Slashdot Mirror
Pianist Asks Washington Post To Remove Review Under "Right To Be Forgotten"
Goatbert writes with word that pianist Dejan Lazic, unhappy with the opinion of Post music critic Anne Midgette, "has asked the Washington Post to remove an old review from their site in perhaps the best example yet of why it is both a terrible ruling and concept."
It’s the first request The Post has received under the E.U. ruling. It’s also a truly fascinating, troubling demonstration of how the ruling could work. “To wish for such an article to be removed from the internet has absolutely nothing to do with censorship or with closing down our access to information,” Lazic explained in a follow-up e-mail to The Post. Instead, he argued, it has to do with control of one’s personal image — control of, as he puts it, “the truth.”
(Here is the 2010 review to which Lazic objects.)
when the pianist succeeds. This is clearly a case where the "right to be forgotten" conflicts public interest.
Grandiloquence is an occupational hazard for a solo musician. There you are, alone onstage, playing works that are acknowledged to be monumentally great with breathtaking ability. It can be hard to avoid assuming the trappings of greatness.
Exhibit A is Dejan Lazic, who made his Washington debut Saturday afternoon as part of the Washington Performing Arts Society's Hayes Piano Series at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater. Lazic, 33, is a pianist, composer and sometime clarinetist. A few years ago, he made a strong mark as a performing partner of cellist Pieter Wispelwey. More recently, his claim to fame was turning Brahms's violin concerto into something dubbed "Piano Concerto No. 3," which he recorded with the Atlanta Symphony earlier this year. The feat ranks somewhere on the "because it's there" spectrum of human achievement: attention-getting, large scale and a little empty.
His recital of Chopin and Schubert on Saturday was unfortunately on the same spectrum. The selection of those two composers is usually a way to demonstrate a pianist's sensitivity as well as his virtuosity. This performance, though, kept one eye fixed on monumentality. Some of the pieces, such as Chopin's Scherzo No. 2, sounded less like light solo piano works than an attempt to rival the volume of a concerto with full orchestra. This scherzo became cartoon-like in its lurches from minutely small to very, very large.
It's not that Lazic isn't sensitive - or profoundly gifted. The very first notes of Chopin's Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante at the start of the program signalled that he can do anything he wants at the keyboard, detailing chords with a jeweler's precision, then laying little curls of notes atop a cushion of sound like diamonds nestled on velvet. Again and again, throughout the afternoon, he showed what a range of colors he could get out of the instrument, switching from hard-edged percussiveness to creamy legato, crackling chords to a single thread of sound. The sheer technical ability was, at first, a delight.
Soon, though, all of the finesse started to seem like an end in itself. Every nuance of the music was underlined visibly with a host of concert-pianist playacting gestures: head flung back at the end of a phrase; left hand conducting the right hand; or a whole ballet of fingers hovering over keys and picking out their targets before an opening note was even struck at the start of Chopin's Ballade No. 3. There were fine moments, but they stubbornly refused to add up to anything more than a self-conscious display of Fine Moments. The final movement of Chopin's Second Piano Sonata was in a way the most successful part of the program: sheer virtuosity, and perfectly unhinged.
Schubert's B-flat Sonata, D. 960, was a chance to shift into another gear and show a more reflective side, but it was a chance Lazic didn't quite take. The notes, again, were exquisitely placed, and there were things to like, but the human side fell short. All of the precision didn't help bring across the lyricism of the first movement's theme, or the threat of the bass growl that keeps warning off ease from the bottom of the keyboard. The second movement, instead of being a searching, tugging quest, was reduced to merely very pretty music.
The pianist was received with reasonably warm applause, but it didn't last long enough to draw an encore - which ought to get his attention. He's a pianist of prodigious gifts, and he's too good not to do better, to move beyond the music's challenges and into the realm of its soul.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Sparks but no flame: Pianist Dejan Lazic at Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater
By Anne Midgette
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 6, 2010; 5:32 PM
Grandiloquence is an occupational hazard for a solo musician. There you are, alone onstage, playing works that are acknowledged to be monumentally great with breathtaking ability. It can be hard to avoid assuming the trappings of greatness.
Exhibit A is Dejan Lazic, who made his Washington debut Saturday afternoon as part of the Washington Performing Arts Society's Hayes Piano Series at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater. Lazic, 33, is a pianist, composer and sometime clarinetist. A few years ago, he made a strong mark as a performing partner of cellist Pieter Wispelwey. More recently, his claim to fame was turning Brahms's violin concerto into something dubbed "Piano Concerto No. 3," which he recorded with the Atlanta Symphony earlier this year. The feat ranks somewhere on the "because it's there" spectrum of human achievement: attention-getting, large scale and a little empty.
His recital of Chopin and Schubert on Saturday was unfortunately on the same spectrum. The selection of those two composers is usually a way to demonstrate a pianist's sensitivity as well as his virtuosity. This performance, though, kept one eye fixed on monumentality. Some of the pieces, such as Chopin's Scherzo No. 2, sounded less like light solo piano works than an attempt to rival the volume of a concerto with full orchestra. This scherzo became cartoon-like in its lurches from minutely small to very, very large.
It's not that Lazic isn't sensitive - or profoundly gifted. The very first notes of Chopin's Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante at the start of the program signalled that he can do anything he wants at the keyboard, detailing chords with a jeweler's precision, then laying little curls of notes atop a cushion of sound like diamonds nestled on velvet. Again and again, throughout the afternoon, he showed what a range of colors he could get out of the instrument, switching from hard-edged percussiveness to creamy legato, crackling chords to a single thread of sound. The sheer technical ability was, at first, a delight.
Soon, though, all of the finesse started to seem like an end in itself. Every nuance of the music was underlined visibly with a host of concert-pianist playacting gestures: head flung back at the end of a phrase; left hand conducting the right hand; or a whole ballet of fingers hovering over keys and picking out their targets before an opening note was even struck at the start of Chopin's Ballade No. 3. There were fine moments, but they stubbornly refused to add up to anything more than a self-conscious display of Fine Moments. The final movement of Chopin's Second Piano Sonata was in a way the most successful part of the program: sheer virtuosity, and perfectly unhinged.
Schubert's B-flat Sonata, D. 960, was a chance to shift into another gear and show a more reflective side, but it was a chance Lazic didn't quite take. The notes, again, were exquisitely placed, and there were things to like, but the human side fell short. All of the precision didn't help bring across the lyricism of the first movement's theme, or the threat of the bass growl that keeps warning off ease from the bottom of the keyboard. The second movement, instead of being a searching, tugging quest, was reduced to merely very pretty music.
The pianist was received with reasonably warm applause, but it didn't last long enough to draw an encore - which ought to get his attention. He's a pianist of prodigious gifts, and he's too good not to do better, to move beyond the music's challenges and into the realm of its soul.
... you do make some BOLD uppercase statements.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
A lot of people with similar histories have asked Google the same thing, and have been denied.
http://www.google.com/transpar...
No that's not even close to what the ruling is about. The ruling doesn't relate to the right to be forgotten, contrary to the media repeatedly getting this wrong.
The ruling relates to the 1995 European Data Protection Directive which EU member states have all I believe implemented. The UK's implementation for example is the 1998 Data Protection Act for example.
What the act says, is that organisations (such as companies, charities) cannot hold personal data on people unless there is:
1) Prior agreement- e.g. you agree to let your bank hold your personal details when you open your account.
2) An exception under law, such as the police doing investigations, or credit reference agencies holding credit reference data.
3) A public interest/public record defence, such as a newspaper reporting on the bankruptcy of a public figure.
The data protection has existed and been applied this way to most companies since it's creation - i.e. in the UK since 1998 for example. When I worked with some recruitment agencies previously I gave them my CV, phone number, name, e-mail address etc. some years back. I have since had contact from other agencies whom I did not give these details too, likely someone stole them when they left and took them to their new employer or similar as is typical in that industry. Because I wasn't interested in these other recruiters the data protection act is what allowed me to tell them to cease all contact and delete every bit of information they have on me - I had agreed to no relationship with them, and I had made clear to those I originally gave my details to that they were not to be passed on under any circumstances. This is a good thing, the law empowered me to deal with data theft that resulted in me being pestered against my will.
The only thing that the recent ruling changed is that the judge simply ruled that the law does in fact apply to Google- for some reason Google has until this point felt that it's above the law and that because it uses lazy algorithms to simply harvest as much data as possible, slap adverts on that data and profit off of it that somehow the law didn't apply to it. The original newspaper article about the bankruptcy did not have to delete it because a newspaper can perform public record duties. Google on the other hand has no such protection, it does not produce public record, it simply harvests data from other sites (including those that do produce public record) and profits off of it to the tune of many billions in ad revenue.
This is why the ruling went against Google- because it's not special, the law does apply to it, because it's not creating public record content but simply copying it from those that do, and because in doing so it was storing personal data that the subject in question did not agree to let Google have.
If Google simply provided a blind link to the article in question there would've been no ruling against it, but the fact that it takes a copy of the article and provides a snippet alongside the link is where it fell foul - at this point it was clearly holding personal data without any legal right to do so.
The actual right to be forgotten is a proposed provision in an update to the European Data Protection Directive that is not yet law. If Google wishes for a search engine exemption the time to lobby for it is now, but criticising existing law which is 16 years old and which just about every other company has implemented and followed is monumentally stupid. Google is not and should not be above the law. The proposal in the 2012 refresh of the law (2012 is just when the process started, it's not finished yet) explicitly lays out the fact that the right to be forgotten cannot be used to censor arbitrarily such that although that's how the law is being applied now, it proposes making it more explicit in law.
So it's not about creating the right to be forgotten, it's not about publisher and links, it's simply a reiteration that yes, the law applies to Google like it does everyone. You can think