What always baffles me about the right to be forgotten is that the issue never is if something should truly be forgotten - it should not, it will stay on record, in news articles etc. - but always if the offending piece of information should be removed from search engine indexes.

I find this really troubling, because just making it harder to find does not remove it and shifts power to persons who can make better use of search/indexing tools or have the means to hire someone who does.

> [...] violated his rights and his "ability to develop his personality,"

That's a rather poor translation of "Recht zur freien Persönlichkeitsentfaltung". It's not really about developing your personality, it's the right to live freely and pursue your personal life goals; something more akin to "the pursuit of happiness".

I'm a bit torn in this case. I'm generally for the right to be forgotten, especially in cases like this one, after the criminal has served a lifetime in prison and has been re-integrated into society. However, the decision has some strange aspects to it and elicits the usual ignorance about the Internet.

From what I've read, the judges primarily bemoaned that it is so easy to search for his case by his name. Instead, the German magazine Der Spiegel is supposed to kind of obfuscate the original articles in their online archive, making discovery harder, but not necessarily to delete them or alter his name in them. The idea is that the stories should be harder to find in searches by name. In my opinion that makes no sense, neither technically nor from the point of view of the 'right to be forgotten' - and in a case like this, the stories are all over the net anyway.

Link to original article: http://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/spiegel/pdf/14355425

Court ruling (in German, unsurprisingly): https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheid...

Interestingly, the ruling refers to the yacht as "A.", unlike the BBC article which uses the full name.

Well that's disappointing. I've generally been in favour of right to be forgotten as in a UK context it aligns well with the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act.

A minor offence would be legally forgotten quickly, a murder would carry a sentence of over 4 years which would never be eligible for forgetting. It seems odd to me to clear something quite so serious.

So does "right to be forgotten" mean that people don't have a right to remember?

I find interesting that while the "right to be forgotten" does not prevent the person from being named, all the articles I have found on Google are careful not to name him (and I'm not talking about German articles, but articles in English from non-German sources).

This strikes me as self-censorship.

As an aside, it's also interesting that a person sentenced to life for murdering two people in 1982 was freed in 2002...

An Orwellian rectification that seems to be catching on.

"rectify — the Ministry of Truth euphemism for the alteration of the historical record:"

Was there even an internet for someone to chronolog his murders back in 1982?

I don't get this article at all...

I find these discussions pretty boring, because virtually none of the commenters have ever even read the two or three short articles of our Grundgesetz that are at the center of this legal question.

I'm not talking about familiarizing yourself with standard legal doctrine or landmark constitutional court rulings. Just having a little respect for the fact that the US Constitution does not apply.

The right to be forgotten is not decided on a whim by a few judges, according to their personal preferences, there is legal text surrounding the issue.

We Europeans who criticize your Second Amendment may be shallow, as well, but we have usually at least read something about a "well-regulated militia" or the "right to keep and bear arms", so we understand where you're coming from, even if we think that's nuts.

Well let’s put the mans name here and references so that we don’t forget...

>>...when he shot and killed two people and severely injured another during a row.

My two cents: maybe the memory should be longer for a few things, stealing a loaf of bread or smoking pot is quite different from murders. In many countries cold blooded murders give you a life sentence or death (either by the state--or victim's family members when the state does not act) so maybe this guy should have had the chance to file such an appeal.