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.)
Sure. Remove the Google link to the bad review.
And every other link to the guy. Forever.
No more searches on him, for the entire rest of his performing career.
It's the only way to keep that review from sneaking back into future search results.
Overwhelmingly you are going to have people with mis deeds wanting to have those deleted from history. Just imagine the Enron principals decide to emigrate and have their histories expunged ?
I wonder if they are knowedgable of the Streisand effect and the Slashdot effect. If not, they will know now. LOL. The news of the request is more important news than any old review they were trying to escape.
The truth shall set you free!
I'm shocked, I tell you.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That is only true because this is still a novelty. When other people and companies jump onboard, google will be deluged with hundreds of thousands of requests from everything from microsoft to restaurants to politicians. At that point no one will be paying attention. This needs to get fixed, ASAP.
It won't work. We have a First Amendment here. Any law seeking to restrain the press from reporting news can't be enforced.
You do NOT have a RIGHT to control your public image. A public image is something that emerges from HOW you perform in public.
You do NOT have a RIGHT to not have your religion, beliefs, politics offended.
You CAN be just as misguided, idiotic, self absorbed as you want to be as long as I am not forced to change my behaviors to accommodate your stupid world views.
The way I see it, I DO have the RIGHT to see, believe, read, write, learn, say, do what I want want if it doesn't interfere with someone else's right to do the same. If you do not agree with that, then we have a problem.
Letter To Iran
Am I the only one who actually laughed out loud at the utter pretentiousness of this review?
detailing chords with a jeweler's precision, then laying little curls of notes atop a cushion of sound like diamonds nestled on velvet.
Amazing. It tells me absolutely nothing except that the writer is in love with her own prose. It's a shame Mr. Lazic couldn't see this review with the proper humor and irreverence it deserves. I think I'd wear it as a badge of honor if I was criticized with this sort of pomposity. Instead, he's gone and done something for which he should be rightfully shamed - much worse than an apparently decent but lackluster performance.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
is that the review has within it significant amount of praise, and the criticism is mostly constructive. The pianist should have taken this as a learning opportunity more than anything else. The critic closes the review with what is basically an encouragement for the pianist to not limit his considerable aptitude at the keys to mere showmanship, and to strive for true greatness. I don't know the current stage of professional development of this pianist, but there are two main possibilities: either he's not improved since the review, or he has. If the former, he has no one to blame but himself, and more recent reviews would probably be in line with this one--so why single it out? If the latter, then this review should not be seen as a black mark on his career, but a historical point of reference and a symbol of his continued improvement--so again, why try to hide it? The trappings of the ego often end up working against its owner.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
It wasn't even a bad review. I mean, it wasn't a *wonderful* review, but it still said that the pianist was incredibly proficient at his craft; he just needs to stop being fixated on impressing everyone with how good he is every single minute and allow for some calmness, some reflection, and some humility.
So, appropriately enough, the self-obsessed twerp is complaining that the review wasn't good enough for his tastes.
But Midgette's pretensious prose parrots Lazic's performance, presumably.
I've heard Lazic's recitals, and I must say, this review perfectly describes them. All of them. The man is talented, certainly, but fails to produce even the slightest musical effect on the listener. His play is a waste of great pianistic control - all that control and virtuosism bring about nothing of substantial value.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Of course there should be and just like with freedom of speech there should be some limitations. The problem is that there's a much larger amount of information about people out there and no way of understanding how it all fits together and is interpreted by the people who control the databases.
In this case, it's rather absurd for him to claim that this isn't censorship when it's highly unlikely that he would have requested the take down if the information had been complimentary. Instead his "truth" is almost certain to produce a more favorable sense of how he plays than might be warranted.
Nothing is ever "clearly". The pianist could argue that he's greatly improved since then and thus the post is now wrong, outdated, and unduly hurts the pianist. Therefore it's in the public interest to remove that terrible post from the internet.
Then the artist should invite the Post reviewer to his next concert and ask the Post to amend the review by adding a link to a new article describing how the artist has improved.
Dejan Lazic went from being obscure to being world famous for the wrong reason, now he will remain in the memories of people as a person not able to take criticism.
How many did know of him before this story?
Who will hire him for a concert now?
If I wanted an obnoxious person-centered musician with an ego the size of Mount Everest I would hire Prince.
If I wanted a piano player that is fun to watch I'd take Robert Wells instead.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It wont work because the whole summary and story is 50 shades of wrong in the first place.
Time and time again the same FUD against the 1995 European Data Protection Directive (that often being referred to incorrectly as "the right to be forgotten") seems to get parroted here on Slashdot but it's completely wrong.
A review of someone's work is not, has never been, and will never be classed as personal data, and hence eligible for removal under the data protection directive, or even the proposed actual "right to be forgotten".
It'd be nice if the people bitching about this whole thing actually understood it but time and time again the only arguments against it are from those people who think it's something that it's categorically not so we end up with summarys on Slashdot like this which are just completely wrong.
It won't work in Europe either. He sent the request to the newspaper, not the search engine. Newspapers are protected by the public record defence. Google would tell him to sod off as well, because the article is clearly relevant and current.
We really need to stop reacting to every idiot making these requests. I get hundreds of moronic DMCA requests a year from mindless fools who don't even realize that I'm not in the US and the law doesn't apply to me. I don't even have a .us domain name. I don't post articles to Slashdot about how my rights are being infringed by spam DMCA requests that I don't even read, even though it's a stupid law and violates many of the freedoms we enjoy in Europe.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC