That's a modern pseudo-juridical invention that, tbh, I disagree with. The baseline should be that actions have consequences, and then you exclude certain specific areas (underage, exploited, etc).
That's fine if the consequences are reasonable, but they are often not. The mob doesn't do proportionate responses. Those who fear the mob cannot be relied on to stand against it. The "right to be forgotten" aims to strike a balance between justified consequences and the modern-day Scarlet letter the web attaches to any percieved wrong-doer.
And it really misses the target. In practice, the main users of that "right" are seriously-bad guys - from pedophiles to serial fraudsters.
It really should become a "right to be forgiven", with penalties for discrimination like we have for race and religion. This would also help with things like registers of convicted felons, which in practice are more disproportionately harmful than a few items in google cache.
> the main users of that "right" are seriously-bad guys
Source?
I recently read that it’s used a lot by young people wanting to remove embarrassing they or others added in their younger days. I’ve no idea to what extent either of you is right.
Every time I try to google local well-known fraudsters in the UK, where even the news article itself mentions previous well-reported scandals, all searches with the name of the guy will only return the google message about records having been hidden because of that. It's just insane. It's like walking into a library, pulling up a newspaper collection from 2001, and when you reach a certain day, all pages are censored or ripped out. How is that not utterly dystopic...?
I agree that youth should be a special case, but in the general term it's just a Bad Idea imho. It's the actual Memory Hole, and not even in ironic terms.
You're absolutely right to see a problem here, but the opposite is also true. Like with so many things now, the negative impact of some actions was mitigated in the past by the high cost (or effort) required to perform that action. It was still possible, but unfeasible in practice for all but the most committed. When the cost is reduced, suddenly the mitigation is no longer there, and thus the negative impacts become a lot more prevalent.
The "right to be forgotten" relates to personal data on a living person, not works of literature, unless, I suppose, it's biographical literature about people who are still alive.
IP rights are granted by society to encourage creation to enrich the commons in the first place. If you seek to prevent published work from eventually entering the commons you're not holding up your end of the bargain.
Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod in a written testament to destroy his entire work after his death. Max Brod didn't obey. Do you think he was wrong?
Terry Pratchett asked Neil Gaiman to destroy his unpublished works after his death. Gaiman obliged. Do you think he was wrong?
I'm no fan of IP, and we all know it's a boondoggle to take something that's public and try to erase every last instance of it (as _why seemed to want to do), but the prerogative that people do have is whether or not to publish something in the first place. Privacy is a human right, and that includes the freedom not to have your private thoughts published against your will.
The right thing to do is think about what’s best both for your friend, and for society in general. This can lead to different decisions in different situations, yet both being “right”.
I think he was both. He did wrong by Kafka because he violated Kafka's trust, but he did right by the public by refusing to destroy that which should and would eventually belong to the commons.
Why are you so sure? What was more important: respecting Kafka's personal wish or making sure that future generations can read “the trial“? I'm not claiming I have a definite answer, btw.
