Follies of the Rich and Famous



Some of you reading this might remember the flapdoodle a couple of years ago about the California Coastline website, and Barbra Streisand's lawsuit against CCRP (California Coastal Records Project) and its architects, Ken and Gabrielle Adelman.

The basis of the lawsuit was that the project, which took 12,000+ pictures of the California Coastline from a helicopter, published a picture of Streisand's home and thus invaded her privacy, etc. Streisand lost the suit and had to pay Adelman's legal fees, which is the only outcome that made sense, given that the pix were taken from the airspace over California, a public venue. The irony here is this: If Streisand had not said anything about this picture being on the web, very few people would have found it or cared about it. As a result of her complaint, the whole world now knows that a picture of her house exists on the web, and the avowed purpose of suppressing the picture was not only not achieved, but was hopeless the minute she filed suit, given the way the Internet works

The latest example of complaints that backfire is the news this week that Apple Computer has removed all books from publishing house John Wiley and Sons because of an "unauthorized" biography of Steve Jobs that Wiley is about to publish. In a snit over the fact that he couldn't suppress the book outright, Steve has caused all of the other books by the same publisher to be removed from the shelves of Apple stores.

This is plain silly. For one thing, the removed books are readily available in virtually any bookstore in the nation, as well as from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and no doubt many other online bookstores. The sales figures for Wiley books directly attributable to Apple Stores is negligible. Second, the biography that Steve objects to would not have been an item in the Apple stores, which sells Mac computers, accessories, and Mac-related books. The bio would not qualify. So Steve is punishing authors of books that help sell his computers and have nothing to do with the biography. But the final reason this is silly is that, as a result of this flap over the book, it will have vastly better sales numbers than originally projected. One bookstore, Kepler's, has changed its original order from 5 to 25 copies as a result of the extra noteriety the book has gotten. And the publisher has doubled the first print run from 25,000 to 50,000 as a result. And moved the publication date up (to May 13 from sometime in June or July).

I might not have bought the book myself, but now I will because of the publicity.

Why is it that rich and powerful people so consistently overreach and do their own cause damage? If Steve had played it cool, the bio would have probably never made much of an impact. Ditto for Streisand. And for any number of other rich people with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.

Posted: Sat - April 30, 2005 at 02:04 PM        

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