The Right to Be Forgotten and Monkey Selfies
September 5, 2014
The tension between privacy and open information is on full display now that the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” ruling is being implemented. BBC News reports, “Wikipedia Reveals Google ‘Forgotten’ Search Links.” Despite its strongly voiced objections, Google is complying with the court’s decision; it has set up this page where Europeans can request information be unlinked.
Now the Wikimedia Foundation (which manages Wikipedia) is posting removal notices it has received from Google related to the ruling. Perhaps the top name in open information, the foundation protests that the process is leaving the Internet “riddled with memory holes.” The BBC article goes on to report:
“The Wikimedia Foundation has also published its first transparency report – following a similar practice by Google, Twitter and others. It reveals that the organisation received 304 general content removal requests between July 2012 and June 2014, none of which it complied with. They included a takedown request from a photographer who had claimed he owned the copyright to a series of selfies taken by a monkey. Gloucestershire-based David Slater had rotated and cropped the images featured on the site. But the foundation rejected his claim on the grounds that the monkey had taken the photo, and was therefore the real copyright owner.”
Those monkey photos alone are worth clicking through to this story—there’s a short news video about them that well illustrates the absurdity of the situation. Besides, this is a very handsome monkey. And, apparently, quite the photographer.
Cynthia Murrell, September 05, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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