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EU Court Sets Limit On 'Right To Be Forgotten' In Company Registers (reuters.com)
The European Union's top court ruled in May 2014 that people could ask search engines, such as Google or Microsoft's Bing, to remove inadequate or irrelevant information from the web results produced from searches for people's names. Today, the court is limiting the so-called "right to be forgotten" principle, ruling that individuals cannot demand that personal data be erased from company records in an official register. Reuters reports: In Thursday's ruling the European Court of Justice said that company registers needed to be public to ensure legal certainty and to protect the interests of third parties. Company registers only contained a limited amount of personal information and, as executives in companies should disclose their identity and functions, it said. This did not constitute too severe an interference in their private lives and personal data. However, the court said there might be specific situations in which access to personal data in company registers could be limited, such as a long period after a company's dissolution. But this should be determined on a case-by-case basis.
I think this is more about censoring (or whatever preferred euphemism Europeans are using to justify this) search results rather than individual hits. It would not be that sites cannot publish the things in question (yet), but rather that sites like Google, Bing, or Yahoo would have to remove all hits for a certain name if requested. In other words, the thing is still there, you just can't find it through conventional means.