I can understand why it appeals to people - their sense of unfairness is triggered, and that is a useful heuristic for finding unjust behavior.. but the actual implementations discussed amount to "make it like it used to be". On the surface it seems like you can design something that might work.. but the trick is, it'll involve a ton of fiddly bits of law. Those fiddly bits are things that lawyers (and therefore corporations and rich people) are very good at playing with, which will inevitably result in a evolving double-standard, just like in finance, health-care, politics, and employment law.
There is a form of the 'right to be forgotten' that makes total sense. Your creations - your journal, your twitter feed, your facebook notes and photo blog - these belong to you in a sensical way, and determining who has access to them might be a reasonable right you possess (though I'm unaware of any legal system that enforces that right).
But the conceptions of this 'right' I hear discussed all hinge on some variant of 'noteworthy' - that's because a moment's thought of the obvious approach tells you "wait, that will gag the news services!", which we've trained ourselves to think of as representative of goodness and openness. But 'noteworthy' is a context-based definition! The news that is noteworthy to one group is not to another, and that distinction is inherent in society - we can't wrap a semantic game around to solve the problem.
The reality is that the nature of accessible information is changing, and society will need to change with it. It's hardly the first time technology has forced society to change! The right to be forgotten is the right to exist in the world circa 1960 forever.
> Your creations - your journal, your twitter feed, your facebook notes and photo blog - these belong to you in a sensical way, and determining who has access to them might be a reasonable right you possess (though I'm unaware of any legal system that enforces that right).
Would be, if copyright were implemented that way. But it's not - you signed over the right to control the stuff you put on Facebook as soon as you wrote it.
Which is true, however facebook is incentivized to go after anyone who is successful at using that content on their on site (linking to profile photos).
I learned this the hard way from a project I was working on that mined and crowd sourced personality information, where we shut down after a loss in traffic in response to a C & D from facebook to not link to photos (which disrupted how people engaged with the site).
What we realized though, was that n-1 people truly don't care about ones own privacy, and because of this, if any laws people create to try to address this aren't reflective of what is possible in reality, it will be toothless (like when me and my friend got a request from CNIL, and basically ignored them with no consequences).
But you've also given them a non-exclusive and irrevocable right to use it as they want (with limitations, you'd need to read their exact policy to be sure).
So while you may retain the copyright, you could very easily have signed over permission to whatever company who's website you used to post it to use it however they want.
> But you've also given them a non-exclusive and irrevocable right to use it as they want
Such things are not actually irrevocable in the US, although they do last a long time.
Starting 35 years after the grant of a transfer or license of copyright, there is a 5 year window during which the author can give written notice of termination, and the transfer or license ends. The author may do this regardless of any agreement to the contrary. This is codified at 17 USC 203 [1] for those who want the gory details. "copyright termination rights" is a good search term to find discussion and articles on this.
Probably not much use in getting embarrassing content removed from a website that you unwisely licensed it to because after 35 years people have probably long forgotten about it unless it is really bad, in which case it has probably already harmed you as much as it can.
It will be interesting to see if the termination right ever affects free/open source software.
> It will be interesting to see if the termination right ever affects free/open source software.
I wonder if this could be tested with code assigned to Oracle? I bet there are contributors to OpenSolaris under CDDL that wouldn't mind testing it out.
Yeah. My thought was "RTBF is nice but it doesn't scale well". It will end up so that friends of Zimbabwean dictators can force search engines to "forget them" but shoplifting marks people for life.
Even simple parameters are not that simple. Age-based thresholds, for example, would likely ensure family connections and privilege are "forgotten". The fact that one was a stupid teenager doing a stupid thing might be forgettable; but the fact that one got out of trouble thanks to Dad's friends should remain visible. This is impossible, no matter how you slice it.
I can understand why it appeals to people - their sense of unfairness is triggered, and that is a useful heuristic for finding unjust behavior.. but the actual implementations discussed amount to "make it like it used to be". On the surface it seems like you can design something that might work.. but the trick is, it'll involve a ton of fiddly bits of law. Those fiddly bits are things that lawyers (and therefore corporations and rich people) are very good at playing with, which will inevitably result in a evolving double-standard, just like in finance, health-care, politics, and employment law.
There is a form of the 'right to be forgotten' that makes total sense. Your creations - your journal, your twitter feed, your facebook notes and photo blog - these belong to you in a sensical way, and determining who has access to them might be a reasonable right you possess (though I'm unaware of any legal system that enforces that right).
But the conceptions of this 'right' I hear discussed all hinge on some variant of 'noteworthy' - that's because a moment's thought of the obvious approach tells you "wait, that will gag the news services!", which we've trained ourselves to think of as representative of goodness and openness. But 'noteworthy' is a context-based definition! The news that is noteworthy to one group is not to another, and that distinction is inherent in society - we can't wrap a semantic game around to solve the problem.
The reality is that the nature of accessible information is changing, and society will need to change with it. It's hardly the first time technology has forced society to change! The right to be forgotten is the right to exist in the world circa 1960 forever.