> It is legally no different than standing on a street corner handing out flyers.
It's not legally different, but it's still different, which is something that I think people on both sides of this debate sometimes selectively forget. Before the web, those "street flyers" were pretty unlikely to go viral and be seen by millions of people. They were pretty unlikely to get, well, much farther than that street corner. And there certainly wasn't a widely-known and shared infrastructure dedicated to capturing copies of the flyer and preserving them indefinitely.
I don't know that there should be a "right to forget," but in the pre-digital era, things had limited circulation. They went out of print. You couldn't control what happened to copies after they were printed, no, but nobody could say, "You know what, I don't want this thing to go out of print, so I'm going to put it back into print whether the author likes it or not." To use your flyer example: I can't legally demand people who have my flyer burn it, but I can legally demand that people don't make copies of my flyer and hand it out on street corners of their choice for the next thirty years.
The closest thing the web has to the concept of "out of print" is, well, taking things offline. And a lot of things that go offline undoubtedly should be preserved. I use the Internet Archive all the time. But at the same time, I'm not convinced that the answer to someone saying, "Hey, this thing I put online 20 years ago and took down 10 years ago is something I'd really like to keep out of print" must always and forever be, "well, you should never put anything online that you'll ever reconsider at any point in your entire life, you fool."
I think the "out of print" argument is a cop-out. That's allowing the economic constraints of physical copy production to override the ideals behind the law.
Things went out of print because the unit cost of producing one extra copy was much higher than producing 10000 extra copies. As demand for copies tends to taper off over time, you eventually reach a point where you simply cannot produce just one extra copy at a cost lower than the price the next customer would be willing to pay for it.
No such pressure exists for digital reproduction. Every additional copy costs the same low, low amount. The author then has no reasonable argument for refusing to make an additional copy.
And yes, there was infrastructure for capturing and preserving copies of print flyers. It wasn't all-encompassing, and didn't catch everything, but there are many museums of ephemera now that have extensive collections of published material that was of limited circulation (and limited literary value). For those items that were expected to get thrown away or used as toilet paper, there was always the possibility that someone might have saved it, and it could still be around in some form 200 years later.
It is entirely reasonable for an author to demand that no one else make and distribute copies of their work. But in my opinion, if you can find the author, and make them a reasonable offer for a new copy of their copyrighted work, and they refuse to make one and sell it to you (or to license the right to make your own) then they have essentially abrogated their copyright. You would then be morally (but not legally) justified in copying that work from another source.
When something is published, the genie is out of the bottle. No law can stuff it back in. And copyright was intended to protect the livelihoods of creators, not to give them the ability to more easily destroy what they have wrought. Thus, whenever there is any confusion or ambiguity, I always personally interpret a copyright situation with the test "is there any way this might lessen the creator's ability to sell (or otherwise monetize) one more copy of this work?"
If the creator is no longer attempting to make money from a work, screw their copyrights. We granted them that limited monopoly to make enough money so that the effort of creation would be worthwhile to them. If they don't care to sell, I don't care to protect their ability to sell exclusively.
It's not legally different, but it's still different, which is something that I think people on both sides of this debate sometimes selectively forget. Before the web, those "street flyers" were pretty unlikely to go viral and be seen by millions of people. They were pretty unlikely to get, well, much farther than that street corner. And there certainly wasn't a widely-known and shared infrastructure dedicated to capturing copies of the flyer and preserving them indefinitely.
I don't know that there should be a "right to forget," but in the pre-digital era, things had limited circulation. They went out of print. You couldn't control what happened to copies after they were printed, no, but nobody could say, "You know what, I don't want this thing to go out of print, so I'm going to put it back into print whether the author likes it or not." To use your flyer example: I can't legally demand people who have my flyer burn it, but I can legally demand that people don't make copies of my flyer and hand it out on street corners of their choice for the next thirty years.
The closest thing the web has to the concept of "out of print" is, well, taking things offline. And a lot of things that go offline undoubtedly should be preserved. I use the Internet Archive all the time. But at the same time, I'm not convinced that the answer to someone saying, "Hey, this thing I put online 20 years ago and took down 10 years ago is something I'd really like to keep out of print" must always and forever be, "well, you should never put anything online that you'll ever reconsider at any point in your entire life, you fool."