Publishing used to be a really heavy-weight process, because printing and selling access carried a great deal of expense and ceremony. Trying to keep your book out of the local library to enhance sales revenue was a no-no.

Interesting how the landscape and conversation has shifted. Sadly, it doesn't appear possible to even have a definition of publishing that both maintains the right of the public to access information, and allows for individual privacy.

Options like disabling crawling are insufficient, essentially web servers have to read author's minds to divine their intent in order to not screw up. Don't crawl certain kinds of content and you might be accused of discrimination, providing services to one group and not others.

Ownership is a weird thing.

> People can still have local copies

Yes, but under current copyright laws they are not allowed to distribute them without your consent.

Depending on the license. If you have a CC-BY-SA or public domain at the bottom, then you're allowing people a legal right to keep a copy.

In practice, the nature of the web allows everyone to keep copies of everything if they want. But if someone republishes it, then you need to use the DMCA process (for American websites) to take that content down if it violates copyright.

Going back to print, what if you print something you don't want out there anymore? Well if people have already bought your book or magazine, they have bought a right to that physical copy. They can even sell the book or magazine to anyone else (granted that the content isn't illegal).

But they can't make copies of their bought copy and distribute those, which is akin to what the Internet Archive does.

That's not the point. The OP mentioned he wanted to make sure nobody can read it anymore. Private copies prevent that scenario.

Except they do in Europe under the 'right to be forgotten'.

That's what they think. Fortunately for the Internet, there are lots of unaffected servers outside it.

And unfortunately for Joy Reid.

> Except they do in Europe under the 'right to be forgotten'.

It's not because they say it exists that it makes it valid in practice.

I could say that "black is white" and yet it won't be so. The EU could say it, and afterwards black would still be black and white would still be white.

> It's like saying "when I do something crazy in public I want to be able to make everyone forget about it later on". That's not how things are supposed to work.

Says who?

How would you go about erasing actual memories?

In real life, things done when a person is young are often forgotten with time, and the way the brain works is that time lessens the importance of a memory, so even if it's not completely forgotten, the memory is fuzzy and considered inconsequential.

On the internet, everything is as fresh as this morning, forever. No longer do we have "do you remember when so-and-so used to say that stupid stuff, boy have they changed!" Now it's "look, here's a link to so-and-so staying stupid stuff, now we know what they really think!"

The idea that once something is in the public it should remain there firmly embedded, forever, makes sense on the surface, but definitely seems to break down when examined closely, in my opinion.

The passage of time is the typical method.

What if someone records their memories on paper?