section on the story (now removed obviously) where actually another wag wrote "You don't need to publish the lady's name, because we know already. It's Ms. Canute."
Well happily so far the naysayers have been proven wrong. The pictures have not gone viral - a quick search of all the key search engines and social network sites reveals this. There has been (as we predicted) no Streisand effect. This confirms predictions I made in my book The Regulation of Cyberspace, that the online community function as a network and that regulation is likely to be effective when the community perceives that regulation or control as fair and justified. As AMP is perceived mostly as a victim, most people want the order to succeed. This may be contrasted with celebrities such as Barbara Streisand who seek to control unreasonably through a misapplication of the law (see also CTB).
Have we succeeded in removing the images from BitTorrent though? Well I've received a text from Matthew Richardson which reads
You will be pleased to hear that I think as of Monday morning we will have purged all of AMP's pictures from readily available websites...A great result I think.So as we stand it seems we have been broadly successful. There is a problem with digital goods in that there are surely still many copies of the pictures available in the hard drives of people who made copies before the order. AMP will have to live with this knowledge. What she won't have to put up with is the continued dissemination of the pictures. At least that's how things stand now.