Pianist Thinks He Can Use “Right to Be Forgotten” Law to Remove His Bad Reviews, Accidentally Outs Himself as a Thin-Skinned Censor Instead

Europe’s “right to be forgotten” law, which lets people force
search engines to scrub away links to certain sorts of embarrassing
information, has produced several free-speech horror
stories already. Now it’s given us this:

The pianist Dejan Lazic, like
many artists and performers, is occasionally the subject of bad
reviews. Also like other artists, he reads those reviews. And
disagrees with them. And gripes over them, sometimes.

But because Lazic lives in Europe, where in May the European Union
ruled that individuals have a “right to be forgotten” online, he
decided to take the griping one step further: On Oct. 30, he sent
The Washington Post a request to remove a 2010 review by Post
classical music critic Anne Midgette that—he claims—has marred the
first page of his Google results for years….”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.”

If the right to be forgotten actually worked this way, this
would be its worst free-speech horror story yet. Instead, it’s more
of a horror for Lazic’s reputation. TechDirt‘s
Mike Masnick
lists some of the ways the pianist has misunderstood both the
law and the likely effects of his request:

1. The [E.U.’s right-to-be-forgotten] ruling only
applies to “data controllers”—i.e., search engines in this
context—and not the publishers themselves. That was clear from the
ruling.

2. The ruling applies to search engines in Europe, not newspapers
in the US.

3. The ruling is not supposed to apply to people in the public eye,
so famous world-traveling musicians don’t count.

4. The purpose is to remove outdated information, not things like a
review of a performance.

5. It most certainly is not, despite Lazic’s stated belief,
supposed to be about letting someone control “the truth” about
themselves.

6. Because of all of this, the lukewarm review of Lazic’s
performance from 2010 is getting lots of new attention.

7. Because of all of this, Lazic’s views on censorship, free speech
and his own personal reviews is now widely known.

I suppose that’s one silver lining to this ridiculous ruling.
It’s a honey trap for would-be censors to expose themselves—at
least as long as they don’t understand the law.