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Pianist asks Washington Post to remove review under 'right to be forgotten'
- ChrisGranger 12y agoHas Dejan Lazic not heard of the Streisand Effect? (Then again, perhaps this is a deliberate bid for additional publicity.) Does he also think European laws apply to American newspapers? This seems pretty silly...
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- gamegoblin 12y agoIANAL but it might still affect their distribution of the paper in Europe. EDIT: according to response, the law does not affect newspapers, which I guess makes sense, otherwise anyone could prevent anything negative from being published about them.
- ncallaway 12y agoThe European Union's "Right to be Forgotten" legislation only applies to search engines and link aggregators. It does not apply to newspapers, so it will not affect their distribution if they do not comply.
- vacri 12y agoThe Streisand Effect has an upper limit on the number of people it can affect at any time. There's only so many 'scandalous reveals' the public mind can handle at once.
- rmc 12y agoAmericans often act like their laws application everywhere. Why not give them a taste of their own medicine.
- jMyles 12y agoFor what it's worth, I'm American and for some of "my" laws (ie, prohibition), I act like they apply nowhere.
- chris_wot 12y agoOh, great reasoning.
- DanBC 12y agoIt's a shame you got so heavily downvoted. Perhaps some examples would have helped: 1) taxes. An American citizen must file an annual tax return with the IRS no matter where they live. https://americansabroad.org/issues/taxation/us-taxes-while-living-abroad-faq/ https://americansabroad.org/issues/taxation/us-taxes-while-l... 2) Kim Dotcom, living in NZ, having his home raided by paramilitary police I'm guessing the downvotes are for using "americans" when plenty of Americans hate some of their laws.
- nraynaud 12y agothe cuban laws?
- rmc 12y agoAmericans often act like their laws application everywhere. Why not give them a taste of their own medicine.
- rmc 12y agoAmericans often act like their laws application everywhere. Why not give them a taste of their own medicine.
- inuhj 12y ago"It’s also a truly fascinating, troubling demonstration of how the ruling could work." It seems to be working exactly as it was intended.
- nraynaud 12y agosheer stupidity, it doesn't work like that. They just fluffed the news to appeal to American readers. The news is that the guy wrote to the wrong outlet and that he can't legally do what he wanted because that would violate free speech. Good luck getting an english language newspaper publish it that way.
- molecule 12y ago> Leaving aside the fact that Lazic’s request is misdirected, under the ruling — it applies to search engines, not publishers, and only within the E.U...
- myrandomcomment 12y agoDoes the tone and shear stupidty of Dejan's comments make anyone else just want to slap him? This whole ruling was just bad to start with and is only going to get worse. I am inclined to put up a site that documents every removale and figure out some scripted method to slip links into EU country websites in an effort to make it impossible to keep up with the removal request. Yes, I know it sounds a bit spammy. I am only thinking out loud because I am so taken aback by the idiocy on the situation.
- thomasz 12y agoAm I the only one who actually likes the right to be forgotten? I can understand that it's a PITA for search providers, but I honestly think that your shit just shouldn't stay with you forever. It would be highly problematic if it could be used by public people like politicians to carefully manage their SERPs, but that is not the case, even if people like this pianist go to court with ridiculous cases.
- nraynaud 12y agoNo I like it. I love the idea that an individual could put it to a corporation without putting millions. And I think there is a pure bias here from Americans. I was writing a long comment but I scrapped it, they love free speech and firearms, and there is no way to force acceptance of difference of point of view on them. And the pianist is not going anywhere, he wrote a letter to the wrong organization (and now he's thrown under the bus). He can only scrub results on the European Google.
- jMyles 12y agoI don't think most of the objections are normative (ie, free speech and firearms are good) so much as empirical (ie, the nature of the internet, or of human networking in some more abstract sense, precludes a "right to be forgotten").
- ObviousScience 12y ago
- Frozenlock 12y agoI would bet he did it to show the shear stupidity of the 'right to be forgotten'.
- thomasz 12y agoWell, it's a dishonest move then. The law only applies to search engines, and it doesn't protect your recent artistic endeavors from criticism.
- decisiveness 12y agoThis should definitely be linked on his Wikipedia page, ironically making it appear above the search result of which he's trying to rid himself.
- jMyles 12y agoI don't see irony. I see providence. "Forgotten" information will be less lost going forward.
- krcz 12y agoI can see irony here, as defined in Merriam-Webster dictionary: > 3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony If the pianist made the review more available by action supposed to hide it, it would be ironic. Just as Oedipus parents helping to fulfill the fate by trying to avoid it.
- rohanprabhu 12y agoMost of the times when someone prominent uses the right to be forgotten, they go from 'a slight chance to be forgotten' to 'celebrity level remembrance'
- jacquesm 12y agoIt's the ultimate marketing & free PR hack.
- freshflowers 12y agoYet more sheer propaganda about what the right to be forgotten actually entails. Here's hint #1: what Google takes down under the flag "the right to be forgotten" is Google's choice, not the law. And Google wages a propaganda war against any EU privacy laws, so they'll pick the most ridiculous and damaging examples possible and claim "we have to because of the EU". The author lazily copied Google's propaganda instead of doing her homework. Which makes the sarcastic sentence "Of course, all that balancing and fact-gathering is generally outsourced to journalists." all the more ironic.
- mcintyre1994 12y agoAre you claiming it's exclusively Google's choice? So the law just States Google must have a way for you to raise issues and it's completely up to them, no government interference whatsoever, whether to comply? And just to make sure it's totally their choice, there are no potential fines or other punishments anybody can enforce as a result of them declining such requests?
- DanBC 12y agoA review of a pianist is unlikely to be irrelevant and so EU search engines don't have to remove it. All you're seeing here is someone who has a negative search result for his name who doesn't know how (or doesn't want) to use blackhat SEO to manage his search results; and a lack of services providing whitehat SEO to make more (to his mind) relevant results rank higher. While it doesn't appear to be the case here let's not forget that it's entirely possible for a bad reviewer to write a review that is not based on any facts. And we know that if you're searching for a person's name you use the US version of your search engine's website.
- psykovsky 12y agoMaking a dozen or two of social media profiles is blackhat SEO now?
- 1gor 12y agoImagine someone going to a library and making them remove a book from their catalogue/index. That book then will be forever covering dust on a library shelf. That is not a censorship, since anyone who knows where that basement shelf is can read the book. Or is it?
- coldtea 12y agoImaging the library offering a girl's diary. Or the diary of some person describing in detail how he raped her. Now, because it causes her great emotional distress to have people reading it, she asks them to remove it from their index (or even remove it completely). That's censorship, right? Or is it?
- arh68 12y agoInteresting times! I'm just glad English defamation law doesn't apply to me. Most people are simply too lazy to run their own web crawler. I'm not sure why this is (the technology is well known), but they find the convenience of public search engines irresistible. Of course the ruling doesn't disallow crawlers, even personal ones, to access the Post's review. It doesn't even prohibit Google from displaying the links in full, as long as the search criteria does not contain Dejan's name. Google hardly has the right to free speech anyway. DMCA can remove links willy nilly. Even fraudulent takedown requests are processed smoothly, with little to no repercussions. It's easy to be idealistic about free speech. Yet to see the balance between people claiming harm and the people's need to know, to have seen the pendulum swung before, it's hard to get upset about this.
- jxcole 12y agoYou cannot actually be harmed by speech, and you certainly can't be harmed by a piano review. The EU has ruled wrong in this case.
- RexRollman 12y agoIndeed it has. It really should be labeled as "The Right To Suppress What You Don't Care For".
- vidarh 12y agoThis is either incredibly pedantic, or incredibly ignorant. While you can not be directly harmed merely by the speech itself, you can certainly be indirectly harmed by it's continued wide public dissemination, on the basis of others reactions to it. > and you certainly can't be harmed by a piano review. The EU has ruled wrong in this case. The EU has not ruled that you can get a piano review removed.