Pianist Dejan Lazic wants to use Europe’s right to forget law to get Google to kill off a bad review in the US. 

Lazic sent The Washington Post a request to remove a 2010 review by Postclassical music critic Anne Midgette that marred the first page of his Google results for years. For the sake of balance we have decided to link to the review which will help Google forget.

Anyway, Lazic said that his wish for such an article to be removed from the internet has absolutely nothing to do with censorship or with closing down access to information. Instead it is about the right to control of one’s personal image — control of, as he puts it, “the truth.”

The basic premise of the law is that individuals have the right to their personal information, so they should also have some control over their personal search results. If a search for your name on Google or Bing turns up “inadequate, irrelevant or … excessive” links, the court ruled, you should be able to ask the search engine to remove them.

However the way we understand it, the ruling applies to search engines, not publishers, and only within the EU. However, in the unlikely event that Lazic wins it could be a bad time for truth over image. It would mean that artists, performers, politicians, public officials and companies would be allowed to edit the record according to their personal opinions and tastes.