| The News Minute | March 6, 2015 | 1:00 P.M. IST |In 2003, the American actress and singer, Barbara Streisand inadvertently spawned a phenomenon. Named after her, it’s called the ‘Streisand effect’. In attempting to block the photographs of her Malibu home from reaching the public domain, the 72 year old filed a US$50 million suit against a journalist and his website for invasion of privacy.The images, which had been downloaded only six times until then, were subsequently seen by close to 4,20,000 people over the next month.India’s Daughter, the documentary made by Leslee Udwin and telecasted by the BBC as part of its Storyville series, is currently riding on the same effect.Close to an hour long, the feature by the British focuses on the ‘Nirbhaya rape’ of 2012, while also attempting to address the upheaval it brought about in Indian society in the aftermath of the incident.The move made by a Delhi court on Tuesday to block the telecast of the documentary on NDTV didn’t really work as the BBC had screened the documentary on Thursday morning (IST), and it later found its way to Youtube. By evening on the same day, the government had asked Youtube to take down the video.Let’s just assume that was the end of that. Even if it was, the move by authorities to try and block the video only ended up generating enough interest around the whole affair to make people go online and watch it. Not just watch it, but download it too.So after Youtube was asked to take down the video, it still exists on the P2P community (torrents) and has been uploaded on various file-sharing and other video hosting websites. The amount of interest it generated can be gauged by the fact that in one day, the same file was uploaded by four different torrent users for sharing. An average Bollywood movie gets as many dedicated torrents to it within a day of its release. Which does say a lot.In effect, by trying to block people from seeing the documentary, the powers that be may have only ended up spawning just another example of the Streisand effect.Tweet Follow @thenewsminute