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.)

Comments

Re:Public image created by public, not owned by yo

[bill_mcgonigle]

The European Union disagrees.

The EU couldn't get negative rights straight if one hit it over its head.

Statists who love entitlements love to call them "rights" because "rights" have popular support.

The EU has created an entitlement to be forgotten, not a right, no matter what they call it. It's easy to tell the two apart - a right requires simply leaving a person alone - an entitlement requires a third party to provide a good or service, customarily under some threat of retribution for not doing so.

That's exactly what the EU has done - it forces somebody at the media outlet to remove a bit of data, without compensation - call it servitude or conscription, depending on your perspective, to provide a benefit to the person making the complaint.

Compare that with the right to free speech, the right to practice religion, the right to be free from searches - they all require the person to be left alone, and no third party is pressed into service.

Malarkey like TFA is what happens when people start thinking that entitlements are right - in an area where no entitlement has even been created, people who've heard about the EU's folly start thinking they have a right to another's labor. That kind of thinking is not alien to the US, though it's gone out of favor in the last century and a half, at least in the direct sense.

Nothing new here

[fyngyrz]

The winners have always been able to rewrite history to suit them. These (very) few years of the Internet keeping semi-accurate track have been an anomaly. It isn't a given that it will be allowed to continue.

Orwell was an optimist.